What Is the Good Life?

The Permanent Questions With David Brooks

In the debut episode of 'The Permanent Questions,' David Brooks sits down with philosopher Meghan Sullivan to explore the fundamental question: How

Key takeaways

• A meaningful life requires more than intellectual knowledge—it demands active cultivation of virtue and character.
• Philosophy should not be confined to abstract theory; it must guide daily living and ethical decision-making.

Main topics

• The nature of the good life
• Philosophy as a guide to living

Notable quotes

"If you don't have a really tight, really well-argued position, you're going to get a bad grade in this class." – Megan Sullivan on her first philosophy assignment

Conclusion

The episode establishes 'The Permanent Questions' as a vital space for exploring timeless moral and

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Hi, I'm David Brooks. If you're listening to or watching this, you've stumbled across the first episode of a new podcast called The Permanent Questions. The idea of the podcast is that there are a lot of shows about politics and business and health and tech, but Speaker 1 (0:16) there aren't Speaker 3 (0:16) enough about the really big questions of life. How do you find your purpose? How do you confront death? How do you save a relationship that's going through a rough patch? How do you build a just society? Now, you may be asking yourself, how the hell did a political pundit get into these deep waters? When I was 18, an incredibly lucky thing happened to me. The admissions officers at Columbia University, Wesleyan, and Brown decided I should go to the University of Chicago. I didn't know anything about Chicago. I never visited. I never knew anybody who went there. But it was the only school I got into. It turned out to be the perfect school for me. My favorite joke about Chicago, it's a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students St. Thomas Aquinas. And I fit right in. There's a saying, if you catch fire with enthusiasm, people will come for miles to watch you burn. My professors had caught fire with enthusiasm. Those teachers were filled with a certain conviction. The conviction was if you read important books, had important conversations, and addressed big questions, you would have the keys to the kingdom. They gave us new things to love, new ideas, new heroes, new activities, new subjects. They tried to teach us how to see, not only to see with your preconceptions and the things you think you see, but to see with the clarity of a Tolstoy, the moral depth of George Eliot, the empathetic outrage of James Baldwin. Mostly, they introduced us to the great conversation. The great conversation is a tradition of debate that goes back for thousands of years. It's a collective attempt to find a workable balance between the inevitable tensions of life. The tension between autonomy and belonging, between freedom and order, between diversity and cohesion, safety and exploration, tenderness and strength, intellect and passion. The great conversation never ends because there is no permanent solution to these tensions, just a temporary resting spot that works in this or that circumstance. I never wanted to leave the great conversation, and I never have. I went off and became a journalist and a political pundit. And that was a worthwhile thing to do, and I still do it. A lot of the big questions in life are political questions. Who should lead us? What does a just society even look like? But none of my six books are about politics. They're about the kind of questions my teachers asked me back in Chicago. How do you educate your emotions? How do you survive a setback? As my career has gone on, I came to the conclusion that we as a society are over-politicized and under-moralized. That is to say, we pay attention to every little political scandal, but many people have been given no instruction on the basic questions of how to live, of how they should find their calling, what they should really want. And over the last 15 years or so, this sensation has taken a deeper urgency. Like a lot of countries, America seems to be going through some sort of spiritual, relational, and social, and maybe moral crisis. You know all the stats. Rising loneliness, rising despair, rising distrust, rising polarization. We're living through a period of great technological advance, but we're losing our humanistic core. Because of technological improvements and social deterioration, our lives are objectively better, but subjectively worse. The elements of civilization that lift the spirit and nurture the affections are playing a smaller and smaller role in our national life. Religion, literature, art, theology, history, philosophy, friendship, even conversation. In previous periods of technological advance, there was a humanistic counter-reaction. The humanists said, okay, bring us your science. Bring us your machines. Bring us your efficiency. Bring us your technology. That's fine. But don't turn us into machines ourselves. And the humanists made an aggressive counterpush to say, we will preserve our humanistic core. We will preserve what is essentially human. This podcast is an attempt to be a small part of that kind of humanistic reaction. We asked Megan Sullivan to be the first guest on the show because she's the kind of great teacher I'm talking about. Megan teaches one of the most beloved courses at Notre Dame University, which is called God and the Good Life. She's won Notre Dame's Joyce Award for Excellence in Teaching, and as you'll see, she's got a dynamic personality. She co-authored a book based on the course called The Good Life Method, Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. Megan doesn't just do education. providing students with facts they can regurgitate on the test. Megan does formation. She helps students become better versions of themselves. And so it's a great pleasure to welcome Megan Sullivan to this table. Speaker 3 (5:10) Welcome, Megan Sullivan. You are the first guest on The Permanent Questions. You are the founding figure of our podcast, so thank you for being here. Speaker 2 (5:19) Heavy is the crown. This is a tremendous responsibility, David. I Speaker 3 (5:23) know. All future guests will be measured by your exemplary example. Exactly. Speaker 2 (5:26) I'm hopefully going to create a large ceiling for this podcast. Speaker 3 (5:31) So you grew up in North Carolina, and I assume you had a moderately normal childhood, and then you became a philosopher. So how the hell did that happen? Speaker 2 (5:42) I did not grow up in an academic family. My mom was a receptionist in a dental office. And my dad, my dad worked a bunch of different jobs. But for most of high school, he worked at this company called Replacements. They basically replaced like broken plates. My dad was in the plate replacement business. My mom was in the dental billing business. So that, you know, was not particularly academic background, but, you know, very, very loving. And if you had a... told me when I was a high school student that I would end up a philosophy professor, I would have asked you to throw me off a bridge. Most of my students have never met a professional philosopher before they take my class. But in high school, actually, one of my best friends, her dad was a philosophy professor at our local university. And we were very, very judgy, snotty teenage girls. And we devoted... probably two years of high school to thinking, we cannot understand this guy's job. So in high school, I had a well-considered, extremely negative opinion of the profession of philosophy that was based on, you know, nothing but... vibes about my friend's dad's books. I got a scholarship and went to the University of Virginia. So this big public school where, you know, as you're a freshman, you're just sort of fed into the meat grinder. You just get whatever classes are left over after all of the big kids register for their classes. And my academic advisor was talking to me and I was so stressed because I couldn't get any of the pre-law classes that I desperately wanted or econ classes. And he's like, I think that you would really love this ethics class. called Issues of Life and Death in the philosophy department. It's really debatey, and I just think given your background, you're going to have a blast in there. So I was like, okay, fine, philosophy. And I enrolled in that class, and I was hooked by the second week. The exact moment, I remember this really vividly. I was sitting in Alderman Library in the library at UVA, and we'd just gotten our first assignment for all of our classes, our first writing assignment. I was writing all these boring book reports for my other classes. In issues of life and death, the question we were assigned is, should you end your life? And I remember talking to the TA being like, do you want me to write about what David Hume says about suicide? He's like, absolutely not. I want the strongest possible argument about whether you should continue living. And I was like, are you allowed to ask me that? Like, is that allowed? And he's like, not only is it allowed, but there are better and worse answers. And if you don't have a really tight, really well-argued position, you're going to get a bad grade in this class. And I just remember sitting in the library, the kind of blinking cursor on Microsoft Word staring at me thinking, ah, we're firing live ammunition here. Like, this is real. And that Just totally got me hooked. Speaker 3 (8:31) Now, a lot of philosophers write abstruse academic articles with a lot of like notations and numbers and diagrams. You actually teach this class and you've written this book on how to live. Why'd you become that kind of philosopher? Speaker 2 (8:43) I had an epiphany my third year at Notre Dame. I was getting ready to go up for tenure and I'd been teaching our big intro philosophy class. And when you go through the tenure process, at first you're only focused on keeping your job. And then you start to hit a point where you imagine a future where you're just a professor and you're not worried about getting fired all the time. And I was in that kind of mindset of thinking, what do I want to do with the rest of my career after I hopefully survive this tenure vote? And I felt very, very strongly that I wanted to focus the next chapter on my teaching, like that that's what really I loved about my job. And I'd been teaching Aristotle. We teach, we teach, we inflict Aristotle on every single freshman at the University of Notre Dame. And Aristotle has this line in the second chapter of his book about the good life that I've always loved and I always assigned students to write essays about. He says, we conduct this examination not so that we can know what virtue is, but so that we might be good. Like we do all this not so we can know what dead people said about. virtue and philosophy, but so that we can become happier people. Otherwise, there's no benefit of it, he says. This whole enterprise is pointless if it doesn't find some way to make us better. Speaker 3 (10:04) Now, you're in the business of helping people become, as you said, happy and good. And this podcast is in the same business. I'm joining your team. Speaker 2 (10:11) Yeah, all right. Speaker 3 (10:12) And so as we enter this conversation, I thought I'd... raise some objections to the life we have chosen. Bring Speaker 2 (10:19) it. Objections are the love language of philosophy. Speaker 3 (10:22) So the first one is like, why is this necessary? Like I get up in the morning, I have my frappuccino, I surf my media feed, I go to work, which is good, I like my work, and I go home and I watch Netflix. Why should I read a bunch of complicated books and have hard conversations? Speaker 2 (10:38) So one assumption I think we should challenge. is that there are some people who do philosophy, like a small number of people, like my friend's dad, and then everybody else doesn't do philosophy. That's like saying there are some people who exercise and everybody else doesn't exercise. I get why you'd make that assumption if you think that exercise or philosophy is this really, really narrow prescribed activity. But that's just not true. My doctor would be the first person to tell you, you use your body every single day. It's just some people exercise well and train, and other people are potatoes like me, which is why my doctor brings this up all the time. It's the same with philosophy. If we think about philosophy in the ancient tradition, like Socrates' tradition, philosophy is caring for your soul. Speaker 2 (11:27) And everybody has to do this. It's just a question about whether or not you're going to do it well or you're going to do it in a really immature way. You could do better or worse at reasoning through these soul questions that are going to slap you in the face. Like if you don't use your philosophical muscle, then you're going to find it pretty atrophied at these junctures in life when you really need it. Speaker 3 (11:49) Let me know what you think of my answer. My answer would be we live in a dangerous world, a spiritually dangerous world, that you graduate and you enter modern America, modern society, and there are a couple temptations. The first is you're going to lead an aesthetic life. I think Kierkegaard came up with this. And an aesthetic life is like you have some happy, pleasant experiences, and you treat all of life as how can I have more pleasant experiences? And you treat your life sort of as a consumer. And that strikes me as a shallow way to live and not a sturdy way to live because you don't have the substance to survive the hard times. The second is, and I see this in a lot of my students, you become an insecure overachiever. You don't know what your purpose is. You don't know what the foundation of your life is. So you think you can make your life better by building a series of successive stories on top of a foundation made of sand. And eventually that comes crashing down. And third, like Iris Murdoch, who's this novelist and philosopher. She said, the purpose of life is to become more virtuous. Like, that's the whole deal. And so to me, it's almost a way to resist the temptations of the world. Speaker 2 (12:52) I love Iris Murdoch. This is like a deep cut probably for a lot of folks. They don't know that she's one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. But one of the things I love about Murdoch is you read her essays, which can be pretty dense. Like I wouldn't jump in in the deep end in her philosophical essays, but she always has these examples that strike me as very true to life. And one of her examples is she comes out of a faculty meeting and she realizes she just really despises her colleague who's just irritating. And she can't quite put her finger on what she doesn't like about this woman. but she just doesn't like her. And she's sitting in her office and she's stewing and it's starting to ruin her day. And then she realizes, she has this moment of realization that she can reconsider this person. Like she has free will. Like she can sit there and just ask herself to look again or imagine this person again. And that she's not just like a victim of her prejudices or situation, but in fact, she's able to work on her inner life just as much as she's able to work on her career. And, you know, it's hard, but reading examples like that, I think, you know, she practiced what she preached. Like she really strived. Speaker 3 (13:57) She read one book that I could understand, which is called The Sovereignty of Good, I think it was called. And it's short and it's very clear. And the thing I loved about it is that she was a devotee of Simone Weil, the French mystic from World War II era, basically. And Weil once said, attention is the ultimate form of generosity. And Iris Murdoch builds on that. And she says, you think morality is mostly about what you do, but a lot of it is just how you attend to people. And she said, sort of as the story you said, you should cast a just and loving attention on people. And Speaker 2 (14:29) I Speaker 3 (14:29) like that because it's loving, but it's also just. Speaker 2 (14:32) You know who also does this? This is always so surprising, and I point this out to my students. Everybody thinks that the Stoics are like these hard, emotionless robots, like the ancient Roman philosophers. But if you read Marcus Aurelius, who was the emperor of Rome and who killed like scores of barbarians, was like a hardcore general. You read his meditations and the opening chapter of it is just a long list of all of the specific people he loves and what they have meant to him in his life. Before he gets into