About
Rebecca Goldstein answers questions on her new book, The Mattering Instinct. This can be used for book clubs and readers groups.
The Mattering Instinct not only offers a new framework for understanding yourself and others that can yield practical insights. It also offers a way of understanding the most irresolvable divides that separate us, which are ripping our society apart.
Question: You’re both a professor of philosophy and a novelist. Do you ever feel these two disciplines are at odds with each other?
RNG: I did very much feel that way when I first began writing novels—as did my philosophical colleagues. Many of them seemed to regard me as having lost a fair number of IQ points when I published a novel. Of course, there are philosophers who also write novels, like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus. But unlike them, who were existentialists, I was trained in analytic philosophy, which highly values rigor and precision. Analytic philosophy tries to keep itself as far away as possible from the messiness of human life. But the messiness of human life is, one way or another, whether tragic or comic, the very stuff of novels.
Question: And yet you’ve said that your best philosophical ideas came to you by way of your work as a novelist. I’m speaking here particularly about the ideas in The Mattering Instinct.
RNG: Yes. I first began to think about mattering while writing my first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, published in 1983. It was because I was trying to make sense of the characters in that novel, how each of them longed to matter and how their unexamined longing blighted their understanding of both themselves and one another. In fact, I even had one of my fictional characters formulate the idea of the mattering map, which is central in The Mattering Instinct. But it took me a long while to see that these ideas about mattering weren’t only useful in psychology—which has largely ignored motivation these last few decades and concentrated almost exclusively on cognition—but also in sociology, political theory, and philosophy. The longing to matter is the crux of human motivation. It transforms us into the value-seeking creatures that we are. And seeing this crux offers a new way of approaching the most salient problem of our own fraught and fractious time—which is: How do we manage to civilly live together without either pretending that we are all fundamentally the same or else wanting to throttle one another?
Question: What would you like readers to take away from the book?
RNG: I offer a new framework for understanding ourselves and others, especially useful for trying to understand those whom we may find most baffling and even appalling. I intersperse the theory with many stories to illustrate the points being made. One involves a former skinhead neo-Nazi with whom I bonded over discussions of mattering. The language I had been developing allowed us to quickly find our way to deep understanding. He is now a friend. How to find our way to seeing our commonality with people with whom we deeply disagree is one of the messages I hope people carry away from this book. I try to combine the outlooks of both the analytic philosopher and the novelist—providing some clarity about our lives while also remaining true to the messiness.
Question: If you’ve been thinking about these questions for so long, working them out into a far-reaching theory, why has it taken you all this time—from 1983!—to publish a book about them?
RNG: Maybe because it did develop, over the years, into such a far-reaching theory. It seemed too large, too daunting. I have a general suspicion of large theories—most especially if they’re my own. So I aired them in public for a long time, searching out criticisms, pushback. In fact, I spoke so much about these ideas that other people began writing about them, but with oversimplifications and distortions. So I thought perhaps I’d better write my own book. But more than anything what pushed me into writing was observing the ill will of our times, the way we are turning on one another, transforming the territories of the mattering map into mutually hostile camps. The crisis of our times is the crisis of mattering.
Question: Is there some philosophical saying that you most identify with?
RNG: Yes. It comes from Baruch Spinoza. “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”
The Mattering Instinct is available now for pre-order.
Rebecca Goldstein is represented by the Random House Speaker’s Bureau and by Wolfman Productions
You can see Rebecca’s official bio here >
Education
Ph.D., Princeton University, philosophy, 1977
Dissertation Title: “Reduction, Realism and the Mind”
Dissertation advisor: Thomas Nagel
B.A., Summa Cum Laude, Barnard College, Columbia University, 1972
Awards
- National Medal of the Humanities, awarded by President Obama, 2015
- Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Yale Univeristy, 2012
- Freedom From Religion Foundation, Freethought Heroine, 2011
- Humanist of the Year, American Humanist Association, 2011
- Humanist Laureate, International Academy of Humanism, 2008- .
- Honorary Doctorate, Emerson College, 2008.
- Guggenheim Fellow, 2006-2007
- Radcliffe Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 2006-2007
- Koret International Book Award in Jewish Thought (“Betraying Spinoza”), 2006
- Willard O. Eddy Lecture Award in Contemporary Philosophy, Colorado State University, 2006
- Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2005
- MacArthur Foundation Fellow, 1996-2001. Citation:
- Best Books of 2005 (“Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel”): Discover, Chicago Tribune, New York Sun
- Bunting Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 2001 (declined)
- Honorary Doctorate, Spertus Institute, Chicago, Ill, 2000
- Honors in Fiction, Massachusetts Book Awards (“Properties of Light”), 2001
- 100 Great 20th Century Works of Fiction by Women (“The Mind-Body Problem”), Feminista: The Journal of Feminist Construction, 2000
- Bogliasco Foundation Fellow, 1998
- Prairie Schooner Award for Best Short Story of 1997, University of Nebraska Press
- Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Mazel, University of Hartford, 1996
- National Jewish Book Award for Mazel, 1995
- National Jewish Book Honor Award for Strange Attractors, 1994
- Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award, for The Dark Sister, 1993-94
- American Council for Learned Societies Fellowship, 1984
- Whiting Foundation Fellowship Award, philosophy, 1975-76
- National Science Foundation Fellowship Award for philosophy of science, 1972-75
- Montague Prize for excellence in philosophy, Barnard College, 1972
Employment
- Professor of Philosophy, New College of the Humanities, London, U.K. 2012-
- Research Associate, Harvard University, 2007-
- New York University, Visiting Professor in Departments of Philosophy and English, 2016-18
- Montgomery Fellow, Dartmouth College, Autumn 2013
- Franke Visiting Fellow, Whitney Humanities Center,Yale University, Autumn 2012
- Miller Scholar, Santa Fe Institute, Autumn 2011
- Research Associate, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 2007- .
- Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Trinity College, Hartford CT, 2001-2006
- Scholar in Residence, Brandeis University, 1999-2000
- Professor of Creative Writing, MFA Program, Columbia University, 1993-1996
- Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Honors Program, Rutgers University, 1988-1990
- Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Barnard College, 1976-86
Books (nonfiction)
Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away (Pantheon, 2014) Published in the UK (Atlantic Grove, 2014) Translations into fourteen languages
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (Nextbooks/Schocken, 2006).
Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (Atlas Books/Norton, 2005). Translated into twelve languages
Books (fiction)
Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (Pantheon, 2010). Published in the UK by Atlantic Grove; translated into 16 languages.
Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics (Houghton Mifflin, 2000). Translated into German.
Mazel (Viking, 1995, reissued by The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). Translated into German.
Strange Attractors: Stories (Viking, 1993, Penguin, 1994). Translated into Italian.
The Dark Sister (Viking, 1993, reissued by the University of Wisconsin Press, 2004)
The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989)
The Mind-Body Problem (Random House, 1983; Dell, 1984; reissued by Penguin, 1994). Translated into German.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York, where her father, an immigrant from Ukraine, was a cantor. Her family was Orthodox Jewish. She graduated from an all-girls high school whose primary concern was to prepare girls for a life of Orthodox marriage and motherhood. By her senior year she was regularly playing hooky, mostly going to libraries to try to get herself some semblance of an education.
She married the future physicist, Sheldon Goldstein, when she was nineteen and, since her husband was pursuing his graduate studies at Caltech, spent her sophomore year of college at UCLA. After that year, both she and her husband returned to New York City, he to continue his graduate studies at Yeshiva University and she to continue her undergraduate studies at Barnard College. She graduated summa cum laude and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy, with a concentrate in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. She was supported by a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship.
After earning her Ph.D. she returned to her alma mater, where she taught courses in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of mathematics. She also decided to fill in her gaps in the history of philosophy, volunteering to teach a course on the 17th century rationalists. Her aim had been to study Leibniz more closely, but to her surprise, it was the rationalist Spinoza who most fascinated her, challenging her analytic bias against metaphysics. Eventually, Spinoza’s magnum opus, the Ethics, became her favorite text to teach, expanding into a semester-length course.
It was sometime during her tenure at Barnard that, again to her own surprise, she used her first summer vacation to write her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem. It went on to become a critical and popular success. Writing the novel changed her relationship with academic philosophy.
More novels followed: The Dark Sister, which received the Whiting Writer’s Award and Mazel, which received the 1995 National Jewish Book Award and the 1995 Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Her book of short stories, Strange Attractors, received a National Jewish Book Honor Award.
She had become increasingly interested not only in the arguments that philosophers construct, but also in the person behind the arguments, and, in particular, the individually variable core intuitions brought to bear in philosophical thinking. Her thesis was that, philosophical convictions being under-determined by both a priori reason and empirical evidence the vacuum is filled by intellectual temperament, varying from one thinker to the next, expressive of their entire orientation toward reality (including orientations that reject any notion of reality). This new focus shaped the next two of her books, both of which are non-fiction.
The first is Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, part of a series (W.W. Norton) devoted to great scientific discoveries. The book examines Gödel’s unique mathematical theorems in the context of his deep philosophical commitment to mathematical Platonism. It received feature articles in The New Yorker and The New York Times, numerous favorable reviews, and was named one of the best books of the year by Discover magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Sun.
Her next book, part of a series on great Jewish thinkers and themes (Schocken), was Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us Modernity, which examined the radical thinker’s views in the context of his experience brought up among Sephardi Jews during the time of the Iberian Inquisition. Her thesis is that Spinoza employed Cartesian rationalism to resolve the problem of Jewish history and, by thinking his way outside of religious responses to personal identity, succeeded in seeding the European Enlightenment. The book won the 2006 Koret International Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought.
Following these two works of non-fiction, she wrote two more novels. Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics, weaves a Gothic plot around the Byzantine complexities of quantum mechanics. At its core are two problems in philosophy of science that have long interested her: the problem of interpreting quantum mechanics and the problem of reconciling quantum mechanics with relativity theory. Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, is inspired by the culture wars between religionists and secular humanists. The book has an appendix, supposedly written by her main character, which formally sets forth thirty-six arguments for the existence of God together with an analysis of their fallacies. Christopher Hitchens confessed to her that he was using the appendix as his cheat sheet in his debates with theologians. The book was named the best fiction book of the year by The Christian Science Monitor and among the top ten novels of that year by The Washington Post.
Plato at The Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, her next book, alternates between expository chapters, which attempt to place Plato in the context of the extraordinary cultural explosion of ancient Athens, and modern-day dialogues, which feature Plato himself engaging with the issues of the 21st century. (Plato, of course, wrote in dialogue form.) The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, and the book was the subject of feature articles in, among others,The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Times Higher Education Supplement, Prospect, the Wall Street Journal, and Atlantic, with, once again, The Washington Post citing it as one of the best books of the year.
Her latest book is The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. She had been gestating its ideas ever since The Mind-Body Problem, when she first introduced the idea of the mattering map in her effort to understand the sadness of her main character. The Mattering Instinct is influenced by Spinoza’s own attempt in the Ethics to firmly ground an objective ethics on secular grounds that we can all accept, no matter our theological beliefs, or lack thereof.
In 1996 Goldstein became a MacArthur Fellow, receiving the prize which is popularly known as the “Genius Award.” In awarding her the prize, the MacArthur Foundation described her work in the following words:
Rebecca Goldstein is a writer whose novels and short stories dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of imaginative storytelling. Her books tell a compelling story as they describe with wit, compassion and originality the interaction of mind and heart. In her fiction her characters confront problems of faith: religious faith and faith in an ability to comprehend the mysteries of the physical world as complementary to moral and emotional states of being. Goldstein’s writings emerge as brilliant arguments for the belief that fiction in our time may be the best vehicle for involving readers in questions of morality and existence.
In 2005 she was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship. In 2008, she was designated a Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Emerson College, where she gave the commencement address. Goldstein has been designated Humanist of the Year 2011 by the American Humanist Association, and Freethought Heroine 2011 by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. In that year she also delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University, entitled “”The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature,” which was published by University of Utah Press.
In September of 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in a ceremony at the White House. The citation reads “for bringing philosophy into conversation with culture. In scholarship, Dr. Goldstein has elucidated the ideas of Spinoza and Gödel, while in fiction, she deploys wit and drama to help us understand the great human conflict between thought and feeling.”
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an award-winning philosopher, writer, and public intellectual. She is the author of ten books of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction, including 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.
She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University and has taught at Yale, Columbia, NYU, Dartmouth, and Harvard. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, her work has been supported by the MacArthur “Genius” grant and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Whiting Institute, Radcliffe Institute, Council of Learned Societies, and the National Science Foundation. In 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama. She lives in Boston and in Truro, Massachusetts.