Love Is the Great Subject: A Conversation on Literature, Science, and Social Justice with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

REBECCA GOLDSTEIN is a philosopher and novelist with a background in the sciences; she is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, among them two of my favorites in each category: The Mind-Body Problem (Penguin, 1983) and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (Schocken, 2006). In 1995, GOLDSTEIN received a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the "Genius Grant"; in 2006, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship; and, in 2008, she was designated Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism and awarded an honorary doctorate by Emerson College. In 2011, Goldstein was declared Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association, and in 2014, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by PRESIDENT OBAMA. Her most recent book is the enormously popular and critically celebrated Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away (Pantheon, 2014).

This is a short, selected version of a very long list of publications, honors, and awards. But I would like to offer a further distillation: Goldstein's work not only demonstrates the meaningful continuity between the humanities and the sciences, it exemplifies the force that drives all such work: ontological wonder. Goldstein is deeply curious about the nature of our complex, unfolding universe, from questions of aesthetics to the motivations of human beings and the behavior of subatomic particles. As John Horgan wrote, following an interview with Goldstein: "She thought science would eventually validate panpsychism. Physicists would show that consciousness lies latent within all matter, just as the exotic quantum properties charm, color and strangeness do. 'I'm still a materialist,' she said, 'but matter is a hell of a lot more interesting than we used to think it is.'"¹

This wonder is evidence not only of curiosity but also of awe, a state of inspiration, a form of love. It is a love of this world that informs her work as a novelist and a philosopher, a love of beauty and human truths. In Goldstein's novel The Mind-Body Problem, Princeton graduate student Renee Feuer (named, one feels, to integrate the Cartesian split she ponders) expounds her philosophy of value:

Everyone loves a hero. What we differ on is the question of who the heroes are, because we differ over what matters. And who matters is a function of what matters. Here in Princeton what matters is intelligence, the people who matter are the intelligent, and the people who matter the most, the heroes, are the geniuses…. People occupy the mattering map, though they don't happen to be present in my mental picture of it. The map in fact is a projection of its inhabitants' perceptions. A person's location on it is determined by what matters to him, matters overwhelmingly, the kind of mattering that produces his perceptions of people, of himself and others…. One and the same person can appear differently when viewed from different positions, making interterritorial communication sometimes difficult. And then some of us do an awful lot of moving around from region to region.²

In recent years, Goldstein's fictional "mattering map" has itself made that trip from one region of value to another, garnering significant attention within and beyond the discipline of philosophy. Goldstein herself has returned to it as a serious subject of philosophical and political inquiry. A 2017 issue of Free Inquiry devoted to her theory includes an article by Goldstein in which she writes, "in case you haven't yet had your fill of the protean materializations of the wonder-word matter, let me suggest that its polysemy provides the most succinct statement I know to give of the human condition. What we are, we humans, are creatures of matter who are determined to matter. We are matter that would matter."³

It is because this world matters, because we all matter (that for each of us, to use Goldstein's framing of ethics, "mattering matters") that her work speaks for the values of reason and knowledge, and against determinism...