News
“Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a MacArthur Genius Award recipient, philosopher, novelist, and author of The Mattering Instinct. Her verdict on why human beings are driven to matter — and what threatens that drive — might change how you think about your own life.
In this conversation, we discuss why every human being is haunted by the need to matter, the four types of people and how each one tries to satisfy that longing, why Ludwig Boltzmann’s tragic death is a thermodynamic story, how depression maps onto entropy, whether AI can ever have a mattering instinct, and why heroic strivers are the most threatened by artificial intelligence. We also get into what Freud got wrong about what women want, the physics of matter versus the philosophy of mattering, and why the second law of thermodynamics may be the most personal law in all of science.”
The philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s latest book looks beyond happinessas the goal of a well-lived life.
By John Kaag.
“Philosophers are generally expected to display wisdom and calm in the face ofexistential questions. I am just not one of those philosophers. I spent 30 years racingaway from these thoughts by running and swimming obsessively, pretending that Ihad no physical limits. Certain evasions are bound to fail: At 40, I suffered a cardiac arrest after an ill-advised treadmill workout. The sheer physicality of the event—the stopped heart, the failing body, the onerous recovery—threw into sharp relief aquestion that had always lurked beneath the surface: Does my life have a purpose? Or, put another way, how can I justify my existence? This dilemma gnaws at us in times of crisis and whispers to us in quiet moments of self-reflection. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book, The Mattering Instinct, helped me understand this feeling, tosee it not as a personal quirk or a philosophical indulgence but as a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human…
…The Mattering Instinct is a testament to the idea that humans find purpose when, as the poet Rumi wrote, we “let the beauty we love be what we do.” In a world fractured by competing claims on what’s important, Goldstein offers a vision that is both intellectually resonant and humane, reminding us that the struggle to justify our existence is the very thing that makes our existence matter.”
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
On January 26th at the University of Toronto 1500 people packed into Convocation Hall to watch a fascinating dialogue on the meaning of life featuring philosopher William Lane Craig, psychology professor Dr. Jordan Peterson, and philosopher and author Dr. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (moderated by journalist Karen Stiller).
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in White Plains, New York, which is a fairly affluent suburb slightly north of New York City. I grew up in the fifties, a time of frenzied conformity, following the disruptions of WWII, and White Plains was as conformist as it gets.
Religious household?
My family was an anomaly in White Plains, since we were (1) Orthodox Jews and (2) decidedly not affluent. We lived in this little section, carved into the commercial downtown, some three-square blocks which were demographically different from the rest of White Plains. It was populated mostly by immigrant families from Sicily, and their kids were my neighborhood friends. But in school it was different. Because of the districting I went to a school that was almost solidly well-heeled WASP.
What was your family like?
My father had come from Poland—well, it was Poland when he lived there but it’s now the Ukraine. His father had been the rabbi in their little village. My father’s getting out of Poland in time—most of his immediate family did, except for one married sister and her children, my first cousins, all killed by the Nazis—formed the backdrop of my life. I think the strongest emotion of my childhood was wanting to protect my father, who was the most extraordinarily gentle person. He came from another world and never really adjusted to American values. He’d been ordained as a rabbi but never practiced as one. Instead he became a cantor. He lacked the confidence to be an American rabbi, which was something so different from being a rabbi in a little village in Poland. He fell back on his beautiful voice to support his family, although pretty meagerly, especially in the context of the wealthy community where we ended up living. He also prepared boys all over Westchester County for their bar mitzvahs, especially difficult cases, kids with all kinds of cognitive and emotional problems. He was a master teacher; his gentleness had a magical effect. But he didn’t charge families for the lessons. You see what I mean when I say that he never really adjusted to American values. Sometimes people would pay my father as they saw fit for the year or more that he had put into preparing their sons, but often they didn’t. I remember my mother, who was American-born, getting furious when some families didn’t pay him anything. I remember one occasion when she exploded when one such family, “from Scarsdale yet!” whose child had presented particular problems, gave my father a gift of three fancy clothes hangers. She hurled them into the trash, which was a gesture whose drama I admired, though I also thought it was a shame. They were very pretty hangers.
REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN, philosopher and author of “Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction” (2010) and “PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPLEX: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away” (2014), talks about the role of her older cousins in her childhood, and the reason she became a philosopher. From House of SpeakEasy’s “Seriously Entertaining, “June 2015.