Loading summary
Transcript45 lines
- [00:02]
A
This is Philosophy Bites with me, David
- [00:04]
B
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
- [00:06]
A
Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
- [00:11]
B
what is it to matter and why does that matter? Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein, author of a recent book on the topic, the Mattering How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us Explains.
- [00:26]
A
Rebecca Goldstein, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
- [00:29]
C
It's great to be back. Dave.
- [00:31]
A
We're talking today about, well, I guess an odd word not one one hears very often in the English language. Mattering. What is mattering?
- [00:40]
C
Yeah, it's a really interesting concept. The way I define it, the verb to matter is to be deserving of attention. You know, we talk about what matters, we talk about who matters, we worry about whether we matter. And in all, all of those cases we are talking about being deserving of attention. So it is what we philosophers like to call a slightly normative, partially normative concept. Deserving is a normative term and we
- [01:08]
A
want to deserve to matter in the way in which dogs and cats and lions and snakes and spiders don't care about mattering.
- [01:17]
C
Yeah, and I particularly am interested in, when I say deserving of attention, the question is, from whom? Is it from others? Well, actually, I think the really interesting aspect of this is that we want to prove ourselves deserving of our own attention. And that sounds slightly paradoxical because we've got it. There's nothing that each of us pays more attention to than ourselves. If we measure how much we think something matters by how much attention we pay to it, then it would seem that each of us thinks that we are the thing that matters the most in all of the universe. And short of lunacy, we know that's not true.
- [01:58]
A
But that's because we want to justify our lives to ourselves.
- [02:02]
C
Exactly. And this is where this notion of meaningfulness, you know, a meaningful life, which had always baffled me, what can that possibly mean? I know what meaningfulness means in a proposition or a theory. But where it comes in, I think is a secondary concept to mattering, which I can defined very clearly. Deserving of attention? Whose attention? Our own attention. That means we have to, as you say, justify ourselves in our own eyes. This makes us normative creatures by our very nature. Values seeking creatures totally different from all other species.
- [02:38]
A
And so the capacity we have that other species don't have is, well, many capacities, I guess. But fundamentally the capacity for self awareness.
- [02:49]
C
Self awareness. Self awareness of such distance that we're able to gain from ourselves in self reflection. A capacity that these very large brains of ours have evolved for totally different Reasons I think because we are gregarious creatures, but nevertheless we can turn this on ourselves as self reflection and interrogate ourselves. And one of the things that we, we interrogate ourselves about is all the attention that we devote to ourselves.
- [03:18]
A
I want to talk in a little bit about the various ways in which we might justify our existence, the various ways in which we might matter. Before we get there, I'm wondering whether this is a modern phenomenon, the need to matter. I mean there are still hundreds of millions of people in the world who live in desperate poverty, live from day to day. But that's been the condition of most humans for most of human existence. And I'm wondering whether the, for most of human existence we didn't have the luxury to care about mattering.
- [03:48]
C
I love this question and it's absolutely true. Certain preconditions have to be in place before we have the luxury, exactly the right word, the luxury to consider these existential questions. I mean this is the heart of the existential dilemma. I finally understand what those existentialists were going on about, about the absurd. I never quite got it before I started thinking in this way. But we can actually date the point in human history when in certain areas of the globe these kinds of normative questions, existential questions, value seeking questions came into consciousness. And it's what we call the Axial Age. The age that Carl Jaspers had named the Axial Age, when all of the religions still extend as well as Western philosophy came into existence. I should say why he named it the Axial Age. He says it's as if our attention had turned on an axis from the daily struggle to just survive, to have enough safety, security, caloric intake, to just live, to see another dawn, to being able to ask and what are we learning, living for? So we can actually date basically from 800 to 200 BCE with the 6th century BCE being the high point of the Axial Age. But all of the religions as well as Greek tragedy and Greek philosophy come into the one secular approach to these existential questions come into being. And you know, and interestingly, all of us, no matter where we are on the normative framework, can trace ourselves back to that time.
- [05:39]
A
Let's get into the weeds of this a bit. Is there a taxonomy of ways in which we try to matter?
- [05:48]
C
So as far as what I call these mattering projects where we channel our, what I call the mattering instinct into these mattering projects, there are so many. I'm obsessed with talking to people about this subject and gathering the diverse diversity of ways in which people try to Feed this need to justify themselves in their own lives and live with what they call a meaningful life, this great existential internal need we have. But what I found, I mean, it's taken me a while, just by reading tons of biographies and talking to people constantly about this. What I found is that there are four major strategies that all of these different projects can fit into. And that by reasons of temperament, interests, culture, random flukes of one's history, one tends to prevail in a person. Although we can change over the course of our lives. I have, for example, but that there are four major strategies. It's open to falsification. This is an empirical generalization, and I'm always looking for falsification.
- [06:57]
A
Okay, so there are four. Let's go for them, one by one. Give me the first.
- [07:01]
C
Well, what I have found. I'll start with the people I call socializers, because I found that most people seem to fall into this category. And these are people who understand this existential need. Am I deserving of my own attention? They understand it in terms of others. The way they convince themselves that they matter is that they matter to others. That's how most people seem to. To see it in all of us. We all need to matter to others, have people in our lives who will pay us attention whether we deserve it or not. I call them my family, my friends, sometimes my colleagues. But for a socializer, well, there are two types. For some socializers, it's those people who are already in their lives to whom they want to matter, need to matter to satisfy their sense of mattering. But there are socializers who need to matter to. To people who aren't in their lives. For example, those who want fame. And I've found that a lot of young people I talk to, millennials and younger, that's how they think of mannering. They want to be influencers. They want to be paid attention to by tons of strangers. That's what it means to be famous. But you know what? It makes sense if you want to ultimately convince yourself that you're mad or the fact that a bunch of strangers are paying attention to you can be very convincing. And for some people, it works. And for some, it turns out not to work. And that's true for all of these ways of satisfying our longing to matter.
- [08:30]
A
So the first category of socializers, that feels very familiar to me, I know lots of people who, once they become parents, say, now I know what the meaning of life is. I've got kids I need to bring up, and nourish my children. The second one is slightly weird, isn't it? Because that has got to be a modern phenomena. Because the idea of fame amongst strangers, that certainly didn't exist as a phenomena 10,000 years ago.
- [08:53]
C
Well, interestingly enough, there was something like that in the ancient Greeks. You know, their gods were useless when it came to convincing people that they mattered. Right. You didn't want the gods to pay too much attention to you because if you were a woman or even a man, you'd get raped or they'd vanquish you in some kind of competition. So for the ancient Greeks, this notion of kleos, which is kind of glory or fame for your life to live on, for you to be worthy of an epic to be sung by the poets, is there, which is really, really interesting. But nowadays it's so much easier to be famous if you're a cute little girl lip syncing on YouTube. You can have tens of thousands of followers in 15 minutes. So it's much, much easier to be famous now. You don't have to be Achilles, you don't have to be Helen of Troy. I should also mention in the social categories, cults also, because that's a very interesting phenomena. I don't know about in the uk, but boy, in the US we've got a lot of cults, political cults, religious cults. But to be somehow feel that you're being paid attention to by a cult leader who matters more than anybody. So there's a kind of trickle down mattering that you gather. I had a very good friend who was lost to a cult. She was a great searcher. And when she found this cult leader, her existential needs finalized were realized. So I just wanted to get that in because there are a lot of things that this explains why.
- [10:22]
A
So that's social mattering. The first of the four categories. Give me the second one.
- [10:27]
C
Okay, let's go to another where it's also mattering to another, but not immortal people. I call transcenders who have a metaphysical belief that there is a transcendent being, whether they call it God or something more spiritual, but something beyond normal experience that is responsible for there being something rather than nothing, for the laws of nature themselves. A being whose mattering can't be doubted. And we matter to that being. And that's why we were created. So we were created purposefully. We're here because we were chosen to be here, meaning we have a role to play in the narrative of eternity. That is a very strong sense mattering. And you know, all of the arguments which I've been involved with, arguments against the existence of God and all of this sort of thing, that doesn't really get to the heart of it. There is this deep need we all share to justify our existence, to feel like we're not here for nothing. And this one, a kind of cosmic mattering. It doesn't get bigger than that. Short of lunacy, short of thinking that you yourself are divine or something. It's really strong. And I think that explains the tenacity in the face of everything, in the face of evil, in the face of laws of nature that don't seem to leave room for this being. Nevertheless, it will persist. It will always persist. Philosophical arguments is not going to do away with this.
- [12:03]
A
And you say it doesn't get bigger than that. In the cause of that transcendental mattering. People are capable of killing.
- [12:09]
C
Exactly. They're capable of killing. They're capable of sacrificing their own lives. Just open the pages of the newspaper and that really shows. It's not the will to live that's the strongest thing in us, it's the will to matter. We'll sacrifice other lives, we'll sacrifice our own life in order to prove our own mattering, if need be so.
- [12:29]
A
Transcendental mattering, social mattering. Give me the third category.
- [12:34]
C
The third category. I call it heroic strivers. You have certain standards of excellence in mind that you want to maybe not reach, but asymptotically approach, get nearer and nearer to in order to reconcile yourself with yourself. These standards may be intellectual, they may be artistic, they may be athletic, they may be ethical. I'm very interested in people we could call saints, especially when they're not religious. Pure, ethical, heroic strivers. They very much fascinate me. But yes, these are the goals. This is what I have to do with my life. You know, scientists, poets, musicians, Olympic stars. They're the people about whom biographies are written. But I should say that it has to be heroic, striving for the person themselves, which doesn't mean that they have to have great talent.
- [13:26]
A
So it's setting a goal that one values maybe reaching. In Britain, grade eight in the piano, getting under three hours in the marathon or whatever. Setting a goal one values and attempting to achieve that goal.
- [13:42]
C
That's right. Making progress towards it. You know me, what is mine? I started life as a transcender. I was brought up very, very religiously. I lost that when I was 13 years old. Was a real. What do I do with my life now if I'm not living in order to obey the rule giver. And it was, okay, I want to know stuff. I want to know as much as I can possibly know, maybe even add a little bit to it. That's been my mattering project that keeps me going. I became a philosopher.
- [14:17]
A
So that's your mattering project. I was going to ask you about that, but let's get to the fourth category. So we've had transcendental mattering, social mattering, heroic mattering and competitive mattering.
- [14:28]
C
There are people I've spoken to and they're the one group that become a little uneasy when I talk to them about their mattering. They understand mannering in zero sum terms. I mean, a lot of us have a streak of competitiveness in us, right? But this is how they understand mattering. When somebody matters as much, or Jupiter forbid, more than they, it feels like something is taken away from them. We see it in great display because many of our political leaders fall into this category, always having to prove that they matter. I'm thinking of one particular political leader.
- [15:08]
A
I can guess who.
- [15:09]
C
Guess who, right? Always everything. I matter more than this, than that. I know more than the generals, I know more than the scientists. This is a wonderful display of what a competitive manner here too. However, I divided it up into individuals, individual competitors and group competitors. People who feel that they belong to a group that matters more than others. And if those others to whom they are committed to mattering more than start gaining, trying to put that to rights can become their mattering project. Racist, sexist, classists, nationalists, jingoists, and sometimes more professionally defined. We philosophers matter more than anybody, or we physicists, you know, matter more than anybody, or we vegans matter more than anybody. And this gets transformed into the very mattering project. So that's an interesting phenomenon.
- [16:03]
A
You mentioned right at the beginning, that mattering has a normative component. So presumably it's open to me to say, well, you say that matters, but that's a ridiculous thing to care about.
- [16:17]
C
Yeah, and I have many examples of people I've spoken to where I think, really, this is what you want to do with your life. An example, I was waiting for a friend who was habitually late in a lobby of a Manhattan hotel. Guy comes up to me pestering me and you know, can he buy me a drink? Blah, blah, blah. So I started to talk to him. This was about 25 years ago, I should say, about mattering. Why does he approach strange women and pester them? I didn't put in those terms. I tried to be a little more diplomatic he was, this is the first time I heard the phrase, a pickup artist. That was his mannering project. He had his statistics, he had his heroes, he had his books, which I then went and read, you know, was so interesting to me. This was his mannering project. You know, do I think this is the best way to spend a human life?
- [17:12]
A
No.
- [17:13]
C
There is a normative element here. To want to be deserving of one's own attention is already deserving, is normative. And we, in caring about being deserving of our own attention, are normative creatures.
- [17:26]
A
I'm wondering, in fact, whether this is the role of the philosopher, because I love your categorization into different types of mattering. But that seems to me to be a project in a way, for a psychologist. And the philosopher comes along and says, you're mistaken about caring about X, and what you should really care about is Y. Should that be the world of the philosopher?
- [17:49]
C
Well, for one thing, I do want to make clear that we all need this. There's something so deeply human in this need, even when it goes terribly wrong. I spoke to an ex neo Nazi, right, whose mandarine project was to put the world to rights. You know, that's how he thought of it. It was a normative project for him that these, what he had called in his Nazi days, mud people were occupying the White House. How could the world have gone so wrong and that the Jews were behind this? And so terrible moral errors being made on the basis of this great need that he certainly felt justified in and that gave meaning to his life. I mean, it really was a chaotic life before. And then it had purp. It was meaningful. So I think it's really important, whether we're philosophers or not, to see this working and to understand what's going on, the better to fix it. But, you know, distinctions can be made. This was not a good mattering project. I mean, for one thing, because I think there's an essential dignity to this aspect of all of us. You know, we always hear talk of intrinsic dignity, of being human. Again, I could never wrap my head around what does that mean? I understand dignity in Kantian terms. Treat each other as autonomous, rational agents. But what does that mean, the intrinsic dignity? And I think there's a kind of dignity or something at least estimable in trying to justify yourself in your own eyes, even if it leads you to the worst of normative values, you know, as it did this ex Nazi. I think that the very fact that we have this instinct shows that we all do matter, that there's something about being a human, that really matters. And that means that if your mattering project doesn't recognize that if your mannering project is devoted to showing certain people, whether people in your life that you want to dominate or whole groups of people that they don't matter as much as you do, you're making a mistake, you're erring. The fact is, in the philosophical, moral sense, we all matter. The mere fact that we so long to matter makes us matter. I believe that to be true. And so that's one way that our mattering projects can go very wrong.
- [20:13]
A
And in your own case, you said that you abandoned transcendental mattering and you took up learning mattering, the idea that the more that you learn, the better, and perhaps you can even contribute to the corpus of knowledge. And you've never had any doubts about that. So you remain convinced that this is a legitimate way of matter.
- [20:35]
C
It seems worthwhile to me. I've certainly had doubts that I had anything to contribute, you know, and that's another way that our mattering projects can fail us. They can fail us personally. They can make us feel like failures constantly. And I've often thought that that was true of my mattering project. But of just trying to at least learn everything and trying to fit it together coherently and even without making any contribution, that seems to me worthwhile. Knowledge seems to me of value. You know, justice, knowledge, compassion, beauty. These are things that are worthwhile. If your mandarin project is to either cultivate the appreciation of these things or maybe even to add to them, that's a good thing. And it might lead to a tremendous amount of frustration and disappointment. I mean, look at the Wittgenstein's life, the heartache, the misery that he went through, even though he contributed a great deal. And then he says, at the end of his life, tell them I've had a wonderful life. Because he was doing what he thought mattered and struggling. And that's what we're really after. We're not after happiness. Happiness is vastly overrated. We want to do something worth the doing. We don't want to waste it. Our lives.
- [21:54]
A
Rebecca Goldstein, thank you very much indeed.
- [21:57]
C
It's a great pleasure to talk to you, as always.
- [22:07]
B
For more Philosophy bytes, go to www.philosophybytes.com. you can also find details there of Philosophy Bytes books and how to support us.