A Conversation With the Authors of The Good Life Method

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.

On Expressing Thematic Concerns

by Elizabeth Kirschner

I’d like to say a few words about the expression of one’s thematic concerns, or obsessions, that is, how they find their way into the poem, piece of memoir, story.

All the old idioms insist that the writer’s obsessions must be expressed, not stated. That sounds fairly oblique. As does Pound’s insistence, “Go in fear of abstractions,” or William Carlos Williams dictum “no meaning, but in things.”

It all has to be expressed in a highly physical manner. The reader must be able to intuit what the writer is trying to say via the senses: smell, taste, sound, sight, touch.

 By means of example, here’s a passage from one of my own stories:

“I place my hands deep in my brother’s moccasins which I haven’t moved from the rocker’s seat. I wear them that way for a minute, ridiculous mittens, then put them back, nestle them close as veterans sharing identical scars.

It’s self-portrait after self-portrait: my profile shaded in ash, prim as trash, the curve of cheek rounded in vegetable peel. A face of unidentified viscera.

The shadows of snowflakes, flickering like dark birds. My father spoke, my mother listened. They occurred, like a sink full of water, voices a cloth submerged, unclean in the equine rot of night.

If we note the physical language, we can get a feeling for what this narrator is feeling:

After putting her brother’s slippers on her hands, like “mittens” she nestles them close, “like veterans.” The word “veterans” connote experience, does it not? One in which the narrator and the brother even share “scars.”

In this way, we begin to deduce a few things about their childhood, that it may be “war-like,” yet the word “mittens” suggests warmth, comfort, until we hit that discomfiting word, “ridiculous,” which undercuts our presumptions.

Note how the speaker’s self portrait is conveyed. “Shaded in ash.” “Prim as trash.” Such a description suggests an older narrator, not a child, but language is how the reader constructs a palpable sense of who each character is.

“Trash” is a powerful word. Coupled with “prim,” we get a clear sense of how the speaker views herself.

The reader’s thinking is further colored by “the shadow of snowflakes.” Note the position of the word “shadow,” how it dominates, overpowers the word “snowflakes.”

Both words represent actual things, i.e., we can see, even smell a “shadow.” Put a verb with it, then we can even hear it, “the shadow sings.”

Likewise, a snowflake has a physical presence. In this instance, it’s flickering like “dark birds.” This creates a mood, does it not?

Then we come to the parents. Who “occurred.” Note how inanimate that feels, how this gives them more thingness than presence, especially as it’s expressed in past tense. The word “occurred” is immediately backed into a simile, “like a sink full of water.”

The work of simile and metaphor is to compound things, to layer in complexity, let language work double-time. “A sink full of water,” denotes inertia, uncleanliness. This is characterization.

Note that the parents’ voices are submerged, “a cloth,” which suggests a desire for erasure. The passage ends with, “In the equine rot of night.” Consider the sensory impact of these words. How “equine” qualifies “rot.”

Isn’t the reader left with a disquieting portrait? Doesn’t the word “rot” color the whole passage? Note that, this far, I haven’t “stated” what this story is “about.” The idea is for it to unfold, sentence by sentence.

Here’s the ending to a different story:

“Her cries tasted like limes. As I walked down the spit, crabs scuttled on the beach. Increasingly human, increasingly scowling, so helpless, warlike.

With the scowls of warriors imprinted on their backs, each was a solitary criminal. They reminded me of my sister, Harmon, the painting, which created its own vocabulary, stiff as a broken neck, or a trinity of moths, the color of waxed paper.”

We look for clues in the text to help us interpret what the writer is trying to express. “Her cries tasted like limes,” is an image of freshness, tartness. It is even intimate, as it suggests that the speaker is literally tasting “her cries.”

Next we latch onto the crabs scuttling on the beach. We “see” the crabs. Their physicality is made more complex and concrete by the fact that they’re “scowling.”

Personification, then. The crabs are given human qualities, which makes them more menacing. Stories need a little menace, a sense of threat, that’s where the tension comes from.

But these crabs. Not only are they “increasingly” scowling, they are also “helpless,” “warlike.” Might this be interpreted as the writer’s sense of the human predicament? Isn’t it further complicated by the notion that each one is “a solitary criminal?”

This is how the writer’s obsessions get expressed. In the sheer physicality  of the language. Every single word must carry significant weight, if it is to earn its place in any particular piece of work.

 Another short passage:

“When I go to sleep, I’m vinegar inside clouded glass. The world comes to an end when I wake up, violence is underwhelming, my mouth, a guarded hearse as the incomprehensible shuffles into place.”

What concerns, obsessions can we glean out of this? What do the actual words suggest?

Clearly, the speaker sees herself as astringent. She has the sense that the world “ends” every time she wakes up, that “violence” is “underwhelming.” Even her mouth is a “guarded hearse,” as the “incomprehensible” comes into play in that last phrase.

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Aren’t some of her obsessions made apparent here. How can we not feel her sense of mortality if she experiences every morning as an ending? We know she’s preoccupied with “violence” and the “incomprehensible.”

Doesn’t the story itself try to explicate, or put into action, some of these concerns? Given this paragraph, might not the reader expect some kind of violence, underwhelming, or otherwise to transpire? Might that act of violence lead to the speaker’s mouth feeling like a “guarded hearse?” Doesn’t violence compound our sense of the “incomprehensible?”

In this manner, the story can become the vehicle, the tenor, through which the writer can express, via all the elements of fiction, his or her deepest obsessions.

Plot, characterization, setting, conflict or suspense, some sense of the dramatic that necessarily seeks resolution. POV is involved, as someone, i.e., a character, has to have a distinct vantage point.

 Setting is the place to stand. No story can occur without a precise location in time and space. For example:

 “Outside the door, the warped distortion of mundane things—utility poles spook the blue, evergreens offer sinister shade—malevolent, nefarious, corrupt.”

The reader can participate in this: he or she can look outside that door, see a kind of warped perspective on things as ordinary as utility poles and evergreens.

The utility poles are “spooked.” The evergreens offer “sinister” shade. Coupled with the three bleak adjectives at the end of the sentence: “malevolent, nefarious and corrupt,” we are once again being influenced, or seduced by the writer.

This is how it works: the writer employs all there is in his or her powers to express, quite simply and complexly, that which can’t be expressed any other way. There must be an urgency, a fierce sense of immediacy and necessity, i.e., the writer must put everything at stake.

If there isn’t a feeling that the story must be told, at all costs, then it’s likely to fail. In this way, it’s akin to love. If one doesn’t give into it in its entirety, if one isn’t wholly vulnerable and committed, the attempt is likely to be utterly doomed.

It’s the attempt that matters. Something will arise out of the attempt, especially if the effort has been wholeheartedly made.

 Revision is, shall we say, the house of correction, the place where we can go back and forward, over and over again, until the thing that might have been made in haste, due to that profound sense of urgency, can be remade, reshaped, seen anew.

This is where the writer can luxuriate, take an inordinate amount of time, to make what she or he is trying to say, as nearly perfect as only the imperfect can.

Doesn’t the story call us back to all that matters: bone, skin, that fragment of you surviving in me as I open my mouth to speak? Isn’t it one way to return to the living?

 Aren’t stories, with their tornado of moments, a brief sojourn into what makes us most human? Don’t they dismantle and remake what the heart names in some insatiable and utterly inexplicable manner?

 In this way, stories swaddle up like capillaries as they pass through the years slowly, in hope of a metamorphosis. I crave that moment of transformation.

 The story may begin in hell and end up in paradise, or vice versa, but the journey, the deeply going into and the sometimes horrifying reemergence, the whole mystifying process wherein one thing becomes another, a process which absolutely encapsulates the mystery of narrative and the narrative of mystery, this is why I write, humbly and at times feebly, I write because it always holds me in thrall, and this is how I praise, or practice praising what I feel is the whole human catastrophe.

Elizabeth Kirschner is the author of BECAUSE THE SKY IS A THOUSAND SOFT HURTS, her debut collection of short stories. She has published five volumes of poetry, most recently, MY LIFE AS A DOLL,  Autumn House Press, 2008, and SURRENDER TO LIGHT, Cherry Grove Editions, 2009. The former was nominated for the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Patterson Book Prize and named Kirschner as the Literary Arts Fellow in the state of Maine, 2010. Her memoir, WALKING THE BONES is forthcoming from The Piscataqua Press, February, 2015.

Kirschner has been writing and teaching multi-genres across four decades. She served as faculty in Fairfield University’s low-residence MFA in Creative Writing Program and has also taught at Boston College and Carnegie-Mellon University. She currently serves as a writing mentor and manuscript consultant and teaches various workshops in and around her community in Kittery Point, ME.