Raised in a Jewish Orthodox family, philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein gave up on the idea of God in her teenage years, after she read Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian. She then became ‘a quiet atheist’, so that she wouldn’t upset her religious parents. Meanwhile, Goldstein has become a vocal humanist. She found solace in philosophy and philosophical fiction, having a particular soft spot for Plato and Spinoza – her twitter account name is ‘PlatoOnBookTour: Plato reacts to the 21^st century.’ She is one of three philosophers who ever got the US National Humanities Medal. A visiting Professor at New York University and New College of the Humanities in London, Goldstein will be giving a talk on Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, and discussing post-truth at HowTheLightGetsIn Festival in London on 22^nd September. In this interview, she explains why we should think more about what really matters, the ways in which mattering is a more helpful philosophical concept than meaning, and how thinking that some are better than others because of their talents is dangerous.

You’re currently working on a book on mattering. What do we mean when we say that something, or someone, matters to us?

The notion of mattering is intimately linked with the notion of attention. To say that something matters is to assert that attention is due it, the kind of attention that both recognises and reveals its reality. Something that matters has a nature that demands to be known, and the knowledge may yield other attitudes and behaviour due it. If I say that something doesn’t matter, I’m saying that it’s not worth paying attention to. 

And the notion of mattering is also normative, meaning that it implies an ought, an obligation—namely the obligation to pay appropriate attention to it. I think there are objective truths about which things matter. I believe it is a demonstrable moral truth that all humans matter, which isn’t, of course, to assert that only humans matter.  

I first became preoccupied with the concept of mattering when I was writing my first book, The Mind-Body Problem—which wasn’t a work of philosophy but rather of fiction. I don’t think this was an accident. A novelist must think out the motivations of her characters, and our strivings to matter — to demonstrate that what we are and what we do are worthy of appropriate attention — are key in understanding human motivation. The concept of mattering stretches across the divide between empirical psychology and moral philosophy. 

You’re co-writing with the founder of positive psychology Martin Seligman and social psychologist Roy Baumeister. What empirical studies have you found most interesting in the work with them?

I should first make it clear that the book I’m writing isn’t being co-authored. I’m very grateful that Martin Seligman, when he was reading my last book, Plato at the Googleplex, saw the possibilities for psychological research in the ideas about mattering to which I briefly allude there, and he got in touch with me. The paper we three are co-authoring is strictly theoretical, laying out some of the key concepts in analysing the ways that the striving to matter functions in human motivation and the kind of new research this suggests.