The Good Life

Santa Clara professors weigh in on what the concept means to them and offer advice on how to find the Good Life yourself

“The Good Life” is one of philosophy’s most widely known, pondered and debated notions. It’s in the name–what does it mean to live a good life? Is it one that is in accordance with virtue, one that is marked by good health or one that is filled with pleasure? Does it take place within the individual or within society?

We asked Santa Clara’s philosophy professors for their interpretations of the concept. In their responses, you’ll find a variety of theories, thinkers and practices that each finds meaningful in their idea of what constitutes the good life, and how they apply that to their own ways of living. 

We hope that through their wisdom and knowledge, you’ll be able to take away something meaningful in your own search for the good life. 

There is this good that transcends everything that we see, touch, hear. There are ways of trying to attain it, to unify with it, and there are some ways that are better than others. If we try to do it in the ways that we can see others who are on the path towards “the good” doing, then we might ourselves get to it. 

Following Confucians, one way in which we can detect that is through the admiration, especially for moral exemplars. Admiration is not an infallible guide and so it has to be reflected admiration–we have to think it through with respect to other people that we regard as exemplars. 

Why is it the same folks keep cropping back up? Why does the Buddha keep cropping back up? Why does Jesus keep cropping back up? Because they live certain kind of lives and seem to have certain kind of practices–many of which overlap. 

Do you think that if we were self-interested and selfish individuals, as some people have said, that we would practice self-sacrifice? And yet, many cultures have tend to have this notion of self-sacrifice. That's one example. Compassion, humility and generosity are others. We can start to inductively infer what kind of character traits and practices are conducive for living such a life, and then we can start doing that ourselves. 

The best way for students to find the good life is to ask questions, and then start learning how to ask better questions. And then get better at it. Ask questions to people who have been reflective and thoughtful about a lot of these matters. You might realize that some of your questions were poor ones or ill-formed ones, and that's okay. 

Be inquisitive, cultivate intellectual curiosity, have the desire to know. Read widely. Read authors who are very different from you. Question many of your own assumptions. 

— Eric Yang, Associate Professor 

I think pretty much what Aristotle thinks about the good life, that you need a central activity in your life that you can pursue as an end in itself, and that has a significant place in your life. If you perform it well, it'll be satisfying, and that's happiness. 

For Aristotle, happiness doesn't mean pleasures or wealth. It seems to me most people around today don't don't understand what happiness is, and if they understood it correctly, they might even decide they're happier than they thought they were. It's not that these external goods are nothing, but happiness is pursuing this activity. I think they’re just different words for the same thing, the good life and the happy life. 

My central activity is philosophy: writing philosophy, reading philosophy, teaching philosophy, talking philosophy. So I think I have a good life, a happy life. 

I think I'm lucky. I research, I teach. Everything that I've ever written started in the classroom. And then after I've written it, I take it back into the classroom and enrich it. I’m involved in all sorts of philosophy faculty discussion groups. It's just a whole series of activities that reinforce each other and feed off each other. 

When I talk about the good life in class, I think it resonates, but, you know, it's got to grab you. It can't be imposed from outside. Students have to see it themselves, get attracted to it themselves. 

You have to find what interests you. I suspect most people run into problems when they are aware of the kinds of activities that interest them, but they're interested in wealth or money or a good job. They live in a world that tells them that the wealth and the good job is what’s important, and this other thing, well, that's just a hobby. It seems to me that students ought to think about those activities that they really enjoy and think about how they might build a life around them.

— Philip J. Kain, Professor 

I conceive of the good life as a life where all black people globally are unencumbered by race-based oppression. Conceiving of myself as a part of a collective enlists me in this justice struggle, one that is not necessarily chosen, but one that is important regardless. 

Many of the challenges that we face are systemic. Perhaps realizing that our capacities for bringing about the good life are limited is a start, because we can realize that it will take more than just the individual. 

One thing to do is try as best as we can to dissolve the ego, to let go of strong attachments to this concept of an individual self so that we can begin to conceive of ourselves as a collective self. 

I think that Santa Clara students can actively seek out student groups, events, faculty members and other university resources that come from experiences that are drastically different from their own. In attending those events, talking to those professors, talking to one's peers, we can begin to deconstruct these boundaries that we put up around our individual selves and work towards conceiving of that collective self. 

When I think about having this collective oppression lifted, that seems to be the first kind of world where justice could possibly be achieved. So it satisfies the preconditions for a world where good lives can be led. 

We often hear that you can get more things done collectively than you can alone. For me, at least, in an anti-black world, the efforts of the individual have to be supported and upheld by others in order to make any sort of significant or real impact. 

I have a community of folks who exist with me in solidarity in the fight and the struggle. How effective our efforts are or will be is truly yet yet to be determined, but they are helping me resist oppression, and I do think that helps me lead the good life. It definitely helps, having support, so that you don't feel alone and isolated. 

— Justin Clardy, Assistant Professor

I think that there are definite guidelines and parameters about what constitutes a good life. I don't think that the good life is just in the eye of the beholder; I'm certainly with the Aristotelian tradition in holding that there are certain features of a good life that need to be present and that people can quite mistakenly think they're leading a good life when in fact they aren't. Having said that, I think there's a great deal that depends upon the individual. The details of the good life for you may not match the details of the good life for me, but there’s going to be parameters. 

I think Aristotle is right in that you have to have certain material adequacies. I don't think that abject poverty is consistent with the good life. If you're going to have a good life, there has to be adequate material conditions to enable you to flourish physically and to cultivate emotional stability. 

You have to try to cultivate virtue, such things as courage and living in regard for others. The good life is also going to be a life in which you have self-regard–but you shouldn't excessively privilege the self. It’s a life that is intimately connected with moral decency and character development. Without moral decency and character development, I don't think that one can legitimately lead a good life. I think that the moral character developmental dimension is really very important for everybody, not least of which is the college age group. 

A good life is more than just about serving yourself. I'm not that big; there are other things bigger than me. Truth is one of them, the welfare of humanity another. My career has been spent in the pursuit of the truth, which I stumble upon every once in a while, and doing something for people beyond me. 

— Christopher B. Kulp, Professor 

I study Ancient Greek philosophy, so I’m very sympathetic to the view that a good life, or eudaimonia, is a life of virtue. My specific take on the life of virtue is that it has to be lived within roles and institutions. 

This is something you see in the Stoics. Virtue has to be practiced within the society that you're a part of, it's not just this abstract activity. You have certain roles that you have to take on that give you certain obligations and duties, and you have to try to work out how to fulfill those obligations and duties in a way that's virtuous and with a conception of the ideal.

Some of that is stuff that's given to you by tradition or by society or custom. But then the question is how do you integrate that into a conception of virtue as a whole? My view of virtue is really not intellectual, it's a matter of practice. 

If I’m going to live a good life, I’m not going to invent a good life. You're not going to stumble upon a new view of how to live a good life, because humans have been stumbling around trying to live wisely for thousands of years. The history of philosophy is a collection of reflections on those things, and that's why it's worth studying philosophers of the past. 

The Stoics believe that virtue starts from within, and you have to orient your soul in order to live the virtuous life. This implies that you can't really do that without living in the world and engaging with the world, and you're not going to fix your soul if you hesitate to go out and live.

— Tristan Rogers, Academic Year Adjunct Lecturer

The first thing that comes to mind when we say the good life is the word ‘the.’ That doesn't get off the ground for me because it implies a single one. There's going to be a lot of different good lives and it's not going to be up to me to say, well, this is one and that’s not one. They might have things in common, like happiness or fulfillment, or an ability to overcome challenges. 

Then the other roadblock is society. I think to some extent the university tends to tell us things about the good life that a lot of us internalize and don't even realize it. Society tells us the good life is about stuff like a high paying job, the cologne you wear or if you have a nice chain. 

Not only is there going to be not just one ‘the good life’, but also it's going to probably be really pretty circumspect about what society tells us life is like. So I like to say good lives.

One thing you can do to make the good life practical is to sit down and think about what really, authentically brings you joy, happiness, fulfillment, contentment. 

A big thing for me–and the hard part is actually remembering to do it–is to stop and smell the roses, have just that instant to appreciate little things. My rule for myself is, the more I'm in a rush to get to somewhere, that's when I look at a palm tree, or smell a rose, or whatever. That's when it's most important. I get that from Zen, but other wisdom traditions will tell you stuff like that. 

Make it a habit to stop and appreciate the little things, even if it takes just a second.

— Robert Shanklin, Senior Lecturer

A good life is a meaningful life. I am pretty inclined towards a virtue ethics perspective in which a good life is also a life in which you are a good person. 

I don't think a happy life is feeling happy all the time. I can definitely find myself getting tricked into that mindset. Did I work out today? Oh, that makes me feel good. Did I do these things that make me feel good? I feel good. Am I leading a happy life if I feel good all my days? It can seem that way, but I don’t think that is how we should define a good life.

What I find myself directed towards is this meaningful bit, because I could have lots of days that are pleasant but still not have a meaningful life. There are things I do that necessitate not being pleased all the time. 

Teaching is an example of that. I think part of my good life is that I am part of a profession that I do as a calling. Because I care a lot about it, it's painful to me when it doesn't go the way I envision. I view this as meaningful work, but because I view it as meaningful, it's also uncomfortable. 

A new iteration of that for me is my experience with parenting. I do think I’ve been a little bit influenced by that Aristotelian dichotomy between a philosophical life and household tasks. In this framework, cleaning and feeding ourselves are lower level tasks. If we become too absorbed with them, we won’t leave room for cultivating and attending to higher order goods like philosophizing. 

Parts of this still make sense to me, we can get “busy” in a way that impedes a self-reflective life. However, when combined with sexism, such a dichotomy can support the view that parenting work is a “low level” good or unimportant. But a theologian recently illuminated for me that it is in the daily work of taking care of another human being that you start to realize that there is meaning in things that don't always feel big and meaningful. 

—Madeline Ahmed Cronin, Lecturer

Philosophers like to distinguish between a good life, a life lived well, and a happy life, a life full of positive feeling. It's important not to confuse one for the other. The truly lucky can have both, but even in times of sadness and struggle (like it is for many of us right now), we can live good lives. 

One metric I've adopted in my life is to ask myself whether I'd be willing to trade places with myself from five years ago or whether I prefer who I am today. So long as I keep thinking that the person I am now is the best version of myself then, even though I'm a work in progress, I think I'm on the right track. 

You can adjust the backward comparison to something like 2-3 years if you're in your 20s! Would you trade places with 18-year-old you?

 — Erick J. Ramirez, Associate Professor