On our show, we make it a habit of repeating our tagline: “Exploring what it means to live a good life.” But in this episode, we address the issue head-on like never before, with the help of Notre Dame Professor of Philosophy Meghan Sullivan. We discuss her book “The Good Life Method,” which gives helpful insight about the kinds of questions philosophers and theologians have been asking for millennia: What does it mean to pursue a life worth living? What sort of end ought we keep in mind in all our doing and living and being? And how might we get there?
What does it mean to live a good life, and how do we start?
Episode Transcript
Lee C Camp
[00:00:00] I'm Lee C. Camp and this is No Small Endeavor - exploring what it means to live a good life.
Meghan Sullivan
There are certain kinds of disciplines and practices that make human lives go really well.
Lee C Camp
That's Meghan Sullivan, professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and recently the co-author of a book entitled The Good Life Method, which addresses questions of human flourishing through a lens our regular listeners might find familiar - that of virtue ethics.
Meghan Sullivan
Ethics is like having this goal in mind about what those practices and habits are.
Lee C Camp
Today, a conversation filled with stories, methods, and a whole lot of highly practical philosophy.
Meghan Sullivan
When people say they hate doing philosophy, I think they usually just hate all the pretentiousness and the, like, fancy vocabulary words.
But one thing people really do love is talking about meaning.
Lee C Camp
All coming right up.[00:01:00]
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor - exploring what it means to live a good life. And today, an ideal guest for a show exploring what it means to live good life. Professor Meghan Sullivan of Notre Dame, whose recent book is entitled The Good Life Method. Meghan also founded a program at Notre Dame, my alma mater, go Domers, called 'God and the Good Life'.
Meghan, and her co-author Paul Blaschko discuss at length many of the topics I've spent a lot of my own vocational energies exploring. Namely, what does it mean to pursue a life worth living? What sort of end ought we keep in mind in all of our doing and living and being, and what sort of practices, habits, and character traits might facilitate the envisioned flourishing life? What things are worth working and struggling for, and which [00:02:00] are not?
These are the questions that philosophers and theologians have asked for millennia now, and they are questions that remain worthy of much attention and great care. And they are questions that we ignore, at best, to our subsequent frustration, and at worst, to our great peril.
As always, you can reach me at feedback@nosmallendeavor.com to share your thoughts about this episode, to let me know what you're reading, or to let us know who you'd like to hear on the show.
Welcome, Professor Sullivan.
Meghan Sullivan
Oh my gosh, it's such a pleasure to be with you.
Lee C Camp
It's a delight to have you with us. I'm always, of course, pleased to get to talk to folks in South Bend, Indiana, that being my old alma mater day. So, uh, well, welcome. We're glad to have you with us and, uh, grateful for your, your new book, the Good Life Method.
I would like, perhaps counterintuitively, to begin in the very last sentence of your book, where you say, "This [00:03:00] drive to find a goal proportionate to life, and to seek to know this goal with others, is for virtue ethicists what the good life is all about." So unpack that for us and tell us a little bit more about what you mean by that.
Meghan Sullivan
Sure. I mean, we're goal-driven creatures. I mean, that's one of the fundamental insights of philosophy for the last 2,400 years, is it is just part of human nature to be always setting goals for yourself and then beating yourself up when you don't hit 'em. And one of the major takeaways that we want the reader to have from the book and our students to have from the God and the Good Life course, is this idea that this is a great part of life, this part of you that's seeking a goal. But a lot of times the goals that we settle on, they come from kinda stupid places.
They come from reading the news, or from what your friends are doing, or from insecurities that you have about yourself. And one thing that philosophy can do for us, and [00:04:00] that genuine friendships can do for us, and that faith can do for us is help us take this goal-seeking impulse that we all have, but direct it to the kinds of goals that are gonna be much more satisfying and that aren't gonna, we're not gonna lose 'em in February. We're not gonna beat ourselves up if we don't achieve them right away. And to get an understanding of what those goals are in our life, you have to do some pretty hard thinking and you gotta have some interesting conversations, and that's where philosophy can be particularly helpful.
Lee C Camp
Yeah. Yeah, it reminded me of a line that I really like. This is not an exact quote, but from another Notre Dame professor, Alasdair MacIntyre, that I've learned a lot from, who, he said something like, you know, "The key to a good life, or central to living a good life, is to ask what a good life entails." It's asking that kind of meta question, right?
Which seems that we oftentimes, maybe we spend more time asking questions about what we're gonna do for our vacation than asking really what a good life entails as a whole.
Meghan Sullivan
Yeah, absolutely. Or, or we think like, if somebody is asking, [00:05:00] "Am I living a good life?" we think that they're depressed or that something's going wrong, rather than thinking, that's one of the most exciting questions to wake up with every day of, you know, what, what's gonna be ultimately meaningful about what I'm working on? How's this all fitting together into something that's gonna be a beautiful life for me? And philosophy can also help you take those questions, which might seem like existential crises when they hit you at various points, and make 'em just much more part of your, kinda, daily practice about how you enjoy your life and talk with other people about it.
Lee C Camp
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Before we, we jump into some of the particularities of some of the questions and skills that you point to in the book, perhaps give us a sort of working definition of virtue ethics. People who listen to this program or have, have heard a number of people describe that, but for you, give us kind of the key, most significant, kinda, contours or elements of what you think about when you think about what virtue ethics entails?
Meghan Sullivan
Yeah, I think unfortunately, when a lot of people hear the word 'virtue', it conjures, like, [00:06:00] this Victorian woman who is very polite and very well dressed and totally pure and innocent, and that's not what we're talking about when we talk about virtue ethics.
It's this tradition that actually got started-- in the Western world, it got started in ancient Greece with Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, and in the East it got started with Confucius roughly the same time. So again, about 2,400 years ago, 2,500 years ago. The idea behind virtue ethics in these traditions is, there are certain kinds of character traits and disciplines and practices that make human lives go really well.
And ethics, having an ethics, is like having a work ethic. It's like having this goal in mind about what those practices and habits are, and having the drive to work on them and to try to develop them. Over time, you know, philosophers have changed their mind about what exactly those goals should be. The, the [00:07:00] Greeks really prized courage as one of these virtues, and courage in ancient Greece meant, you know, having the courage to face down the Spartans.
Now, courage is still a virtue, but courage in 2022 looks pretty different than it looked like in ancient Greece. And so, a virtue ethicist will help you ask first this question of, you know, are you brave enough? And two, what does that actually look like in the context of the life that you're living? And are there other kinds of virtues?
Are you trying to be a more loving parent? Are you trying to be somebody who cares more about the truth? One of the things that philosophers can lead us in thinking about, is whether or not these kinds of traits that we're trying to develop are ones that we really understand why these are goals and why this would be good for our lives, or if they're just traits that other people are trying to push on us, or just, you know, passing ideas.
So [00:08:00] that's another reason why virtue ethics is something that philosophers spend a lot of time on. 'Cause it's these questions about what, what an excellent human life looks like, even in our own era, or questions that we've, we've gotta think hard about.
Lee C Camp
You're pointing to a view of philosophy, I think, that is counterintuitive to a lot of folks in that you are wanting to see philosophy as a practice that really can help us develop very practical, concrete life skills.
Meghan Sullivan
Exactly. I mean, I think a lot of people hear 'ethics' and they hear, like, a set of rules that you're either following or not, and those rules probably exist in some, like, book that's stored in the library somewhere.
Lee C Camp
Yeah.
Meghan Sullivan
And one thing I love about virtue ethics is, it's not that sense of ethics at all. I mean, there are some absolute rules that people ought to follow, and you should understand why those hold, but ethics is so much more than that. It's very much this question of like, what do you want to be, what kind of way of life do you [00:09:00] wanna cultivate? When you look back on your life, what do you wanna say that you've been really guided by, or you've really invested in? And, that's inspiring. I mean, nobody gets outta bed in the morning thinking, like, 'I'm so excited to follow the rules today!'
[Lee laughs]
Um, that's not the kind of thing that pushes you forward. But this idea of having goals in mind that are increasingly refined and that you understand more deeply and have shared with others - that, that really motivates us to change our way of life.
Lee C Camp
You highlight four skills throughout the book. These are: strong questioning, agency, loving attention, and making meaning. Let me begin with that first one - strong questioning - and note that, at least in one chapter where you're especially dealing with strong questioning in, in thinking about the importance of truth, you introduced this philosophical [00:10:00] term 'bullshit' that's very important for you throughout the book.
Meghan Sullivan
Technical term.
Lee C Camp
Yeah, technical term. That's right. Talk to us about that.
Meghan Sullivan
Yeah, so actually, you know, we didn't, we didn't make 'bullshit' a philosophical term - that, that credit goes to Harry Frankfurt, this really wonderful Princeton philosopher who wrote a, a, an absolutely beautiful book about 20 years ago called On Bullshit.
And the basic idea is, some people genuinely care about the truth, and try to find it. This is a virtue, like you real-- you're the kind of person who admits when you're wrong, you're the kind of person who feels bad if you tell a lie. Then that's a character trait you can build in yourself. Anybody who's parented a 3 or 4-year-old knows what it looks like when it's hard to get that virtue trait going.
Some folks, unfortunately, are liars.
[Lee laughs]
And these kind of people - maybe some of them are leading major corporations right now, or politicians that you know - they really have no problem at all looking you in the eye and telling you [00:11:00] something that they know to be false. And the interesting thing about liars, according to Frankfurt, is they know the truth, they're just trying to push you away from it. But then there's this third category, which is philosophically interesting and also, you know, important to recognize in ourselves. And this is the bullshitter. And the deal with the bullshitter is, he or she doesn't even care about the truth. They never even bothered to ask themselves this question about what's true or false.
So like, a liar knows what's true and is trying to lead you away from it. But a bullshitter just doesn't even care about the truth. And the Greeks, Socrates, his whole career in Athens 2,400 years ago, was dealing with bullshitters. He thought the-- Athens was just addicted to saying whatever pops into their mind, and following whatever argument is kind of moving them that particular day, and always trying to get an advantage over other people, and always trying to be in the crowd that's winning, and just at the end of the day was not willing to sit [00:12:00] down and ask themselves hard questions. And Socrates said the practice of philosophy, one of the key practices of philosophy, is learning how to ask the kinds of questions that cure us of this addiction to bullshit and help us realize that the truth is out there and it's worth going after. And I think, you know, especially in a democracy where people enjoy free speech and where, um, we're all trying to convince each other to vote for our favorite cause or to come alongside us, it's really, really, really important for Greek democracies and for American democracies and the kind of people who are trying to live good lives in a democracy, to care about the truth and to not just care about whatever view is the loudest at the moment.
Lee C Camp
Yeah, and you introduce, um, introduce to most folks, I guess, in an Intro to Philosophy class, but quite well in the book, uh, Plato's Cave, which is this sort of invitation to try to take seriously wanting to know what's real, and the fact that it's hard work to try to motivate ourselves towards that.
Meghan Sullivan
Yeah, the interesting thing about Plato [00:13:00] is, he's trying to give his friends advice about how to care more about the truth. And he realizes it's difficult, because one thing-- everybody knows this - if you go home for the holidays and you're talking with a family member who really disagrees with you about religion, or politics, or Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, whatever the hot button issue is - if you're having a discussion with somebody and you're really not on the same page, you can't really argue them into caring about your point of view. Like, you know, Socrates realized this - like, getting into arguments with people who you don't think care about the truth the same way you do, it's very hard through argument to convince them to change their minds.
So what Plato tries to show his students is that there's another way of helping people realize that you care about them and you care about the truth. And this is the, the famous allegory of the cave. He [00:14:00] says, when you really come to care about the truth, it's really like coming to see things in a new way that's different from the way you were seeing or experiencing the world before.
And Plato says the most important thing we can do for each other, to make us the kind of people who care more about the truth and are able to be better friends and able to love each other more, is to help people realize that we care about seeing the beautiful, in our conversations - that the truth, when we both get it, is gonna be good for both of us.
And so, famously, he says that the experience of coming to care about the truth is like realizing you've been living your whole life in this dark cave, just seeing shadows. And then one day, you get out and you see the real world and you experience it, and it's, it's kinda shocking, but also beautiful and wonderful.
And one of the ways that you can most show how much you care for other people, is if you feel like you've had that kind of transformation, to go meet them where they're at and try to show them what you see.[00:15:00]
Plato famously says, for the people that get out of his metaphorical cave, allegorical cave, they need to try to go back down in. Um, you have to go back and try to take up the perspective of somebody who doesn't see the, the, the world the way that you do, and, and to try to help them come along and see what might be beautiful about what you're seeing.
Uh, and that's not as, like, coercive. That's not argumentative, that's not getting into fights with people, but really helping try to describe what you're seeing in a way that might bring them alongside you.
Lee C Camp
It is, though, potentially controversial and difficult, I guess, as exhibited by Socrates on death.
Meghan Sullivan
Yeah. Well, I mean Socrates-- the Athenians got so sick of Socrates trying to care about the truth, that they killed him. That's the famous end of that story.
Lee C Camp
Y'all have made a lot of the charge against Socrates of corrupting the youth.
Meghan Sullivan
Oh, yeah. I got a huge banner in my office - this, like, four-foot banner that's, uh, Notre Dame colors, blue and gold, and it just says in huge letters, 'corrupt the youth', which is [00:16:00] the, the motto of our course.
Lee C Camp
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our conversation with Meghan Sullivan, professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, founder of the 'God and the Good Life' program there, and recently the co-author with Paul Blaschko of a book entitled The Good Life Method. I love hearing from you. Tell me what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or feedback about today's episode.
You can reach me at feedback@nosmallendeavor.com. You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen. Those notes include links to resources mentioned in this episode and a PDF of my complete and extensive interview notes, including material not found in this recorded episode.
Coming up, Meghan and I discuss how to ask the right kinds of questions for a flourishing life, whether or not our intentions for our actions matter, [00:17:00] and what Aristotle has to say about our habits.
Along with strong questioning, how would you summarize the challenge, then, to your students of what, what does it mean or look like for them as individuals, or as individuals within a community, to do the practice of strong questioning?
Meghan Sullivan
So, one of the key distinctions we talk about in the book, and I talk about with all my philosophy students, is the difference between a prosecutor question and a dinner party question.
So, a prosecutor question is honestly a weak question. That's the kind of question you ask somebody to try to pin them down, or to get them on the record. Suppose I wanna get into an argument with my neighbors about why they send their kids to private school rather than public school. That's the thing I wanna talk about - the nature of education.
I might find my neighbors and say, "Don't you care about the public school [00:18:00] system?" when I find out they send their kids to private school, and I'm trying to get them on the record of saying like, you know, confirming what I already believe about them, which is that they hate the community. And those kinds of questions, they shut down dialogue, they definitely don't build up trust, and honestly they're not great questions 'cause I already think I know the answer.
Lee C Camp
Hmm.
Meghan Sullivan
A dinner party question - and anybody who's great at hosting dinner parties knows how challenging these can be to find - but a dinner party question's a question that gets the conversation going.
A really good dinner party question, the person who asks it cares about the answer, genuinely cares about the answer, and also doesn't know what the person's gonna say next. So it invites this opportunity to learn or see something that you're not currently seeing in the situation. So maybe a dinner party question about education - suppose that's a thing I really wanna talk with folks about - is, "Tell me a little bit about the best moments you had when you were coming up through school, and the [00:19:00] hardest moments that you had when you were coming up through school." And I don't know the answer. I don't know what you're gonna tell me.
I'm, I'm gonna believe whatever you say, because I'm asking you something that you uniquely have a perspective on. And I'm definitely gonna learn something about your philosophy of education by hearing the answer. And I'll probably have a bunch of follow up questions after that. That's a great dinner party question - it invites conversation and there's gonna be something new and true that I didn't know before that you're gonna supply for me. And so one of the things that we try to help our students do, is realize what kinds of questions they genuinely care about, and then switch from prosecutor mode, when they're trying to talk about something difficult - politics or religion or ethics.
Encourage them to have difficult conversations, but to not do it like prosecutors and instead to do it like a philosopher, or somebody who's hosting a dinner party.
Lee C Camp
Yeah. Very helpful. Second skill that you point to throughout the book is agency. Tell us what, first, what you kinda mean by agency.
Meghan Sullivan
This is basically the skill of taking [00:20:00] the appropriate amount of responsibility for your life, and being able to really understand your intentions, and it's something that philosophers spend a lot of time arguing with, amongst each other.
So which kinds of things in life just happened to you, or are part of the system that you're working in, and which kinds of decisions are ones that you're genuinely making and influencing? And the skill that we try to teach our students, and we try to help the readers develop, is learning how to tell better stories about your intentions and motivations, which oftentimes requires some pretty hard thinking about why you're doing the things that you're doing.
So, I can give you an example. Let's suppose that it's holiday season, and I am trying to pick out a gift for my sister-in-law. My sister-in-law lives in Virginia. She's a hard person to shop for. I love her to [00:21:00] death. And I might be getting pretty frustrated with myself 'cause I just can't find out what to buy her. And I decide, ugh, I'm just gonna get her a Target gift card. And then I try to find my reason for making this decision. That's kind of important for my family. But the very first reason that might pop into my head is, she knows she's difficult to shop for and I'm not gonna spend any more time on this. That's my reason for wanting her to just punt and get her this gift card. And that might be a pretty good reason, but I might go to bed at night and think, like, you know, honestly, that's a story I'm telling about why I'm giving this gift to my sister-in-law, Ambrosia. But it's not a true story. That's just a, a reason I'm telling myself.
And humans are really good at coming up with these reasons and rationalizations. The truer story might be, I'm getting her this gift card and not trying to buy her something special, 'cause I just have not been willing to ask her what's really special to her, like have a conversation to try [00:22:00] to get to know her a little bit more.
And maybe a more honest answer is, I'm being lazy by getting her this gift card. And that's, like, a deeper story that I'm taking a little bit more responsibility for my gift giving, and maybe also starting to get to that realization about myself and this particular challenge I'm facing, might also prompt me to change my ways a little bit.
In fact, maybe even the next morning I would text my sister-in-law and say, "You know what, Ambrosia, I've been being a little bit lazy about finding a great gift for you for the holidays, and I wanna work on this. I would really love it if you'd be willing to talk with me for like 15, 20 minutes about how things are going, and I might get a little bit more inspiration."
So it's like taking responsibility and learning to tell the real stories about my intentions helps me also figure out a better plan for loving my sister-in-law.
Philosophy is really good about - this gets into our bullshit point from just a minute ago - but one of the things philosophers have always put as one of their goals is helping us learn how to police [00:23:00] ourselves for these, like, bullshit reasons and intentions and learn how to, to get a better handle about why we're doing the things that we're doing, so hopefully we can change.
Lee C Camp
Yeah, I, I can imagine someone listening, though and, and saying, "this is the problem with you philosophers, is that you, you have to think so much about whether or not to buy a Target gift card."
Meghan Sullivan
[Laughs] Yeah.
Lee C Camp
Right. So, so, so how would you respond and say, wait, it's not just about-- you know, is it just about the Target gift card, or is it about something much more?
Meghan Sullivan
You know, I'll, I'll tell you, my family hates talking philosophy with me. So one of the easiest ways for me to kill Christmas with my brothers and my sister-in-law is to make it all about philosophy, 'cause they just wanna get on with their lives. They have real jobs.
[Lee laughs]
I, I think that, it's important to realize - one, we all do this kind of self-reflection.
You might not realize that it's philosophy, but everybody worries about their relationships, and everybody, they're-- you know, part of having a conscience is just realizing [00:24:00] sometimes we're not doing as good of a job as we can about things that are under our control. But also, I think that loving people and caring about your actions philosophically doesn't mean that you're always describing yourself using philosophy jargon.
Instead, I think a commitment to developing agency and to living a philosophically reflective life is just this commitment to kind of test out the stories that you're telling about yourself. And to do that, you know, when you go to bed at night, doing that kind of inner replay of your day and thinking, how would I maybe describe my actions and intentions a little bit differently?
I think, in my experience with the people that I've cared about - my coworkers, my family members, my students - people do genuinely appreciate having these moments where you say, "Hey, I wanted to tell you what I think it means to me to be shopping for your Christmas gift this [00:25:00] year." Or "I, I wanna be able to tell you a story about what I think family vacations mean to me", or, "I wanna tell you the story about what being a teacher means to me."
And to have worked on that a little bit and to be open to kind of changing your mind, even about what your internal story is, so that you have something more beautiful to tell people. But when people say they hate doing philosophy, I think they usually just hate all the pretentiousness and the, like, fancy vocabulary words and the, like, historical references.
But one thing people really do love is talking about meaning, and what's meaningful to them. And it's a genuine gift for people that you love and care about to be able to have thought about what these activities mean to you.
Lee C Camp
So you, you say in this chapter that storytelling becomes central to agency and the moral life, and you set that up in contrast to utilitarians and consequentialists.
Now some folks listening are gonna, might not know what utilitarianism and consequentialism is. So, one, could you define that for us, and then kind of show us [00:26:00] a contrast of the way your approach would think about some of the questions that they're concerned with.
Meghan Sullivan
Great. So there's a big debate in philosophy that-- and it's honestly been happening since ancient Rome, but it's, it's really acute in the last century - and this is, what kinds of metrics or measures should you use to determine whether or not you're living a morally good life?
One camp - sometimes they're called consequentialists, sometimes they're called utilitarians - believes that you have to focus on the outcomes of your decisions. So, how much good do you push out into the world as a result of your choices? How many people are helped, and how many people are harmed as a result of your decisions?
And it's, it's really, like, a metric - you just measure at the end of the day, did I do my best to try to promote as many good things as possible? If so, then I'm doing well as a moral person. And if I'm [00:27:00] not, then I'm not doing well as a moral person. Certainly if I'm harming others or pushing bad things out into the world, I'm not living a good life.
And that's a really intuitive idea. Gosh, I mean, we live in an era where we track our steps on our watch. Companies that we work for ask us to report every month on various metrics and indicators. We're really results, data driven kind of people. But there's another way of looking at the ethical life that is really important.
And we argue in the book, and to our students, we shouldn't get addicted to the outcomes and instead should be focused much more on intentions. So this is the second camp, and this is really where a lot of virtue ethicists traditionally fall. You can't tell whether or not somebody's living a good life or doing their moral duties just by looking at the outcomes of their decisions without checking the inner stories that they're telling.
So I'll give you an example. This one comes from [00:28:00] Elizabeth Anscombe - very famous philosopher from Oxford in the last century - and she says, you know, suppose you're, you're viewing this scene in World War II. You got some Nazi soldiers that are in a house in France, and the homeowner's outside the house and he's pumping water into the house, and you're just watching him pump the water into the house. And you are watching the Nazis drink the water as it gets pumped in, suppose. And you might think, oh my gosh, that guy, that French homeowner, he's doing something bad.
He's helping the Nazis, he's refreshing their drinks, and this is gonna encourage them to go do something horrible. This isn't morally good. But then suppose you, like, look a little bit deeper, and you realize that the homeowner knows that the well has poisoned water in it, and he's pumping it so vigorously because he believes that this is going to make the, make the soldier sick, and then they're not gonna be able to do anything [00:29:00] bad that day.
Well, gosh, if we knew, if we knew that the homeowner believes that, then we might think he's doing something kind of heroic. He's taking a risk to try to help the other people in his village. That changes our assessment about him entirely. I mean, you could also imagine - this isn't what Anscombe does - but you can imagine a version of the story where the homeowner's kinda nuts, and he believes that, like, it's magical water and if the, if the soldiers drink it, they're gonna disappear.
Then, our assessment of the homeowner gets a little bit different. Like, he's not really a hero in that story. He's, he's kind of an object of pity. Like we're sad that he believes this. Maybe the stress of the war has totally pushed him over the edge. We don't think that he's doing something morally great, but we also don't think that he's doing something morally bad.
He's just like, you know, somebody that we feel badly for.
What Anscombe was trying to point out with these kinds of examples is, if you're just watching a man move his arm up and down, pushing water through a well, you don't know what's significant about the story. [00:30:00] To know what's morally interesting, what's philosophically interesting, what's relevant to this question about whether this guy is living a good life or not, we have to know what's inside his head - and in particular, we have to know the story that he's telling himself about what he's doing. 'I'm thwarting the Nazis', or 'I'm helping the Nazis', or 'I'm making them disappear with a magic potion'. That inner story that he's telling is definitely relevant to the truth about, morally speaking, what's going on in that scenario. And that's something that doesn't just have to do with the consequences - measuring at the end of the day what happens in the event. It has to do with that person's mind and his will.
Lee C Camp
I found fascinating that this approach then means, for our own selves individually, that there's a higher or a more all-encompassing sort of standard here. That, as opposed to just thinking of doing the right thing, however we might define that, [00:31:00] I have to ask myself questions about, what was my attitude?
Uh, or it's the whole, what continents versus of a more genuine virtue notion. So, so maybe talk just a little bit about that.
Meghan Sullivan
Yeah. I mean, we could pick a more concrete, more day-to-day example than Anscombe's French guy and the Nazis. I mean, suppose, you look at an email exchange I have with one of my colleagues at work, and I write a really short, kinda angry email saying, "You need to finish this project before the end of the week, or else."
And the person gets the email, and they work really hard on the project, and they finish it, and everybody does better as a result of the project getting finished. You might think, well, gosh, me sending that, kinda, snippy email had great consequences. Projects got finished on time and everybody's happy about it.
If you're a utilitarian or a consequentialist, you might think, at the end of the day, just send whatever emails, encourage the best [00:32:00] results overall for the project and the team. Don't worry so much about your plan or your strategy or why you address people that way.
But if you're a virtue ethicist, you might think, look, every time I send one of those snippy project management emails, I make myself into the kind of person that cares a little bit less about my colleagues, or is not willing to take the extra time to sort of think about you or your feelings.
I make myself into the kind of person that's kind of, maybe just a cold machine at work, rather than somebody who's like, a caring human boss. And that's the key thing for Aristotle, who's kind of the, the major philosopher of our project and our, our book. Aristotle says, "We are not the people that we think we are. We're the kind of people that our habits make us into". So focusing on, you know, these, even seemingly thoughtless day-to-day things, like snippy emails or ways that we kind of ignore others - [00:33:00] that's crafting us into the kind of person who's callous, who's-- has certain vices. And philosophy, and good relationships and good communities help us avoid that kind of slow habituation into somebody who's not a great person.
Lee C Camp
Would you just repeat that one line for us? It's worth, it's worth contemplating. We're not the kind of person we think we are, but--
Meghan Sullivan
We're not the kind of person that we think we are, but we're the kind of person that our habits are making us into.
Lee C Camp
After the break - why paying attention is a crucial aspect of loving those around us, and the philosophical case for taking a leap of faith.
A third major skill you talk about in the book is loving attention. Talk to us about this skill.
Meghan Sullivan
I think so [00:34:00] many of us think that love is something that we do to other people. We show that we love our kids by taking them to soccer practice, and by spending lots of time with them, and by ordering them to eat their vegetables, and by buying them expensive gifts.
And, like, love is a verb - and that is true, but there's a very important dimension to loving other people that doesn't involve trying to control them, or our projects that we do with them or to them, that it's important to realize. And this is the dimension of love that involves contemplating other people and paying attention to them in a way that's not trying to control them, or not even necessarily trying to change them or act on them.
One of the conversations I've been having with a lot of folks this year, which has really driven home this point for me-- this, this is the first kind of normal year of [00:35:00] getting back to college that we've had in a while. A lot of parents dropped their kids off and they'd spent, you know, two years huddling at home together doing Zoom school, and doing Zoom work, and they were very emotional about dropping their kids off at college.
And I think the reason for that was, they've just gone through this period with their teenagers where they were really active parts of their lives, and now their kids are moving to Notre Dame, or they're going away. And it feels like, for the parents, that they're losing the opportunity to love their kids.
Like, because they're not, they're not driving them to soccer practice anymore. They're not spending every day together in their homes, cooking and talking. And that can feel like a genuine loss for folks. And one of the biggest things we have to do at various points in our lives with people that we love, is realize that they're, they might move away, or they might be pursuing their own activities, and we have to instead just think about how much we love them and watch their lives unfold in ways where we're not maybe the starring character anymore.
It's [00:36:00] really important if you're gonna live a long, good life, for you to be able to navigate these transitions in loving other people, and for the ways that you love other people to survive all the different changes that go into a good life. And so we really try to emphasize a point that Plato makes very beautifully, that modern philosophers like Iris Murdoch teach us about, which is developing this skill of paying attention to the people that you love without necessarily trying to control or act with them, because sometimes you're just not able to do that.
Lee C Camp
Hmm. You, um, frame up this exercise of asking questions as a central way of paying attention. Will you tell us a bit more about that?
Meghan Sullivan
Yeah. So, so Socrates, that great founder of Greek philosophy, in all of his philosophical dialogues, he's always talking with his friends and he's always asking them questions.
So, one of the practices that we encourage for our students and for our readers, is to take somebody that you love [00:37:00] and try to learn a little bit more about the stories that they're telling themselves about their good life. So try to-- one of the ways Aristotle talks about love as becoming a second self to the person that you love, like getting involved in their perception of their life, through questions, and we know this intuitively because we're already kind of practicing it.
You might not even realize that it's philosophical, but maybe you're like on a long car ride with your partner or your kids or your parents, and you get bored and you start asking them to tell you stories. Like, "tell me stories about your childhood in Las Vegas". "Tell me a story about, like, why your boss drives you crazy."
And, if they're willing, you know, they start to, to unspool the story, and a lot of times you feel, you know, you feel the love in those moments. Like, you feel like you're really getting to know that person. They're revealing or disclosing something about themselves to you. They're being vulnerable, maybe. That car ride conversation is a key [00:38:00] example of this philosophical practice of trying to, gently, use questions and curiosity to let the people that you love include you in their inner mental life - the part of them that tells themselves stories about whether their life is going well or not. Not so that you can, like, decide how you're gonna fix them, or decide how you're gonna make your next move. Um, though maybe you'll get some insight about how to help them, but really just so that you can be part of their story - so that you can hear that internal story about their reasons for living the way that they're living, and, and accept it. And maybe, if things are going well, like Aristotle says, you can start to be a second self to them. You can start to like, experience their life from the inside, which, again, a lot of philosophers have thought the very essence of love is this ability that we have with people that we love to be a little bit on the inside of their life.
Lee C Camp
Hmm.
The last, kind of, major skill you point us to is making meaning. Especially under this heading, you seem to posit the [00:39:00] discussions of death, suffering, and God, and we, we won't have time to talk about all of those unfortunately, but I, I would love to hear you talk more about William James and his, his essay, The Will to Believe, out of your chapter, Take a Leap of Faith. James is, um, kind of, famously medical doctor becomes major early 20th century philosopher and struggles a great deal with depression, right? Wondering about the meaning of his life and the purpose of life.
Meghan Sullivan
Yeah, I mean, William James, he's, uh, like one of the founders of modern psychology.
All of my colleagues in the psychology department here at Notre Dame owe their discipline to the work that he was doing in the 1890s. And when James was a medical student, he was very interested in philosophy. He was very interested in different religious movements. Everybody in the, like, late 1800s in the US and Britain was experimenting with different versions of Christianity, they were going to seances - they were very [00:40:00] open-minded about spirituality, and James is a great example of this. But he also suffered debilitating depression. You know, right now we would recognize it as a clinical diagnosis, and they didn't really have those terms for it then, but he would have days where he couldn't get out of bed, where he thought about suicide. I mean, he was in a really rough spot.
And James also spent a lot of time in his own head, and realized some of what he was suffering from was psychological illness that he needed help with, but some of it was also spiritual. And so he has this beautiful, somewhat mysterious part of one of his journals when he was a medical student, where he's like-- he's re- recognizing that he's suffering from depression and that it's making it very hard for him to have a good life.
But he also finds that he's thinking constantly about whether or not he's just a machine. You know, he is really worried about this idea that he's just a part of nature like everything else, and that he doesn't, as a result, have the ability to [00:41:00] make any decisions for himself, he doesn't have any free will.
He's reading lots of philosophy at this time. His self-image, as being totally determined, that's making his depression worse. He realizes this about himself, and he realizes he has to find a way to change. So he writes in his journal one day, he was like, "I can't convince myself philosophically that determinism is false. I can't, I don't have any great philosophical argument that I could prove to myself I'm not just a bunch of atoms. But, I'm gonna decide to take this leap of faith and believe that I have the ability to make choices, that I am in some sense, like, in control of certain aspects of my life. And I've also realized that if I'm willing to take that leap, that I'm going to have the option to be happy again in a way that I won't be if I'm not willing to take that."
And he is like, "Once I, once I [00:42:00] realized I could think about myself in those terms, I suddenly had the realization about how I might start to attack my depression." And so, James is this really interesting example of a really smart philosopher who realizes that we all face these points in life where we're not exactly sure which big values, which big commitments we, we can be certain are true. If we're gonna join a religion, or leave a religion that we grew up in. If we're gonna decide to believe that this person loves us enough to start a family with them, or not. If we're gonna decide which, like, movement to join. Or whether or not we finally lost faith in Twitter.
[Lee laughs]
These are all the kinds of things that are just, like, hard. These philosophical questions are hard, and when we choose, it has the capacity to shape all of our other decisions.
I mean, these are really significant decisions that we face [00:43:00] in life. But, what James wants to urge is, for many of us, there comes a point where we can't wait for more information or we can't stay indeterminate forever. We can't stay in bed forever, wondering. We, we have to just commit and kind of see what follows.
And so, James urges us to treat some of these big philosophical questions as these ideas that we leap into. Now, what's really important is, James is very careful to note that you shouldn't leap into just anything - like there are genuine risks. And James says, we have to take our leaps of faith responsibly. And so one of the toughest philosophical questions that we face in life is knowing when we're at this point, when we need to take a leap of faith, and also knowing how we're gonna take responsibility if we end up getting things wrong.
Lee C Camp
Yeah. And we, we won't have time to untangle all of those, but you kind of take us through in the book, kind of the three different criteria he sets forward for thinking about when it seems reasonable or rational to take one of those leaps of faith, that I found [00:44:00] quite helpful in the book. As we get kind of near the end of our time together, I, I would love to hear you talk more about how philosophy informs your small daily habits. What are, what are kind of things, maybe-- and maybe some, there are things that you don't even talk about in the book, but what are, what are kind of things that you do to help point you back to these kinds of skills or point you back to major lessons you've learned from a discipline of philosophy?
Meghan Sullivan
So one thing that's definitely been true for me the last few years, personally, is, we're, we're going through periods where there's lots of change, and it just feels like, kinda nothing is solid. Like, you know, things get reorganized at work. Uh, there's a global pandemic and now we're all staying home. No, now we're all going back.
The news cycle changes every day. It's easy to feel, especially as an adult, that you're just kind of getting bounced around all the time and you're trying to find a through line. I [00:45:00] think one thing that philosophy is really good at doing, is when you start to have those anxieties, realizing you don't have to solve that problem all by yourself.
In fact, this is the human condition. The ancient Greeks felt this way. Confucius felt this way. People in the Enlightenment have felt this way. We live lives of constant change, and one of the great gifts that we have is the ability to step back and say, alright, how am I gonna try to fit together the different pieces of what has been going on, and what kind of story am I trying to tell myself?
And maybe, what kind of story could I tell people that I care about who are also going through a tough time? I'll give you a concrete example - one that just came up this past week for me. Two years ago, two of my freshman students, in 'God and the Good Life', they were in a traffic accident and they passed away.
It happened [00:46:00] very suddenly. It was over Halloween, and it was one of these things where it was just a, a freak, tragic accident. And I remember when this happened, it was, you know, in the two thirds of the way through the semester, and it was just absolutely devastating. We loved these women, and suddenly they're just gone.
It was also, you know, that first fall, 2020 year, the pandemic, when everything felt like really sad and disrupted and you think, man, why does this happen? You might be dealing with really intense suffering. It's moments like that, when you're honestly grateful for both faith and philosophy. Faith, to realize, oh my gosh, this is a really difficult problem that's kind of above my pay grade to understand, and so I shouldn't be so hard on myself if I don't quite know what the right response is right away.
There's a bigger truth here that I'm not able to totally grasp. That piece of it is important, but also, starting to have some of the [00:47:00] language to talk about what's ultimately meaningful. To talk about why you love people, to talk about why somebody's lives were great, even if they were cut short. And to have thought a little bit about these questions ahead of time so that when tragedy like that hits, you can talk with your students and you can talk with your colleagues and your loved ones about what's happening, and to be able to describe it in ways that start to help you make sense and get a sense of control and understanding back when everything's been tossed up in the air.
And so, I'm very grateful for philosophy in my life because I feel like during the peace times, during the easy times, practicing philosophy, and practicing faith, helps you build up the resources so when the really tough moments come, it's there for you.
Lee C Camp
I've been talking to Meghan Sullivan, professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, especially today discussing her book, The Good Life Method, co-authored with her Notre Dame colleague Paul Blaschko.
Meghan, thanks [00:48:00] so much for your time. It's been a delight to be with you today.
Meghan Sullivan
Oh, it's, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much.
Lee C Camp
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor, and our interview with Meghan Sullivan. Meghan is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She's also the founder of the 'God and the Good Life' program there at Notre Dame, and she's the co-author of the wonderful book, which we've been discussing today, along with Paul Blaschko, entitled The Good Life Method.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated - a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion, and the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.
Alright, thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hayes, Cariad Harmon, and Tim Lauer. Thanks for listening, and let's keep [00:49:00] exploring what it means to live a good life, together. No Small Endeavor is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.