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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, "The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us" (Liveright Publishing, 2026)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:11]
B
hello and welcome to the Van Leer Institute series on ideas. I'm Renee Garfinkel. We begin today's episode with a deceptively simple question, one that philosophers and psychologists tiptoe around and every human being eventually asks in private, do I matter? Our guest argues that this question is not a luxury asked only by those who are secure and privileged. On the contrary, she argues that do I matter is the hidden engine of human life. Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein is one of the rare thinkers who moves effortlessly between philosophy, literature, science, and public intellectual life. She's a philosopher, a novelist, and an elegant interpreter of ideas for a general audience. Her books include Plato at the Googolplex and Betraying Spinoza and many others. She spent decades exploring how reasonable meaning and human aspiration intersect not just in the abstract, but personally, psychologically, and culturally. In her new book, the Mattering How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, she proposes something bold that human beings are not satisfied merely with surviving or flourishing. We feel compelled to justify our own existence to ourselves. Humans long not only to live, but to feel that our lives are deserving of attention, that they objectively matter. This longing, Goldstein argues, explains everything from art and religion to politics, resentment, heroism, tribalism, even the crises of modern society. We are delighted to have her with us today, Rebecca Goldstein. William, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:04]
C
Oh, thank you so much. Pleasure to be here.
- [03:07]
B
And, Rebecca, you've said this theory began not in philosophy, but in fiction. Why do you think storytelling succeeded where formal philosophy initially didn't?
- [03:18]
C
You know, I've been puzzling most of my life over that, because when, as a very young and as yet untenured professor, this idea for a novel popped into my mind, I knew I was doing something dangerous because I had been trained in analytic philosophy and with a specialty in philosophy of math and philosophy of physics, and, you know, to. And that was. That was, and I regret to say, is still a rare job description for a woman in academia. And so to go ahead and write a novel which seemed, even to my eyes, a frivolous thing to do, you know, my husband at the time, tell me, are you kidding? This is the end of your career? But I couldn't help it. Here was this novel growing, a living thing growing inside of me, and I wrote it. And then I had been trained to think a certain way about philosophical questions. The word existential never crossed my lips. You know, this was not the kind of philosophy I did. The meaning of life was to say that in a room of the philosophers with whom I hung out was to get a laugh, you know, that those weren't the kind of things that we spoke about. I think what happened was writing this novel, I don't know why it grew up in me, but writing this novel and inhabiting a subjectivity which was not my own. The main character is somebody who's studying philosophy, but she's not doing analytic philosophy. She's doing those kinds of meaning of life questions. And she's kind of considered not serious because of that somehow escaping to that outsider. It was an outsider point of view in terms of, you know, the. The little world that I was occupying just freed me up to think in a way that I would not. I not only think, and I've done this time and time and again in fiction. I've tried out points of view that aren't my own, and I just find it really exciting and thrilling and a source of knowledge.
- [05:53]
B
So one could say that philosophers often search for truth and novelists for meaning. Which of your identities dominate?
- [06:04]
C
I think it is. I'm a philosopher, and I value. I love. I love fiction. And just because it gives me that feel of what would it be like to inhabit a different subjectivity, see the world entirely differently. I suffer from a weird form of claustrophobia, and I think that, in fact, being enclosed in my own point of view, feels claustrophobic to me. That's one of the reasons I love to read fiction and even more to write fiction, because I become another person. I have to say, I have one book way, way back. It was called the Dark Sister. And the protagonist is a six foot two, really fierce feminist. I am five foot one. I went walking through the world pugnacious and thinking that I was taking up much more space than I take up when I was writing that book. You know, that's what it felt like to be a 6 foot 2 pugnacious woman. And it was liberating and thrilling. I have one, I actually have one novel where I'm a dead person. That was really interesting too. I find this really interesting.
- [07:19]
B
And when did you realize that mattering might be more than just the psychological observation, but rather a master concept?
- [07:28]
C
Yeah. So what happened with that book was my editor for the book. The book is called the Mind Body Problem. And so it was a philosophical mouthful. But my editor, I mean, in our first face to face meeting said, you know, your, your protagonist is a very good looking, she's very funny, she's very smart, very seductive. She's so miserable, she's always on the cusp of despair. Why? And I knew that. I knew that from the very first line. The first line that came to me was, I'm often asked what it's like to be married to a genius. I could feel, feel her discontent in that. She didn't like that. She didn't like that. That's the first question people always asked her. And so I thought and thought I thought about it. I walked around for about two, three weeks obsessing about it. And then her voice came to me and it was like, I don't feel like I matter in the way that most matters to me. So, you know, being the object of male attention and all of these things that she falls back on, that didn't do it for her because that wasn't what mattered to her. And that was a very interesting idea to me, that we all want to matter, but we minister to this longing in vastly different ways. There's great diversity and always will be in how we try to satisfy our longing to matter. And that that's one of the keys to human flourishing.
- [09:00]
B
And yet you maintain that even human flourishing, or at least biological flourishing, is not enough for us psychologically. So you can feel great and do great and have a wonderful life in every material way, but still not feel like you matter.
- [09:20]
C
Exactly. And that's that existential dimension. In us that makes us so different from all other species.
- [09:26]
B
And you call it justifying. You, you argue that animals strive, but humans justify. When, when do you think justification entered evolution?
- [09:39]
C
Yeah, I think it is. And, and, and who? I, I should say, you know, mannering means deserving of attention. And the person we want to prove ourselves, whose attention we want to prove ourselves deserving of is ourselves. We might, we might. So I don't mean others here. You may use others to try to justify yourself in your own eyes, but ultimately the person we have to justify ourselves before is ourselves. And that's really interesting and it's easily overlooked. There's something subtle about it. I think that this came about because of our, you know, incredibly big and complicated brains that give us the capacity for self reflection. Self reflection is fascinating. We are, we're able to step outside of ourselves and regard ourselves as if from the outside. You know, we, we turn our theory of mind that we evolve to understand others. We're gregarious creatures, we, we need to understand others and live with in groups, but we have that capacity and then we turn it on ourselves, on ourselves as if we are another whom we can interrogate and we can probe and we can discover new things about. And one of the things that we discover is that we each pay ourselves an awful lot of attention. We have to in order to pursue a human life. But we can ask ourselves this question, and I think at some point, point we all do. Am I deserving of all this attention that I have of necessity to give myself? And one of the interesting things I discovered when I started to really pay attention to this capacity is that the US suicide hotline is www.umatter.gov. and what depression is, is that feeling of, no, I really am not deserving of my own attention. And that can turn into self loathing. I've known many people who have fallen victim of, of this kind of thing, either, you know, temporarily or chronically, you know, at some point in our lives now, you know, many of us know this feeling of not mattering, of not being deserving of our own attention. So I think, you know, it comes into the evolutionary lineage in terms of, you know, our developing these brains with their capacity for self reflection. And I don't think, you know, I think certain preconditions have to be in place. And when life is completely insecure, there's not enough food, there's not enough stability, shelter, safety. You're not worrying about these existential questions. You're not worrying about justifying yourself to yourself. But as soon as those things fall into place, this question occurred. You know, there is this question. Some of us solve it once and for all. For some of us, this is a question that keep revisiting all through our lives.
- [12:50]
B
Is there a developmental aspect to it? Do children experience the mattering instinct differently from adults and as adolescents, essentially a crisis of mattering?
- [13:02]
C
Yes, it really is. When you are making that all important transition from a home, your family life, which hopefully made you feel like you didn't have to do anything to deserve the attention of others to the world of your peers, where suddenly it's not forthcoming, the sense that you matter and that you see that some kids matter more than others. The more athletic or the brighter or wherever you find yourself, they're going to be kids that the prettier matter more. And that's when this notion of popularity becomes an obsession. So late childhood, early adolescence, into one's twenties, often when one's finding teaching. When I was still teaching at the university, I'm no longer doing that. But it is, you know, many, many, many students would go through these crises of mattering and we call them, tellingly, existential crises. It's so strong that it can overcome the desire to live. And in fact, between my husband and myself, you know, we've known of two suicides among our students. So this is. Yeah, this can overcome even the need to live, to survive.
- [14:33]
B
Well, and you describe it, or the currency you use to talk about mattering is deserving of attention. Other writers who deal with existential issues and even researchers, they measure something similar in terms of meaning or happiness or purpose. Why is deserving of attention the key?
- [15:00]
C
Yeah, well, I just, I think because that gets down to the phenomenology of this thing, you know, and that's why I love the word matter. I love the word matter in both of its senses, the noun and the verb. And I would say the fastest thing. Way to express what we are, we sapiens are. We're creatures of matter who long to matter. And it's. But why? For me, meaning, purpose, coherence, these terms that existential psychologists use, these are all things that can be measured in questionnaires. How meaningful do you find your life? Do you have a sense of purpose? And so it's a very, very useful. I've always found the notion of meaning, meaning when applied to our lives, mushy. There's the analytic philosopher. I've had a mushy, squishy. I didn't, I couldn't get a hold of it. I understand what mattering means to be deserving of attention. I think it's very, very basic. And for me, meaning is a secondary, secondary concept that I define in terms of mattering. When what we do, when we, when this justificatory self justificatory, what exercise or move in the mind kicks in, is we look for a mattering project, something that will fully engage us in our life. Bury this question. I call it the mother question. Of all mattering questions, do I matter? We don't want to be thinking about that. It paralyzes one's life and if it goes on too long, it devolves into depression. I spend a lot of time talking about William James, a wonderful specimen who had so many gifts and yet couldn't zero in on a mattering project and suffered a debilitating, a paralyzing depression where he lay in bed prone, that is the characteristic bodily position of depression, and contemplated suicide day for day and then decided he was going to hit decide on some mannering project. And if our Mandarin project is working for us, keeping us engaged in our life. And it can be, oh my God, this is my great obsession to ask people what their Mandarin project is, of course, explaining what I mean by it first. And there's just such diversity here. There is so much creativity that our species has expended trying to figure out how to deal with this longing. But if our Mandarin project is working for us, we feel that our life has meaning, it has purpose, it makes sense, it's coherent. So these are all for me, secondary concepts.
- [18:07]
B
You talk about mattering in four categories. Socializers, heroic strivers, competitors and transcenders. Tell us about those categories.
- [18:19]
C
Yeah, so I, I just told you that the great diversity, you know, of that I've discovered among my fellow humans in terms of how they deal with this, the mattering projects that they make for themselves, I mean, and one woman had, her project was, you know, to become a French pastry maker. I mean there's just, or, you know, a lot of people, you know, it's the bring, just bringing up their children, flourishing children. I wanted to know. I've gotten all these, I map things out on a mattering map and there's just no room. There are just so many different ways that people try to miniature this. So I asked, are there patterns here? Are there general strategies that all of these different mattering projects fit into? And you know, I thought about this for a very long time and I'm just talked to as many people and read as many biographies, you know, trying to get as much information about this And I came up with four strategies. It's. It's my own empirical generalization, open to falsification, you know, so. But the, the four are there, the transcenders there. And transcenders are those who see mattering in terms of a higher being, whether they call the being God or something vaguer and more spiritual. But. But you know that there is a transcendent being who created the universe out of nothing, who created the laws of nature without and the moral order within. So whose mattering can possibly be doubted to whom we matter? This is the great, I think, force of religion because it gives a believer or a transcender such a big sense of mattering, of cosmic mattering, that you were deliberately created by that which created everything and to whom you matter, perhaps who is always watching you. And you have a role to play in the narrative of eternity. It doesn't get any bigger than that, short of lunacy.
- [20:36]
B
So spirituality fundamentally relocates mattering beyond the self.
- [20:43]
C
It does, exactly. You know, it's a mattering to something much, much higher and beyond one. And that is in other strategies too. So to be in touch with something greater than oneself, higher than oneself, that matters in and of itself is very powerful. But transcenders. And we spent, you know, ever since what we call the Axial Age, when the religions that are still extant as well as Western philosophy first emerged. And I would say this is weakened historically, this is weak when we can see the mattering instinct emerging. Life was in certain periods with certain areas of the globe and in certain period, stable enough so that you didn't have to worry about seeing another dawn. And you can start asking, what is it all for? The paradigmatic existential question. So, yeah, so these are transcenders. And I started out life as a transcender. I was born into a very Orthodox Jewish family. And so I certainly know what that feels like. And, you know, and I was, when I ate something, you know, that I ought not to have eaten, took a little nibble of something from a friend, you know, I felt like God was watching me. And it was a very terrifying. But also I never doubted how much I mattered. So that, that, that is one. And through most of our history, since the Axial Age, we have been transcenders. And I think, you know, partly it's to be explained because of what it does for our sense Of. Of. Of mattering, of. Of. Of. Yeah. So then a lot of the people I speak to, they understand. They're what I call socializers. And in some sense we're all socializers One of the aspects of a flourishing life is to have close relationships with other people. Where gregarious creatures evolve from gregarious creatures. We need to have people to whom we matter whether we deserve it or not. You know, we call them our family, we call them our friends and lovers. And that is essential, I think, to any, some kind of intimacy essential to any, any, any flourishing life. But for some socializers, they collapse what these two essential needs we have for intimacy, close relationships and for mattering into one. To matter means to matter to these special people who are in your life. Many of the people that I questioned over the years, yeah, this is what I matter to my spouse, I matter to my community, I matter to my children and. But there are some socializers where it's not people who are in their lives. So I'm very, very interested and I've spoken to many people who really think of mattering in terms of fame. And this seems to be because it's gotten so much easier to be famous because of social media. You can just be an adorable teenager bopping, lip syncing to some music and bopping your head and you get thousands of viewers that this has become a very strong motivation in trying to realize, to satisfy the longing to matter. And to be famous means to matter, to be just deserving of the attention of a bunch of strangers. And that's interesting. But these are also socializers because it is mattering to others. And there are other phenomena that I like, cults that I analyze in terms of the socializers. Then there are heroic strivers. Heroic strivers don't really care about mattering to others, neither to God or to other people. Although mattering to other people might be a source of evidence. But what the game really is that they have certain standards of excellence in mind that they want to maybe not realize totally satisfied, but approach asymptotically, approach, get closer and closer, make, make progress toward approaching these. These standards can be intellectual, artistic, athletic, ethical, and, and, and, and to be able to live with themselves, to be in an easy relationship with themselves, to be able to justify themselves in their own eyes and to live a life that they consider meaningful is to devote themselves to these standards. And here to a notion of transcendence often creeps into the language, you know, that intellectual heroic strivers will talk about, you know, I live for knowledge or ethical heroic stories. I live for justice, you know, but something greater limits artistic. I live for beauty, you know, and, and yeah, so those are the heroic strivers. It's Hard to be a heroic striver. And the last group are the competitors who really understand mattering in zero sum terms. To the extent that they feel that they matter, others have to matter less. And they're the hardest people for me to talk to because they're very cagey about it and my questions make them somewhat uncomfortable. But, but there is, you know, there is this real phenomenon. Psychologists test people on, on, on the spectrum of how much they matter. And you know, some people, I mean, how much they, how competitive they are, there are different forms of competition, but for some people, and in fact, a lot of the people who take up so much of our public attention, they're competitors. They are people who really think in terms of mattering more than others, in terms of power or money or fame or. But there's. Yeah, it's a competitive thing. And the last group are what I call group competitors. And they feel that they belong to a group that matters more than others. Their mattering is situated in a view about the group to which they belong. And when it seems that other groups that matter less are rising, are competing with them, are not below where they're meant to be, that putting the mattering to rights can become their whole mattering project. And one of the most interesting people that I, for me, that I profile is an ex neo Nazi and who understood exactly what I was talking about when I was talking about mattering. And his whole project was to put the mattering back to rights, that these other people whom he called mud people were taking away the mattering that was rightfully his as a white male, heterosexual American. And of course the Jews were behind it all. So this was a very, very interesting conversation.
- [28:08]
B
That was a fascinating profile, as as many of yours are. Can, can someone migrate across categories during the course of a lifetime?
- [28:19]
C
Yeah, I sure did, I can tell you. And maybe that's one of the reasons I'm so aware of this, this, this phenomenon. Because, you know, I was very, I tend to be a very serious person. So when I was a religious person, I was extremely serious. You know, I didn't have to pray three times a day the way my father and my brother did. But I did, you know, I was going to take on all of the responsibilities of being a transcender. And so. And that filled my life, you know, that was what I felt my life was all about. And at a certain point, things happened and I changed. And it was a. Oh my gosh, it was feeling of such mattering loss, true loss and confusion. But I did change. But I Profile people who change. I found I spoke to a lot of heroic strivers who. Things did not work out for them. Their first mattering project, it just wasn't going well. And the first requirement of a mannering project is that it go well for the person themselves. You know, it allows them to live with themselves and to feel like they're doing something meaningful. That their life, they're not wasting their one and only life. And when, so you know, and when that goes wrong. And I've certainly had many students, graduate students especially for whom that goes wrong, they have to, you know, either they sink into depression or they find another means of, of, of, of ministering to the mannering longing. And what I found is that heroic strivers will often they'll, they can, they'll switch, but it will still be something within the heroic striving territory. So a person I interview, he's, he's also a close friend. He had set out to be a classical guitarist and he's extremely talented and was on television when he was a child and went to one of the best conservatories in the country. But he couldn't make it as a classical guitarist. It's a very hard thing to make. And he went into such a depression that for years he could not even listen to music anymore. It's like being spurned by your lover, you know, and you just want to hear about them or hear set your sights on them at all. And then he became a writer and got his doctorate in comparative literature. So he's still a heroic striver. And he said to me very poignantly, I know what we mean. To be a heroic striver is to be able to tolerate great disappointment, great frustration. But when there's just no let up and you feel like you can't make any inroads, you know, it's time to switch. And there are still disappointments and frustrations in his new mattering project. Of course to be a writer is to experience that, but he can tolerate those and still go on with his life. And so yeah, for me these are some of the biggest changes that we can possibly make to immigrate on the mattering map.
- [31:39]
B
It's very difficult actually. It sounds like you were a heroic striver when you were a transcender and continued to be a heroic striver when you became more secular, chose a different arena.
- [31:53]
C
That is probably the most perceptive anybody ever said to me. Yes, well, I would, I mean that is true, that is true. If I was going to be a transcendent, you know, I was going to, I was going to go full hog, you know, I did not want to leave any gaps. That's, that is true. And when people told me, you don't have to do that, you're a girl, offended me, I was offended. Why shouldn't I do that? And so you're right, you're right. And that is something, you know, I'm hoping that psychologists, there's some interest among positive psychologists in my framework and I hope that they will do research in, you know, what it is that forms us, you know, these temperaments and culture and our talents and our passions, you know, make, orients us towards one strategy or the other. But it's true with transcenders. I found that they're very different personality types. Some are heroic strivers, some are competitors. You know, they, their religion matters more than others. You know, what's the matter with these other people? Are there, you know, people who are. And, and some are socializers, all they want to do is minister to others and, you know. Yeah. So that there are many different types of transcenders in terms of personality.
- [33:19]
B
Let's move for a moment from the individual to the political level. Tell us about how you understand political polarization to be partly a clash between mattering strategies.
- [33:33]
C
Yeah, well, I do think, I mean, if I'm right, that this, you know, this is a deep core. It's there, it's almost, I tried to make it almost predictable by starting with the laws of physics, starting with physics and the second law of thermodynamics and going on to evolution and evolutionary psychology and the neuroscience. If I'm right, that there is, this is sort of there, it's latent in us. As long as the preconditions of a safe and well fed life are there, it's predictable. And it's predictable that it would manifest itself in many different ways, making us very different, very alike to one another in our need to justify ourselves to ourselves. But so different in the expressions of how this comes out and, and we stake our lives on this. You know, this is the, our existential core. So there's a great tendency to universalize it. If it's working for me, it ought to work for everybody. And I collect statements, I call them false universalizing statements. And I have some of my very small collection in the book, I have many more such, such statements where people, you know, it's like, you know, why isn't everybody a scientist? Why doesn't everybody worship God the way I do? Why isn't everybody a philosopher? You Know that. That if it's working for oneself, that it ought to work, you know, for everybody. And that already, you know, the seeds of intolerance are already planted in, in this urge to universalize. And it's very, very deep. When I was a Spinozist, I was a very. I was a very orthodox Spinozist. Like, why doesn't, why doesn't everybody have Spinoza? Can't is the right way to live your life. So I certainly have been guilty of it myself. But so many of our political differences are. They're existential differences. They're no longer differences about policy. Whether we tax Social Security here in this country at 5 or 6 or 7%, that's not what it's really about. It's about which among us matter and which among us don't and who is taking our mattering away from us. And there is, I think, a crisis of mattering. There are certain factors that have come together. One of them is the lowering of being transcenders, which did minister to our longing to matter, but in our secular age, less so. That's one of the factors. But also, you know that there are just people who are thrown in our faces who matter so much more than any of us could ever hope to. And these are the very rich, you know, billionaires and the very powerful, the very famous. These are the people who matter more. And this is. There just doesn't seem to be enough mattering to go around. And things are shifting very, very quickly. I know in this country, very, very quickly, we're going from being a majority of white people to no longer being a majority of white people. All of these go down deep to the women's rise, black people's rise, at least in this country, has it existential connections. And so we fight really vehemently. Anything that touches these existential connect core works up tremendous emotion. And the thing to do is, I think, is to look at it clearly and see what's going on.
- [37:36]
B
Finally, Rebecca, if at this point a listener is asking herself, do I matter? What question would you hope they ask next?
- [37:46]
C
Yeah, so in some sense, we all matter. We do all matter. That's a philosophical argument that I can make and that I am ethically completely committed to. But if, but that's not enough for us. We want to know each of us who are in a position of seeing how much attention we pay ourselves, that each of us, the thing to which we pay the most attention is ourselves. And that causes this need to justify to kick in that one has to think about that to find the thing that lights you up, that makes you want to go on with your life, that gives you the impetus to push on to your future, that there's something that lights you up. It may be things that other people think are trivial, just as my colleagues thought that my writing a novel was trivial and I didn't matter anymore as a philosopher, but it lit me up. And so you go with that. And. But there are other requirements. The second requirement is that whatever your mattering project is, given that ethically all humans equally matter in an ethical sense, your mattering project cannot undermine, cannot ethically, this unethical truth undermine anybody else's sense of mattering. That is wrong. You can't go that way. And the third requirement, it's not a requirement, but it's a nice thing if what you are devote, you are grounding your own mattering on is some way, in some way creative, as I like to put it. It's on the side of life and it's resistance to entropy and it's on the side of creativity and resistance to destructiveness. And that is, you know, as long as I think I want to end with one of my, my, well, maybe two of my very favorite ancient sayings. One from, from Rabbi Hillel of the first century and who it said, you know, if I'm not for myself, then who will be for me? Yeah, exactly. You know, I need a mattering project that's going to make me live, lit up and want to live. So if I'm not for myself, then who will be for me? But if I'm only for myself, then what am I? So that is that third requirement, you know, to be in touch with something where your mannering project is doing some good some way or the other, maybe for the planet, maybe very locally, for your family and your friends, your community. But it's not taking away from anybody's mannering. That is one of my favorite favorite sayings. And if not now, then when? Yeah, because entropy is constantly, is constantly increasing. So the other one comes from the Sufi finger Rumi who said, let the beauty you love be what you do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel down and kiss the ground. There are so many ways to do something creative with one's life. One way is. And people who say this is the way to do it, this is wrong, this is wrong. Part of the richness of our species is not only that we need to justify ourselves in our own eyes, which is a beautiful thing, but we have so many different ways of doing it and finding our way toward our own meaningfulness.
- [41:38]
B
The book is the Mattering Instinct. How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us by Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein. Thanks so much for talking with me today, Rebecca.
- [41:50]
C
Oh, thank you, Renee.
- [41:52]
B
And thanks to our researcher, Bela Pasakoff.