“When it comes to the big questions in life, how do you decide what to believe? And how do your beliefs guide you in what you should do?”
That’s the opening of an unusual video pitch for an introductory philosophy class. In under three minutes, Meghan Sullivan, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, throws out more than a dozen questions that have kept philosophers busy for thousands of years, but with angles that are relatable and surprising, including a fistfight between Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Nietzsche.
The class, “God and the Good Life,” aims to be different. In 2015, as Notre Dame was rethinking its general-education curriculum, Sullivan decided to create a course that challenges students to think deeply about how to live their lives, and to let them know they don’t have to go it alone. Turns out, some pretty great minds have thought about the same things that keep an 18-year-old awake at night.
“God and the Good Life” has proved so popular that she is now working with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to bring the course to other colleges. Sullivan talked with The Chronicle about why she thinks her course resonates with students and how it helps them find answers to life’s modern challenges.
What are the big questions you tackle in this class?
How do you decide what to believe? A lot of my students think this is the easiest question, and by the end of the course they realize this is the hardest. In general, good people care about having evidence for their beliefs. What’s not so obvious is how you find evidence of what you’re trying to believe. How do you find evidence for questions about ultimate meaning?
Second, what do you think your moral obligations are? We load them up with problems professionals are making decisions about now that have high stakes and help them decide what philosophical strategies they think are the best way to handle those kinds of problems.
The third question is, does religion have any role to play in your adult life? Many of our students are struggling with that when they arrive at Notre Dame, and we want them to realize that’s the kind of question that they can talk about with other students.
The final question, which everybody loves, is: What will it take for your life to have mattered, or to have meaning when you die?
We look at the life of contemplation to understand what it would mean to decide that the value of our lives is not going to be measured by the things that you accomplish, but will instead be measured by some kind of inner life you cultivate.
Do you find that students’ beliefs change over the course of the semester?
What we don’t see often is students dramatically changing their worldview. What we do find commonly is that students report that they explain themselves now in a different way. And that’s cool because it’s gotten deeper and more interesting.
We have a fair number of what we call “atheist coming out” essays. Which are basically, “I was raised in household where some religious tradition was really dominant, but I’ve been having these doubts since I was 16 and now I’ve read some Nietzsche and existentialism and I’m finally ready to start explaining what my take on this is going to be.” There’s something about the 18- and 19-year-old mind-set of rejecting this huge system, and being able to write an essay about rejection is something that they relish.
Do you think this course is a good counterweight to the pressures students face today?
I think about Aristotle and the opening bit of the Nicomachean Ethics, which is my favorite philosophy text. He’s talking to his students 2,000 years ago in ancient Greece, and he poses this question to them: What do you guys think would make you happy? And they give exactly the same kinds of answers our students would give in the first week of school. “If I just had a good job.” “If I just found a stable, happy family life.” “If I just had enough money to be able to be sure I met my needs and have leisure time.”
And Aristotle says: That might make you happy, but is that going to make you ultimately happy? Does that mean when you retire you’re not going to have a life worth living anymore? Or if you have a family and your children grow up and all leave, your life won’t be valuable anymore?
All these philosophers think that living a good life requires thinking big. It’s not just about joining a good gym or putting an app on your phone to help you sleep better. It’s about asking these big questions, like, how much time should I devote to a cause? What do I hope I will accomplish by the end of my life? What do I hope will happen after I die?
What does the popularity of this course tell you about where college students are in their lives?
I got some pushback originally from well-meaning but misguided professors who thought it doesn’t make sense to ask 18- and 19-year-olds what their answers are to these big philosophical questions before they know the broad scope of philosophy, before they’ve read Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas and Descartes and Kant. The same way you wouldn’t ask a student what their opinion is of a certain experimental method in chemistry before they learn some chemistry.
That analogy is totally misguided. A student might have thought very glancingly about chemistry before they arrived at college. But when it comes to questions like, What is it to be happy? How should we understand our lives? What is it to be a good friend? Those are things that teenagers, especially, have spent a ton of time thinking about.
If you treat them as if they’ve never thought about this before, or all the thoughts they previously had are without value and they need to start from scratch, I think that’s one reason why students tend to not like their first philosophy courses. They’re predicated on something that’s just not true.
Can college do a better job of focusing on the big questions?
We do our students a disservice when we think their moral outlook is something they have to quietly make up their mind about on their own, without feeling like they’re in conversation with each other or with all these great ideas from the past.
There’s a certain reluctance on some college campuses to put the question directly to the student, like, What will it take for you to be happy? You can imagine folks getting nervous if a student says, I don’t think I can be happy. Which is a legitimate philosophical answer.
If we’re going to teach the humanities, that’s what the humanities is about. It’s asking those questions and wrestling with the answers and letting reason take us to unexpected places.
You might be able to avoid it for little periods of time, but eventually you’re going to be the person who has to make the big decision that has the moral consequences. You’re going to be the person who has to deal with a tragedy in your family, where questions about your outlook on life become salient. We want you to know that you can do that with help. One of the big upshots of philosophy is that you don’t have to face these big questions on your own.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Beth McMurtrie writes about technology’s influence on teaching and the future of learning. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
