For seekers of all stripes, philosophy is timeless self-care. Notre Dame philosophy professors Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko have reinvigorated this tradition in their wildly popular and influential undergraduate course “God and the Good Life,” in which they wrestle with the big questions about how to live and what makes life meaningful.
Now they invite us into the classroom to work through issues like what justifies our beliefs, whether we should practice a religion and what sacrifices we should make for others—as well as to investigate what figures such as Aristotle, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Iris Murdoch, and W. E. B. Du Bois have to say about how to live well. Sullivan and Blaschko do the timeless work of philosophy using real-world case studies that explore love, finance, truth, and more. In so doing, they push us to escape our own caves, ask stronger questions, explain our deepest goals, and wrestle with suffering, the nature of death, and the existence of God.
Philosophers know that our “good life plan” is one that we as individuals need to be constantly and actively writing to achieve some meaningful control and sense of purpose even if the world keeps throwing surprises our way. For at least the past 2,500 years, philosophers have taught that goal-seeking is an essential part of what it is to be human—and crucially that we could find our own good life by asking better questions of ourselves and of one another. This virtue ethics approach resonates profoundly in our own moment.
The Good Life Method is a winning guide to tackling the big questions of being human with the wisdom of the ages.
Why did you decide to turn your wildly popular course, “God and the Good Life” into a book?
As philosophy professors, we’ve worked with thousands of young people to help them start to articulate a purpose. But how do you hold onto it? When the course really took off among college students, we started getting more and more requests to run mini-courses for parents, professionals, and other folks who felt a need for more philosophy in their life but hadn’t ever had the chance to learn about it. We noticed we would offer a one-off lecture on a “God and the Good Life” topic like “faith and responsible risk-taking”, and we’d pack an auditorium.
There’s a tremendous need among people our own age for help reflecting on happiness and meaning. We started thinking a lot more systematically about how we were personally wrestling with these very same questions about happiness and direction, and we thought, maybe it's time to try out the exercises that we give our students. Working on this book has also helped us start deeper conversations with our loved ones about the good life.
What resonated with students the most after completing the course?
We were at lunch with Pete Buttigieg and some students after class a few years ago. Buttigieg, channeling Socrates, asked one of the students “What is philosophy?” The student answered, not missing a beat: “Philosophy is about learning how to see your practical life problems and then to deal with them, but with more understanding.” Our students think this is one of the most practical courses they take in college, and we consistently hear that years later. In the class, we have our students write out their own personal “apology.” Like the “Apology of Socrates,” or Augustine’s “Confessions,” this is a document that details what they believe about some of life’s biggest questions and why. Many of our former students report that they still regularly update this document years after taking the course. When the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, a group of kids in a dorm decided to write and share apologies based on this assignment, even though most of them were not in our course at the time. We think the biggest takeaway is that they have fourteen weeks of space and help in working on their own examined lives, and that time and attention is a genuine gift in their otherwise chaotic and high-pressure lives.
Why is studying philosophy a particularly good lens for young people today to better understand the importance of mental health?
Philosophy engages us at a very deep level. It asks and tries to answer questions like “What sort of person should I be?” and “Are the values that I actually have the ones I should have?” If done right, it can be personally transformative. A lot of the issues that many of us are facing today, especially young people, don’t fit very neatly into some of the categories we’re used to using. Consider the phenomenon of “burnout.” It’s one of these conditions that’s multifaceted. There are semi-technical definitions of it and psychological tools that can be used to help diagnose it, but it’s also something that many of us immediately recognize in our own experience. This feeling can be a starting point for thinking about our complex relationship to work, ambition, and values in the modern world.
Untangling these dimensions, and seeing how far we can get in our understanding of conditions like these by offering arguments and philosophical frameworks has, traditionally, been a role that philosophy has played in culture. Meaninglessness and despair are psychological symptoms, but they’re also the starting point for existentialist reflections. In the right context, and with a community of those searching for answers to similar questions, philosophy can provide a path for any of us to confront issues that we might otherwise struggle to articulate and understand.
What is an “apology?” How do “apologies” play into the structure of the book?
A philosophical apology is your attempt to reason through an answer to a question about how you will live a good life. For instance, what does money mean to you and why? How much time will you spend earning and spending it? There are three dimensions to a good answer, and we help readers put the pieces together. First, you need to reflect on how your ideas have formed so far, where you are starting out from in your own life. Second, you should know a little bit about different strategies philosophers have suggested for thinking about your question. And finally, you need a goal that is informed by who you are and your specific circumstances as well as good reasons, which hopefully the philosophers and your own philosophical reasoning have helped you uncover. The term “apology” comes from the founder of philosophy and the good life: Socrates. He famously gave his reasoning to defend his way of life against the Athenian government, who wanted him to quiet down.
What can Aristotle teach young people and students about balancing the pressures of work with burnout?
Aristotle sees happiness as a habit of being. In the same way that physical fitness is something embodied, and something that you strive for on the scale of months and years rather than hours and days, Aristotle’s notion of happiness (“eudaimonia”) is the result of patient, habitual practice. There’s so much pressure these days, especially in the United States, to present ourselves to the world as constantly striving for -- and simultaneously having already achieved -- perfection and mastery. It’s exhausting! One of the remarkable things about Aristotle is that he thinks about the most complex philosophical ideas -- about the meaning of life, our purpose in the world, and the nature of human relationships -- in a book that’s essentially a guide for how to quietly, patiently, and over the long haul, achieve happiness through virtue. Some of the lessons he arrives at sound simple, but really are profound: balance excess with deficiency in all of your tendencies, live in accord with the best aspects of your nature, build yourself and your community up through the inauspicious practice of virtue.
Why is love such an important part of our path to living the good life?
“Without friends, no man would choose to live.” That’s how Aristotle famously starts off his lecture about love and friendship in the good life. Just about every philosopher we introduce in the book has something significant to say about love and friendship. One key insight is that trying to love someone involves trying to know how they think about their life “from the inside” -- how they think of themselves, their reasons and intentions, their philosophical outlook. And loving someone well, rather than just living life alongside them, gives us the capacity to live “second good lives” through them. This is why developing our capacity to love and setting love and friendship as good life goals is so important. It is really the only virtue that lets you live multiple good lives!
And love is important even beyond the context of relationships. One of Plato’s big insights is that many of the things we consider to be genuinely good things -- wealth, friends, physical health, intelligence -- will only be good for a particular person if he or she loves the right things. Even philosophy, for Plato, is something that can be weaponized in the wrong hands (as his constant debates with the “Sophists” illustrates). The word philosophy comes from the roots “philo” or “love” and “sophia” which means wisdom. One of the things we try to do in the book is follow Plato in showing that the love of wisdom makes our lives better, not worse, and to illustrate this in the context of our own pursuit of these good things.
With the holidays and new year on the horizon, many people might be thinking about how best to give charitably. How might people approach gift giving through the lens of a virtue ethicist?
Holidays are a time of year when we want to do good and celebrate all of the good things in our lives. There is a tendency to approach this season as a series of tradeoffs: how much should we spend on gifts for each kid; whose party deserves what amount of time; how much should go in that red Salvation army bucket? There are two tempting (but mistaken) philosophical outlooks that might guide our giving. First, you might think that how much good you do is a direct function of how much impact your decisions have on the world. Over the holidays, you should stockpile your money and then give until it hurts. Or, on the other extreme, you might think that there really isn’t any way to be better or worse at giving. Your less-than-grateful nephew should be happy you even thought to send him those socks!
Virtue ethics gives us a third, much more inspiring option for good giving. Philosophical reflection can make you better at generosity, but it isn’t a matter of scoring more “impact points” with your gifts. Rather, it is a matter of figuring out the essential goods that your gifts promote and then the connections between your giving plans and those goods. Essential goods are fundamental features of your own good life and the lives of those you give to-- ingredients like knowledge, love, agency, awe. In Chapter 2, we give you our philosophical guide to connecting these ideas with your current bank account and diagnosing why the financial part of giving can feel so complicated.
The second half of The Good Life Method explores how religion might play into someone’s good life plan. How do you frame this for people for whom religion doesn’t play a part in life?
When we started teaching the course, one of the things we were surprised by was how engaged self-described atheist and agnostic students were when we started talking about religion. Some of them really hadn’t found other outlets for dialogue about things like God, suffering, justice and the like, and they were ready to talk. Similarly, many of our religious students found themselves wanting to engage with more critical perspectives. In the book, we offer our own frank experiences with topics like God and religion. Some of them are positive -- we’re both Catholics who have experienced great moments of grace and consolation in our faith -- but some of them are more difficult to pin down. When Paul’s son was born with a mysterious medical condition, one of the things that he found in question was the picture of the gentle, perfect, all-loving God he’d grown up with. We’ve both confronted and grappled with issues of justice and charity in the context of the scandals and crises that have afflicted our church over the past sixty or more years. We’d encourage those who are seeking to have these conversations -- from any angle -- to see us as ready and willing discussion partners. Like our philosophical role models, we strive to follow arguments where they lead, and offer reasons for our deeply held convictions with the hope that these will get taken up into a larger conversation.
According to The Good Life Method, the good life plan will inevitably include suffering such as an unexplainable tragedy, loss and death. How does contemplation help people understand suffering more deeply?
Contemplation has been part of many of the most influential movements in the philosophical tradition, and there are various roles it can play. One major goal in our book is to introduce you to these ideas, and then show you very practical ways that you can develop contemplative parts of your good life. This is especially important in dealing with the most complex threats to the good life.
For the stoics, contemplation is a meditative practice, a way of retreating inward in order to find something good (virtue) that is not subject to the whims of fate. By investing one’s care and attention in something so obviously valuable, and something that is -- they think -- entirely within our control, we can achieve peace of mind, and stability amidst uncertainty.
For Aristotle, contemplation plays a slightly different role. It is the most characteristically human activity and building up our ability to engage in it is the ultimate purpose of all human striving. This might strike us in the busy modern world as a bit odd or antiquated, but it’s probably because we sometimes fail to recognize that many of our most prized experiences are actually deeply contemplative. The awe-inspiring recognition of natural beauty in nature, being absorbed into your favorite song or poem, finding yourself fully present in a conversation with friends or activity with your family -- all of these have contemplative elements that I think we can immediately recognize as deeply meaningful.
One of the insights we can take from philosophy, then, is that we need to build up our ability to engage in this kind of contemplative activity. And what we’ve found is that, in periods of personal trials, it’s this mode of engagement that we fall back on. When Paul’s son was born with a mysterious medical condition that required treatment in the NICU, for instance, he found himself turning to poetry, scripture, and meditative prayer. Contemplation can be a way of pursuing wisdom and the good life even in the face of serious difficulty. It’s a way of resisting quick explanations and making room for a deeper understanding.
The Good Life Method advocates that people have coaches, friends, and role models to turn to throughout life. Do you ever find that you have played that role for one another?
Paul: Definitely. From my perspective, Meghan has long been a role-model, inspiration, mentor, and creative partner. Her professional accomplishments are dizzying, but it makes sense when you see her drive, and how much of herself she brings to her work and relationships with colleagues, friends, and students. Academia is full of people who are willing to give you advice, but Meghan is someone who just leads by example. If she sees something worth doing, she just goes out and does it.
Meghan: Writing, teaching, thinking about the good life… these most of the time confront as really lonely and solitary enterprises. It is hard work but so much more rewarding to have conspirators in your most important projects-- literally the people who share the spirit and breath of your goals. Paul has definitely been that in my life, especially finding energy, inspiration and enthusiasm to push the limits with how we teach and how we share philosophy with others.
Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family College Chair in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, director of the God and the Good Life Program, and director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. She has published works in many leading philosophy journals. Her first book, Time Biases, was published by Oxford University Press. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation. Sullivan has degrees from the University of Virginia, Oxford University, and Rutgers University, where she earned a PhD in philosophy. She studied at Balliol College, Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar.
Paul Blaschko is an assistant teaching professor in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He heads up curriculum design and digital pedagogy for the God and the Good Life Program, and has recently been working to develop similar curricula at universities across the nation as part of an initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Blaschko completed an MA in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, a PhD at the University of Notre Dame in 2018, and held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship prior to being appointed to his current position.
