Book talk | The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

Join MacArthur Fellow and National Humanities Medalist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein for a discussion of her latest book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.

The Mattering Instinct is a revelatory book about the primal drive that in our species alone has been transformed into one of our most persistent and universal motivations: the longing to matter. Drawing on biology, psychology, and philosophy, Goldstein argues that this need to matter—and the various “mattering projects” it inspires—is the source of our greatest progress and our deepest conflicts: the very crux of the human experience. Goldstein brings this profound idea to life through unforgettable stories of famous and not-so-famous people pursuing their unique mattering projects, from the ragtime genius Scott Joplin, whose dedication to his ignored masterpiece, Treemonisha, ended in tragedy to an impoverished Chinese woman who rescued abandoned newborns from the trash. These portraits illuminate how our instinct for significance shapes identity, relationships, culture, and conflict—and they point the way to a future where we all might see that there is, fundamentally, enough mattering to go around.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an award-winning philosopher, writer, and public intellectual. She is the author of ten books of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction, including 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University and has taught at Yale, Columbia, NYU, Dartmouth, and Harvard. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, her work has been supported by the MacArthur “Genius” grant and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Whiting Institute, Radcliffe Institute, Council of Learned Societies, and the National Science Foundation. In 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama.