The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family Col­lege Professor 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, and held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship prior to being appointed to his current position.

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1. Desire the Truth

Don't you realize what a great evil comes from dialectic as it is currently practiced? . . . When young people get their first taste of arguments, they misuse it. . . . They imitate those who've refuted them by refuting others themselves, and, like puppies, they enjoy dragging and tearing those around them with their arguments. -Plato, Republic

Decision 2016

We launched the God and the Good Life course in the fall of 2016. Two months into the inaugural semester, we thought that we were crushing it. Our in-class lectures were lively. Students wrote halfway decent essays. Our course website was crashing less often. GGL was a campus hit. But it wasn't until that November-the week of the presidential election-that we really started to understand the risks and potential rewards of what we were attempting.

The day before the general election, we invited Pete Buttigieg, then the mayor of South Bend, to help us lead a class debate about the role democracy plays in the good life. While Meghan and Pete have somewhat different political and religious outlooks, they've enjoyed the big debates since their early twenties. Pete and Meghan were in the same cohort of Rhodes scholars at Oxford in the early 2000s. Both started new jobs in South Bend in 2011. When Pete deployed to Afghanistan in 2014, Meghan lived in his house. (Paul partied there.) Pete's been dragged in as a "celebrity guest" for many of Meghan's seminars, talking about modern moral dilemmas and local government, Enlightenment philosophy and local government, Greek philosophy and local government. As they discovered, there is pretty much no subject of a philosophy course that cannot be interestingly related to problems of local government.

Paul has a more complicated relationship with Mayor Pete. From the time Paul arrived in South Bend, he has been involved in community organizing. In 2016, the mayor's office announced plans to sell its largest public park, which was the site of both the most biodiverse lake in the county and an underused municipal golf course. Paul helped spearhead an effort with activists from South Bend's Catholic Worker house to oppose the sale. He became a thorn in the side of the city government, publishing op-eds in the local paper and passionately arguing at city council meetings that maintaining the park was vital for the local community. To Pete's credit, he was willing to engage with the group, though he disagreed. Ultimately, the sale never went through.

On November 7, 2016, we brought Pete in to debate with us about Book 8 of Plato's Republic. In the chapter, Plato goes to great lengths to argue that democracy is a tragic form of government and that living in democracies will gradually destroy our souls. We thought this would be a funny class session, foregrounding the big U.S. vote. Meghan represented some of Plato's more extreme views: you can't trust the electorate; the other side is likely corrupt; people don't know what they should want; political rhetoric has absolutely no connection with the truth. Pete represented the pro-democracy side: we are more alike than we are different; we have to learn to live together; we are "political animals" who need to be civically engaged. We figured we would all have a good laugh about Plato's misguided cynicism.

Philosophy (and the professoriat more generally) skews pretty blue, and this can lead professors to off-base assumptions about our students' views. In the past few years we've heard a lot about "bubbles" and "echo chambers," but back in 2016 we were unknowingly living in one. Walking into the lecture room on November 7, we just assumed that we knew the political views of these particular students. Of course people in their demographic support Clinton over Trump. Of course they think the current American political process is unequivocally good for our souls. Mind you, we'd never asked the students directly about how their political views figure into their conceptions of the good life.

Plato versus Pete seemed to go off as planned. At the end of class we did our own Decision 2016 poll of the two hundred students in the audience, using an anonymized polling app. "Who would you vote for tomorrow?" The results were . . . surprising.

Gary Johnson 7%

Jill Stein 2%

Donald Trump 44%

Hillary Clinton 37%

Other 6%

Would Not Vote 4%

Trump won the God and the Good Life election? It seemingly defied reason. Of course, in the next twenty-four hours we'd learn that the political diversity in our class was a microcosm of our nation.

On November 9, a few hours after President-elect Trump's victory speech, we were back in the auditorium and, according to the syllabus, about to switch units and begin discussing the life of contemplation. That felt wrong. For one thing, we realized we had completely screwed up the class on the seventh. The Platonic questions-Can we trust rhetoric? Each other? Do democracies work?-were suddenly very live, very divisive issues. Protests spread across Notre Dame's normally placid campus that morning; some students were demanding the university make statements on immigration policy. Some wore MAGA hats to class; others showed up crying. It was like we went to bed Tuesday night thinking we were one unified utopian campus and woke up Wednesday realizing that we were two different cities secretly living on top of each other.

The fundamental question Plato poses is whether we can be the kind of people who both love the truth and love life together. Is there any way to reconcile the two desires in a single life? That morning after the election, we realized how much we needed Plato.

Let No One Unaware of Geometry Enter Here

Some philosophers are charismatic; you read their vision of the good life and you're immediately drawn to them. Plato is not such a philosopher. He can be judgmental and paranoid. He takes long digressions on topics like how to tame horses. It's not even always clear whether he believes what he is writing or is just being ironic. Still, if you go through Plato's training, so much else in philosophy falls into place.

In the Republic, Plato asks a great question: If we wanted to set up a city to help everyone achieve the good life, in a unified way, how would we do it? And he has a weird starting point to answer the question: geometric puzzles.

Legend has it that above the entrance to Plato's school, the Academy, there was an inscription: Let no one unaware of geometry enter here. For Plato, there is a direct connection between geometry and happiness, one with surprisingly profound implications for our current political conundrums. Caring about geometry is a warm-up for the much harder work of caring for the truth and convincing others to as well.

At some level, many of us find puzzles strangely fun. Area mazes are a very popular puzzle system in Japan; you'll find them in newspapers and books at train stations. Japanese schoolchildren work through them the way American kids do word searches. The goal in an area maze is to use just a bit of arithmetic and some logical maneuvers to figure out a mystery fact about a rectangle. The only geometry you need to remember is that the area of a rectangle is the width times the length. Here is an example of an area maze puzzle. Give it a shot.

Maybe you found the answer (if not, check the endnotes for this chapter). Now ask yourself, How does it feel to not know? And how does it feel to figure it out? And how do you feel about another person if they patiently work through it with you?

Most of us love that feeling of putting the pieces together and solving a puzzle, either by ourselves or, even better, with our friends. If you aren't a math person, think about how you feel guessing the culprit of a murder mystery or remembering that celebrity name after hours of racking...