A Love Letter to the Liberal Arts

"It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing."
— Steve Jobs

When you read that quote, what do you think? Do you nod along inside or does your mind stray a bit, entertaining the idea in concept but not fully buying it in practicality? To a young person in tech, Jobs’ quote may or may not ring true to you. You’re likely seen as a bright brain with a knack for solving problems, and what good are the liberal arts¹ and the humanities² in solving the world’s large, technically complex issues? You want your work to have impact and “matter” — something you know to require hard work, discipline, and things like “frameworks” and “mental models.” Tactical, practical, and efficient.

But consider, for a second, your thinking. Where did your thoughts and beliefs come from? What about your conviction, your mission, your sense of purpose on this earth? These questions are why the liberal arts and the humanities, or subjects distinct from professional and technical subjects, exist. In stark contrast to technology, the liberal arts and the humanities do not prize themselves on innovation and newness, they pride themselves on maintaining humanity’s understanding of itself. After all, Aristotle’s realizations about the meaning of life probably read remarkably similarly to tweets from your friends today.

It is difficult to advocate for the liberal arts by appealing to results or metrics. But our bias towards viewing these non-instrumental disciplines through a problem-solving lens is exactly why we need spaces that suggest other ways of seeing the world. While that lens grants impressive achievement, it might also leave you wondering why you were even chasing after the thing you achieved to begin with. Our goal is to show you that the problem-solving lens is one of many possible views you can have on the world. You can treat this view like a pair of glasses, one that ought to be regularly removed and replaced with a more reflective, contemplative, and critical lens.

Taking off those glasses is scary. The longer you wear them, the more your identity may grow attached to the praise and rewards you received from others admiring their clarity and sheen. But when you do take them off (by either choice or necessity), the liberal arts offer you a toolkit for making sense of the world. Inside is vocabulary for understanding universal human experiences and permission to gesture wordlessly at areas we will never understand but enjoy admiring all the same. At their core, the liberal arts and the humanities serve as aggregated documentation on the human condition — the kind of documentation that is meant to be digested, discussed with others, and revisited from whichever angles serve you best along your journey. As Aristotle would say: “πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει,” or “All humans aspire to know by nature.”

The culture and mentality that fuel technology today has a shelf life — both at an industry and an individual level. These are, of course, inextricably linked: tech culture’s high ask of your emotional energy quickly shortens the lifespan of each company’s culture and in turn, the industry itself. The ecosystem that we inhabit as technologists was not built with humans in mind, it was built to run laps around other industries within the capitalist game, and it does this on the backs of the young people it exploits. In simpler terms: the status quo of technology was not designed to make you a happy, content, morally well-rounded young person. That, however, is precisely the purpose of examining the world through a liberal arts lens. Through this frame of view, we might think thoughts without action items, try opinions on for size, celebrate contradiction, and revel in the pursuit of understanding both each other and the world around us.

The virtues of close reading

If you’re reading this, you’re likely sympathetic to some of the following ideas: that parts of the human experience are universal, that we can learn from how our ancestors experienced the world, that the true, the good, and the beautiful are worth pursuing for their own sake. Maybe you also believe that since, as Aristotle said, "All men by nature desire to know,” learning is necessarily a group endeavor.

You may feel some affinity toward the above, but find it all a little woo, a bit hazy. If that’s you, I want to convince you of the value of a particular, concrete liberal arts tool, one that doesn’t get discussed often: close reading.

By close reading, I mean a technique for group reading often used in discussions and seminars. The seminar leader might choose a page, or two pages, to be read together as a group (shades of Amazon 6-pagers, I know). After the text has been read quietly by everyone, the group goes through the text line by line, trying to understand exactly what the author is trying to communicate to us through small nuances, word choices, and omissions in the text. We’re doing our best to notice craft, all the subtle ways an author uses language to create meaning. But we’re doing this by engaging directly with the text, rather than centering our impressions of an author’s goals, or the “moral,” or a story’s “theme.” Close reading practitioners believe the only way to speak about any of those things is through a grounding in the details on the page in front of us.

There are multiple ways to do this: I’ve been in short story seminars where we focused entirely on the cues for the five senses on one page. What does the author have us see, smell, touch? How do those details shape the world of the story? If the story is told through one character’s eyes, why does it matter that he notices this and that, but is unaware of something else? Psychological details are also fair game: What do we know of characters by what they say and do? What do we learn about them from their reactions to each other?

Alternately, close reading can be valuable for understanding or deconstructing a particular line of argument. The best English professor I’ve had took deconstruction quite seriously. We’d pore over some classic text in numbing detail, and then Larry would take a hatchet to it, pointing out all the ways an author is creating meaning through language. He drew this approach from Derrida and Wittgenstein, and the goal was always to tear us out of the comfortable frame of reference created by the author and see the frame as a constructed thing. When Plato uses this word rather than that, what associations is he implicitly creating in our minds? What “chain of significations” is hiding behind this given phrase? Language, rather than being a window for meaning, is a matrix we trap ourselves within to construct meaning: it does something, rather than describe something.

Or alternately, there’s Straussian close reading, named after the political philosopher who carefully embedded both an exoteric (obvious) and esoteric (hidden) meaning in his texts. According to Leo Strauss, reading the classics and looking for the hidden subtext yields deep insights about human nature.

One common complaint about close reading goes something like, "Surely Plato didn't spend this much time agonizing over every word choice. Why should we?" The answer is twofold. First, for all you know, Plato did agonize over every word choice. The best written works are studies in craft, and if they’ve stood the test of time it is generally because that craft has successfully affected multiple generations of readers. In an expert author's sentences is embedded a lifetime of knowledge. When musicians break down improvised saxophone solos, they're doing so with the understanding that note choices reflect years of practice and musical world-building. Text is like that too.

But even unconscious choices made by an author are worth paying attention to. This is how a person tried to convey their inner world to you. The ways they tried to do that illuminate how they think, what they find valuable, how they experience the world. By paying attention, we can enter into that world.

Close reading of philosophy with these frameworks in mind can be enlightening, but I confess I think close reading of fiction is special, and maybe more valuable. As literary critic Barbara Hardy said, “We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative.” Earlier in that essay, Hardy calls narrative “a primary act of mind, transferred to art from life.” Because we experience our own lives as story, not as argument or political programme, they’re in one sense truer to our reality. Closely reading a story is a remarkable tool for becoming aware of others. By focusing our attention on the tactile realities of a narrator’s story, we can bridge massive temporal and spatial divides and for a moment inhabit the life of another.

You may notice a similarity between close reading and Bible studies or seminars. They share roots in a particular tradition and relationship to text, and both start from the position that this text is worth spending time digesting. (If this was another essay, now would be my chance to talk about the linkages between fictional stories that move us and what C.S. Lewis called “the true myth.”) But I don’t think it’s sacrilegious to say there’s a spiritual component to reading a text together with friends, and in particular to opening oneself to deep, perhaps hidden knowledge.

I don’t know if close reading can make you a better person, and I’m instinctively skeptical of claims that intensive liberal arts study of any kind provides measurable gains. But I do know that I’ve learned, encountered, and experienced great truths through this practice that I could not have any other way. They’re the kind of truths about the inner richness of others, they way they “dream, hate, and love in narrative,” that are all the more valuable for being hard to communicate.