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.

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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.”

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The Mattering Instinct is available now for pre-order.