In this interview, Rebecca Goldstein discusses growing up Orthodox and middle class in a WASP neighborhood, her father, an ordained rabbi and cantor, Walt Disney’s Our Friend the Atom, playing hooky in Washington Square Park, Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, vacationing in the Borscht Belt, where she met Shelly Goldstein, a young physicist studying with Feynman, Barnard College, working with Mary Mothersill, Sue Larson, and Sidney Morgenbesser, becoming preoccupied with the hard problem of consciousness via Hobbes in the subway, struggles with faith, Saint Teresa, ivy league sexism, Carl Hempel, scientific realism, Nagel, friendly physicists, kids, the world-knot, the success of her first book, The Mind-Body Problem, the positive reception of the book outside of academic philosophy, and the negative reception of her book within, impostor syndrome, finding her philosophical groove within literature, vindication on Philosophy Talk, Obama’s accolades, Gödel and mathematical realism, Spinoza and modernity, Plato at the Googleplex, misogyny and the atheist movement, ‘strode’ and ‘stridden’, Steven Pinker, vitriol on the internet, the Santa Fe Institute, Kate Manne, Middlemarch, Trump, Dennett, and her last meal…
[10/10/2019]
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in White Plains, New York, which is a fairly affluent suburb slightly north of New York City. I grew up in the fifties, a time of frenzied conformity, following the disruptions of WWII, and White Plains was as conformist as it gets.
Religious household?
My family was an anomaly in White Plains, since we were (1) Orthodox Jews and (2) decidedly not affluent. We lived in this little section, carved into the commercial downtown, some three-square blocks which were demographically different from the rest of White Plains. It was populated mostly by immigrant families from Sicily, and their kids were my neighborhood friends. But in school it was different. Because of the districting I went to a school that was almost solidly well-heeled WASP.
What was your family like?
My father had come from Poland—well, it was Poland when he lived there but it’s now the Ukraine. His father had been the rabbi in their little village. My father’s getting out of Poland in time—most of his immediate family did, except for one married sister and her children, my first cousins, all killed by the Nazis—formed the backdrop of my life. I think the strongest emotion of my childhood was wanting to protect my father, who was the most extraordinarily gentle person. He came from another world and never really adjusted to American values. He’d been ordained as a rabbi but never practiced as one. Instead he became a cantor. He lacked the confidence to be an American rabbi, which was something so different from being a rabbi in a little village in Poland. He fell back on his beautiful voice to support his family, although pretty meagerly, especially in the context of the wealthy community where we ended up living. He also prepared boys all over Westchester County for their bar mitzvahs, especially difficult cases, kids with all kinds of cognitive and emotional problems. He was a master teacher; his gentleness had a magical effect. But he didn’t charge families for the lessons. You see what I mean when I say that he never really adjusted to American values. Sometimes people would pay my father as they saw fit for the year or more that he had put into preparing their sons, but often they didn’t. I remember my mother, who was American-born, getting furious when some families didn’t pay him anything. I remember one occasion when she exploded when one such family, “from Scarsdale yet!” whose child had presented particular problems, gave my father a gift of three fancy clothes hangers. She hurled them into the trash, which was a gesture whose drama I admired, though I also thought it was a shame. They were very pretty hangers.
As a little kid, what were you interested in? How were you similar to, and dissimilar from, the rest of your family?
I was an introverted child who liked to spend a lot of time by myself. I liked the fact of having friends more than I actually liked hanging out with them. For an introvert like me, a little bit of social interaction goes a long way—true then, even truer now. I can remember hiding out after school so that I could walk home by myself. I loved to walk all over the place by myself. It was one of my major activities. My mother would loan me her watch and give me a time when I had to be home. I also had a bike, inherited from my older brother and way too big for me, but I loved the independence it gave me.
Love it. What else were you up to? What else was on your mind?
Most of all, I loved to read. We were too poor for buying books, especially children’s books, but, starting from before we could even read, every Friday before the Sabbath, my younger sister and I were taken to the White Plains Library, sometimes by my father, sometimes by my older sister, and I’d stock up on my week’s reading. I loved story books but also books on science. I had a rock collection, so I got out every book the library had on rocks, but also books on planets and stars and some wonderful books on do-it-yourself chemistry experiments, though after a few disasters, I was forbidden from doing it myself in the house. The back porch became my laboratory. On the more theoretical side, there was Our Friend the Atom, which just rocked my little world. It blew my mind that material objects were nothing like how they seemed, that there were these whirring invisible itty-bitty parts composing them, with a lot of empty space in between. I wasn’t brought up to have any ambitions. But Our Friend the Atom provoked a modest ambition in me, namely that someday I’d get to meet one of these physicist guys—and of course, it would only have been guys I would have thought of—and ask them how they did it, how they got outside of the way that things seemed in order to tell us how things really are. I just couldn’t get over that fact. I can’t remember ever discussing any of these things that excited me so much with anybody, except my younger sister, Sarah. She had no choice, being my captive audience. [editor’s note: check out the educational film that compliments the book here.]
Did you enjoy school?
Another thing my parents couldn’t afford was to send all of us kids to the pricey Westchester Jewish day school. So my older brother, being a boy and therefore obviously of greater importance, was sent to that school, and my sisters and I went to public school. I think the public-school system was considered pretty good—after all, it was in that affluent, highly-taxed community—but I never could get over how little they taught. The image I would get was of a gradually widening spiral. Every year we would learn the same damn things, only broadening it outward ever so little.
As a teenager, did you get into any trouble? Was high school enjoyable?
Things started to go awry for me when I was in the eighth grade. Let’s just say that my mother decided it was time to remove me from public school and enroll me in a religious school. A very religious, all-girls school located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The girls there came from families more like mine—Orthodox, with immigrant parents—but still, having gone to a public school in White Plains, this school was a huge culture shock. I’d always been aware of being the Jewish kid in my WASP school, but in that Jewish school I felt like I was the WASP. And if the classes were boring in public school, then there’s just no way to recount what an absolute waste of time it was to attend the school I now found myself in. Basically, the girls there were just biding their time until they graduated and got married. A lot of the girls got engaged while still in high school. Everybody would dance around them in the lunchroom.
I quickly learned how to play hooky and get away with it. My poor father would get up early in the morning to drive me to the train station, and I’d catch the train into Manhattan, and then sometimes head to school but often not. It was the late-sixties, and there was a great spectacle to behold in New York City. I often headed over to Washington Square Park to mingle with the crowds, talking to all kinds of wonderful and strange people. The variety of ways of being human fascinated me. I wanted to get a sense of everybody’s story, everybody’s inner world.
Same here! But still, sounds a bit dangerous…
I was coming from a sheltered background. It’s kind of a miracle to me that I didn’t end up getting into some seriously life-threatening situations. Actually, when I look back on it now, I see that I did get into some pretty serious situations, only I didn’t realize it, and somehow it turned out ok. There was this television cartoon series I loved as a small child—Mr. Magoo. This guy who’s half-blind and always completely in the dark about what’s going on around him, but obliviously escapes unscathed. I was the teen-age-girl version of Mr. Magoo.
But mostly, when I didn’t go to school, I’d head off to a library and find books that seemed interesting and sit and read. I loved the grand reading room in the 42nd Street library. That was where I first read Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. And then I’d wander over to Grand Central Station and hop onto a train back to White Plains, my parents none the wiser. How did I get away with it? The thing was that, as bad as my high school was, it was accredited, which meant that at the end of the school year the students took the New York State Regents exam. And there were these little Barron’s Regents review books, with black-and-yellow covers, and all you had to do was study those and you could do well on the Regents exam. The standards weren’t all that high. In fact, in relatively good high schools—even the White Plains high school that my sisters graduated from—they were excused from taking the Regents exam. It was beneath them.
Did you start thinking about what you were going to do in college?
When I was 15 and a junior in high school, I met a boy who was also Orthodox but already in college and, to my delight, was studying physics. His name was Sheldon Goldstein—actually it still is. It was Shelly who gave me permission to be intellectually ambitious. Until then, I liked studying things on my own just because I did. It was pretty much the most interesting thing I could do with myself, given that I have a limited tolerance for hanging out with people. I studied what I found interesting, but I never imagined it would lead to anything. I don’t think I’d ever been told I was capable of anything beyond getting married and having kids. I certainly didn’t stand out academically in high school, which would have been difficult, considering how seldom I was there. I remember my history teacher reading out the results of the Regents exam and when he got to mine he said, “Rebecca Newberger? Who’s Rebecca Newberger?” When I started college, Shelly said to me, “I expect you to be valedictorian when you graduate.” That was amazing to me, since I wasn’t even sure I belonged in college, as I hadn’t really gone to high school. But Shelly was—is—undeniably brilliant, so his thinking I might have a usable brain gave me confidence.
So, how did you meet Shelly?
I met Shelly in the most unglamorous circumstances imaginable—a kosher hotel in the Catskill Mountains, back when there was a bunch of such hotels, the famous Borscht Belt. The Pioneer Country Club. It was strictly Orthodox and probably not known outside that small circle. It long ago burned down, I think. My older sister was 21 and not yet married. She’d been in several relationships that hadn’t worked out. 21 is teetering on spinsterhood in the world of my family. There was an Orthodox singles weekend being held at a hotel, and my parents wanted Mynda to go, but they didn’t think it was proper for her to go unchaperoned. It was a long weekend because the Sabbath blended into a Jewish holiday, Succoth, and obviously my father, being a cantor, couldn’t absent himself from his job. So they decided to send me along as Mynda’s chaperone. Shelly was staying at the same hotel, not because of the singles weekend but because his family, who were from Augusta, Georgia, had come north to be with him for the holiday. Succoth is the holiday where you build an outside hut, a succah, and have all your meals in it. The hotel had built two succahs, one for the singles and one for families. This is the Orthodox Jewish version of a singles bar. When Mynda and I walked into the singles succah we felt all these guys staring at us in a way that made our flesh crawl. We were both blonde, which made us conspicuous, and Mynda was beautiful. We fled the singles succah for the family succah and happened to sit down at the table with the Goldstein’s of Augusta, Georgia. I remember the first conversation I had with Shelly. There was communal singing going on, Jewish holiday songs, and I remarked to him that this kind of music got on my nerves. He asked me what my favorite music was, and I said the Stones, the Beatles, and Bach. Shelly is a serious guy. He wasn’t impressed by my mentioning the Stones or the Beatles, but Bach made him think I might be worth speaking to.
So, where did you end up going to school? Was it what you expected? Surprises?
I started college at the City College of New York. I hadn’t applied anywhere else, since City College was free, and they had an honors program that I had gotten into. I took physics, of course, and calculus, and some special classes that were designed for the honors students, with excellent professors. I remember my honors class in ancient history and also in English. It was the first time I was with students who had amazingly bright things to say in class. What really impressed me was when they were able to place events into a wider context. I admired that and wondered whether I’d ever be able to do the same.
Then after that freshman year, Shelly and I got married. He’d just graduated from college, and we went off to California, so he could attend grad school in physics at Cal Tech. The plan was for me to go to UCLA, but because I’d applied under my new married name, Goldstein, and my transcripts were under the name Newberger, my application had gotten screwed up. So for the first semester I was just on my own, pretty lost and unanchored in Los Angeles, once again often getting myself, even as an old married woman of nineteen, into Mr. Magoo-type situations. I’d been so excited, that freshman year in college, and then that gap semester was kind of a misery, especially since Shelly was so happily involved with graduate school. He actually was studying with Richard Feynman, whose Introduction to Physics I’d read, on Shelly’s recommendation. And so Feynman was a hero of mine, especially when Shelly would come home and tell me amazing tales of what the great and hilariously funny man said and how he behaved. For example, there was a topless bar in Pasadena that was charged with obscenity, and Feynman had gone to court to testify on the bar’s behalf, saying he did some of his best work there.
haha…so when did you get back on track?
When things got sorted out with the UCLA registrar, I was very happy to find myself again in a classroom. After years of playing hooky in high school, I’d suddenly become the most avid student. But I ended up just finishing out the year at UCLA, and then Shelly and I were heading back to New York. He’d decided to transfer back to Yeshiva University for the rest of his graduate studies. Instead of returning to City College I decided to apply to Barnard College, something I hadn’t dared to do before, given my lack of a high school education. But with (almost) two years of college, I had more confidence.
Barnard College was completely wonderful. I’ll be grateful to them for the rest of my life for accepting me, given my high school experience, or lack thereof. I had all of Columbia University to take courses in, but then at Barnard there were these wonderfully small classes, where I acquired the courage to speak up in class. Before Barnard, I’d been too afraid to ask questions, thinking my lack of understanding probably stemmed from my lack of attending high school. I was always painfully aware that while my classmates had been going to school, learning actual stuff from actually qualified teachers, I’d been traipsing around Washington Square Park informally studying what I called “human nature.”
So, how’d you get into philosophy?
Barnard was where I started taking philosophy courses, which also required gaining courage. Philosophy was, in a way, inimical to the way that I’d been raised. It unsettled the ground under my feet, which was why, though unsettling, it was also thrilling. Barnard’s philosophy department was small and intimate. Mary Mothersill was the chair, and she took me under her wing. There was also the brilliant and enigmatic Sue Larson, with whom I took philosophy of language. Everything about Sue—her clarity and humor and eccentricities—was just mesmerizing to me. If I’d dared, I would have hoped to grow up to be Sue Larson. Another amazing class I took as an undergraduate, this one from across the street at Columbia, was in philosophy of math with Mark Steiner. That was when I first studied Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, which I continued to think about for years, finally writing a book on them. I’d taken quite a bit of math by the time that I took Steiner’s class, but there was always this nagging sense that I didn’t really understand, at some level, what mathematics was really about. My head would hurt whenever I’d try to trace the kind of questions I had. Again, I blamed it on my lack of a high school education. But I came to understand in Mark Steiner’s class that it was problems in philosophy of mathematics that had been bothering me for so long, but which I hadn’t known how to formulate. That’s the feeling I was always getting in philosophy classes—including in a class in epistemology I took my senior year with the legendary Sidney Morgenbesser: ah, this is what’s been bothering me all along, only I haven’t known how to formulate it.
Why did you decide to go to philosophy grad school?
It was Sidney who convinced me to go to graduate school in philosophy. I still was toying with going on in science. Probably not physics, even though I loved it. But living with Shelly, I knew what someone truly gifted in physics was like. But I’d gotten obsessed with what we called in those days “the mind-body problem,” though really it was the problem that David Chalmers would, years later, dub, somewhat ironically, “the hard problem of consciousness.” I hadn’t taken any courses in philosophy of mind, but a course I’d taken with Onora O’Neil, who was then at Barnard, on seventeenth-century rationalism, had brought the hard problem home to me. It was while reading a passage from Hobbes while stalled on a New York subway that I suddenly saw why the kind of reductionism I’d accepted for years as settling the matter didn’t. Once I saw this, it just seemed the most tantalizing problem to pursue. And so what I was vaguely thinking, my senior year, was that maybe, though I’d never taken a single course in it, I ought to try to find a way of going into neuroscience.
So what changed your mind?
Sidney spent some time convincing me that what I was really interested in was philosophy. I remember he had this metaphor. Scientists are like capitalists, he said. As long as the system is working, they don’t ask any questions. But philosophers are the socialists. They question the system in the name of higher values even when it seems to be working. That was a metaphor that made a lot of sense to me. Imagine deciding to go on in philosophy on the strength of a metaphor.
What did your parents make of your decision to go into philosophy?
Since I’d gotten married my freshman year of college and only decided to go into philosophy my senior year, my parents didn’t have any say in the matter. I wasn’t living with them, and they weren’t paying for my education. Fortunately, I had scholarships, and I also worked in the college library. My mother had always been suspicious of my taste for study, no matter what the field was. She was irked when I decided to go on to graduate school and postpone having babies. When I passed 25, she was sure my uterus had just shriveled up into uselessness. Years later, when my oldest daughter was starting college, my mother offered her a hefty bribe to not major in philosophy, saying “Look what it did to your mother.” With such an incentive, Yael of course majored in philosophy, as did her younger sister, Danielle. My father never said anything one way or the other, except for once, when I was an assistant professor. He’d come to my office for some reason and was taken aback to see my nameplate with the title “professor.” I don’t think he’d quite taken in the fact that I was a professor before. And he commented that in Poland, among the intelligentsia, a philosopher was considered a high calling. I thought that was very sweet.
It is! Tell me, were you religious? Are you still religious? If not, what changed?
I had these great struggles with religious belief all through my adolescence, starting at about 13. I was like a character straight out of a Russian novel, hurtling back and forth between faith and doubt. The end of the struggle came when I was taking a class at Barnard on mysticism. I was reading one of the assigned books, The Interior Castle by Saint Teresa of Ávila, and it made me realize how alien the whole idea of God had become to me. I’d been reading in the Barnard library, and I went into the bathroom to cry, because I realized that not only didn’t I have faith, but I no longer had faith in faith. I suppose it was sad for me because accepting my atheism meant accepting how separate I was from the people I loved, including my husband. Still, the terms of the marriage were that I would keep all the Orthodox laws, of which there are a great many, which is quite oppressive when you don’t believe in the premises.
Saint Teresa of Ávila is still my favorite saint.
Where'd you go to grad school?
I applied to four programs for graduate school—Columbia, Harvard, MIT, and Princeton. I got into all four, probably because I had outside funding. I’d gotten a generous fellowship from the National Science Foundation, in philosophy of science. I hadn’t yet taken any philosophy of science and wasn’t exactly sure what its problems were, other than Hume’s problem of induction. But in my physics classes I’d felt those telltale nagging questions that I didn’t know how to formulate, and I figured they were probably philosophical. Quantum mechanics particularly nagged me. Anyway, I was hopeful that concentrating in philosophy of science would help me sort out all the questions I didn’t know how to ask.
I wasn’t sure where to go. At MIT I met with Sylvain Bromberger, who caught on right away that I didn’t know much about philosophy of science. He told me that at MIT they would undertake to begin my education in philosophy of science, and that impressed me and convinced me that I ought to go to MIT. But I ended up going to Princeton instead, since Shelly was doing his post-doctoral work in physics at the Institute for Advanced Study. Princeton turned out not to be a good choice for me.
What was wrong with Princeton?
There were few women grad students, and they tended to work with Margaret Wilson, who was then the sole woman faculty member. But she did history of philosophy, and I had already committed myself, through my funding, to philosophy of science. Anyway, I didn’t want to do history of philosophy.
What was the atmosphere like overall?
There was plenty of sexism at Princeton, both subtle and unsubtle, which was, to say the least, undermining. But more unnerving for me was the sense of being incessantly ranked. With every comment you uttered you had the feeling that you were being assessed as to whether you were a good or bad philosopher. So often I would hear a grad student ask about someone else, “Is he good?” followed by a decisive answer. I’d think, how do people even know such a fact so decisively? What’s the tell? The question of who was good and who wasn’t, of whether I was good or wasn’t: these weren’t the kinds of question I had come to graduate school to think about, but the atmosphere was such that those questions did come to take up mental space. I’ve found that nothing more effectively drains the joy out of thinking.
Silver linings?
My first semester was actually pretty good. I took a seminar on Plato with Gregory Vlastos. It was my first in-depth exposure to Plato and to have it come to me by way of this first-rate Plato scholar was a privilege. I found Plato an absolute trip. And I loved the artistry of the dialogues, the theater of them. That seminar with Gregory Vlastos was a great help when, decades later, I wrote Plato at the Googleplex. And I took the logic course that all the first-year students had to take and did well enough that I was one of the two students invited to take an advanced course, given in the math department for the math grad students. I wanted to take that logic course very much, but it conflicted with the seminar in philosophy of science that Carl Hempel was giving. Hempel had been assigned to me as my advisor, for that first year, and I went to speak to him about the dilemma of what to do about the conflict between his seminar and the logic course. That was the first and last time I sought his advice. He said to me, “Well, this is a serious question. It’s not like you’re asking to take ballet.” That response mortified me, since it made me see myself through this esteemed philosopher’s eyes, one of the last living members of the legendary Vienna Circle, and what I was seeing was a young woman who would be better off studying ballet. I should add that Hempel was known as a kind man, and I’m sure that he was. But it must have been hard for someone of his generation to have an inkling of what it’s like to be a young woman trying to enter a male-dominated field. Hell, there are still men who haven’t a clue.
Anyway, given that I had that NSF, I felt I had no choice but to take Hempel’s seminar, and it was disastrous for me. It turned out that my intuitions in philosophy of science were at odds with everybody else’s, including Hempel’s. My problem, it turned out, was that I was a strong scientific realist—at least I learned that much from the seminar. I now had the term for diagnosing what was wrong with me, but I couldn’t seem to talk myself out of realism. I blame it all on Our Friend the Atom. The paper I gave in Hempel’s seminar was so savagely attacked that I gave up on ever again talking up in a seminar. In fact, I gave up on seminars. We had the option of writing a long paper in lieu of attending a seminar, and I took advantage of the option to satisfy all the rest of the required units. In short, I retreated, and in this way missed out on so much of what is necessary to be trained as a philosopher. I squandered the advantages of being at a place like Princeton, having the kinds of conversations I ought to have been having. I’ll always regret it.
Sorry to hear that. Advice for students who have to deal with sexism and similar challenges?
In a field like philosophy, where success rests primarily on convincing fellow philosophers of the importance of what you have to say—it’s not like math, where you can offer a proof, or the empirical sciences, where predictions can be confirmed—intellectual confidence counts for a great deal. Therefore, the signals that undermine confidence are particularly injurious. Seven years ago, a prominent philosopher told me that, until a few years ago, he had assumed that women could not do philosophy at a high level. I imagine that his attitude manifested itself in myriad ways to the women in the field with whom he interacted over the decades. I imagine too, that he was not alone in his presumptions and that, if anything, he should be commended for his self-reflection, self-honesty, and self-correction. So my dear sisters, as well as brothers belonging to groups deemed to be intellectually lacking, when you’re wondering whether it’s you being overly sensitive in thinking others are signaling that you’re not really up to it, the chances are you’re not being overly sensitive. The chances are it’s not you; it’s them.
Good advice. So, what was your plan, given the uncomfortable situation at Princeton?
I wanted to finish up with graduate school as quickly as possible, but the problem was to find someone to work with. I hadn’t exactly gotten philosophically close to anybody in the department in the two years I’d been there. In fact, I spent more time auditing classes over at the physics department than hanging around with philosophers. I audited John Wheeler’s class in General Relativity and Eugene Wigner’s class in quantum mechanics, both memorable experiences. Wigner once quoted somebody—I can’t remember who—to the effect that philosophy is the creation of a jargon which it then proceeds to abuse. The comment made me laugh, but it also offended me. One of the things I was realizing, mainly by feeling so out of sync with everybody else, was that I was a strong realist about everything—not only about science, but about math and ethics and, most strongly of all, consciousness. I thought consciousness was real (still do) and that the mind-body problem is one doozy of a problem (still do). And then I read Tom Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be A Bat?” and learned not only that he also thought it was a doozy, but that he expressed its dooziness with singular brilliance. He got to the bloody heart of its dooziness. That article made me euphoric, and Nagel was at Princeton. So I screwed up my courage and asked if he’d be my adviser and was happy when he agreed. So at least I can look back on getting to work with Nagel as the one true privilege that I got out of going to Princeton.
I had a similar reaction to that Nagel paper. Hey, weren’t you being paid to study philosophy of science?
Since I was aware of taking money from American taxpayers, because I was ostensibly in philosophy of science, I tried to make my dissertation conform as much as possible. I concentrated on the requirements for reducing one theory to another, using the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics as my model. I also defended structural realism. It was all in the service of arguing for materialism without reductionism, which is a fairly common view now but considered a bit crack pot back then, though fortunately not in the least by Nagel.
What was the job market like when you finished?
I got a tenure-track job offer from Barnard College, which was great, even though it felt odd to go back to the college from which I’d graduated four years before. It was an oddness that invited a strong case of Imposter Syndrome. When I’d graduated college my sense of intellectual ambition had been at an all-time high—I’d even thought, on the basis of nothing, that I could be a neuroscientist—but by the time I came back to Barnard with my Ph.D. I‘d been chastened. I’d never felt less equal to being a philosopher, and I worried that I didn’t know much more than the students I was now tasked to teach. It was a heavy teaching load. I also soon had a newborn, plus a long commute from New Jersey, where Shelly was employed at Rutgers, which he still is.
Surprises?
I did something completely insane for someone who had her heart set on an academic career in philosophy, especially as a woman, meaning someone who really had to do everything right to have any chance of being taken seriously. I published a novel, called The Mind-Body Problem. Becoming a novelist had not been part of my life plan. I loved novels and read far too many of them. But I’d never had the ambition of writing one myself, until the summer that I wrote one. The first sentence had come to me unbidden: “I’m often asked what it’s like to be married to a genius.” I knew somehow it was the first sentence of a novel, and it was intriguing to me to figure out who the woman was who’d spoken that line and what her story was. Shelly was horrified, warning me that I’d ruin my nascent career in philosophy, and obviously he was right, but I didn’t have the ears to hear what he was saying. I was already captured by the project of taking a philosophical problem that seemed to me, as Schopenhauer had called it, the world-knot, and trying to spin a plot and characters out of it. A novel seemed like the perfect medium for exploring the fact that an individual’s subjectivity can’t be completely captured in any objective description, making each of us inaccessible to others. And in writing the novel I got back what I had lost in graduate school, which was the absolute joy of losing myself in thinking.
Love it. How’d you summon the courage to do something so unconventional, from the point of view of contemporary philosophy, at least? I imagine a lot of people would say what Shelly said!
The novelist Jane Smiley recently asked me whether I had to overcome questioning whether I had the right to write such a daring novel, since so many women novelists seem to have to overcome such questions. The answer is no, not in the least. I wasn’t even aware that I was writing something that other women writers would see as daring. What did I know about women writers? Nothing. I had nothing riding on being a novelist, while I had everything riding on being a philosopher, and that’s why I could write that first novel with such complete absorption, with no thoughts of “Am I good enough to do this?” intruding. And that’s just what I needed at that point, in order to rid myself of those paralyzing thoughts and recover what I’d always had before Princeton, which was just finding interesting things to figure out. It was interesting to figure out the characters and plot of the novel, interesting to figure out how to get the philosophy in. And that’s why I was deaf to Shelly’s warnings. But too bad for me because Shelly’s warnings were spot on.
The book was a hit!
The book received attention out in the world. It was a bestseller. And if being a novelist had been something I’d set my heart on then what happened would have been beyond wonderful. It’s hard to feel sorry for that younger me, having a successful novel on her hands. Poor kid, what a problem. But frankly, I didn’t know what to do with that success. Frankly, it embarrassed me. Being dismissed by just about every philosopher I knew—even Mary Mothersill, who had been so supportive of me as a student—meant that the experience I’d had with Hempel, seeing myself through his eyes as someone who should be studying ballet rather than pretending to be a philosopher, felt enlarged, replicated. I didn’t even try to publish the journal articles I’d been working on, based on my dissertation. I accepted the fait accompli of not even being put up by my department for tenure and tried to refashion myself as a novelist.
Terrible! Were your colleagues not happy for you? What was going on there?
There’s a Ranking Theorem that counts for a lot, not only in philosophy but throughout academia. It’s organized by how much brilliance is seen as necessary for success in a given discipline. Its longer name could be ‘Just-How-Smart-Do-You-Have-To-Be-To-Get-Through-The-Door Ranking Theorem’. Mathematics and physics are ranked higher than philosophers—I think this is agreed upon throughout academia—and, at least according to philosophers, all other disciplines rank below philosophy. Producing novels, even if philosophical, ranks way lower than philosophy proper. It’s also generally assumed within academia that a person will engage in the highest ranked activity for which her intelligence equips her. Call this the Smartness Theorem, though its longer name could be ‘Why-Would-You-Devote-Yourself-To-Anything-Else-Than-What-Would-Most-Show-Off-How-Smart-You-Are Theorem’. Together, the Ranking Theorem and the Smartness Theorem entail that a person who sinks to writing novels doesn’t have what it takes to do philosophy. Interestingly, the work of Sarah Jane Leslie and her collaborators demonstrates that something like the Ranking Theorem correlates with the number of women in a discipline. The higher the incidence of the word “brilliance” used by practitioners in a discipline to account for success, the lower the percentage of women.
Right. After all this happened, what was the plan? Ever get over that feeling that you were ‘less than’?
The Mind-Body Problem was published in 1983. The philosopher Renee Weber, who was running the honors program at Rutgers, offered me an adjunct position to teach a seminar in the program. I had by this time come to love teaching philosophy, and my honors students at Rutgers were fantastic. However, it wasn’t a job with a future, and I only kept it up for two years. Meanwhile, I’d published four more works of fiction: The Late-Summer Passion of A Woman of Mind, The Dark Sister, Strange Attractors, and Mazel. Once I’d decided that it was to be novels for me, rather than journal articles, a new world opened up. I could spin out all kinds of plots, generate all kinds of characters. It was a hidden talent, like that wonderful recurring dream I have, when I discover there’s an entirely new wing to my home, rooms and rooms I hadn’t known were there. In some ways I thought of writing fiction as analogous to the thought-experiments in which both philosophers and physicists engage, but in many ways it’s importantly different. You have to create a believable world in which a reader can lose herself and discover things for herself—sometimes things that can startle you as the author. You have to be able to stir up emotions, provoke that amazing capacity we humans possess to step outside of our own perspective and see and feel from another’s. The fact that we can feel our hearts broken in hearing stories, even when fictional, is one of our redeeming features, and though my novels of course don’t work for everyone, that they work for some—or some of them work for some—makes me grateful that I was forced to cultivate this side of myself after publishing my first book. My obsession with trying to imagine what it was like to be a person very different from myself that went all the way back to high school, when I’d be wandering around Washington Square Park rather than going to class, was paying off in my second career—though actually I’ve never really considered it a second career but rather a continuation of being a philosopher.
I’m right there with you, Rebecca! You had children around this time, right? Does having kids inform your philosophy? Do you talk philosophy with your kids?
Of course, I spoke philosophy with my kids. Kids are the most openly philosophical humans there are. My younger daughter, for example, who is now a poet of an emphatically philosophical bent, as a toddler used to protest, whenever you called her by her name, “I’m not Danielle. I’m this!” I tried to get at what her protests were about. As far as I could understand, and as was eventually confirmed as she grew older and more articulate, she was struggling to say something along these lines: “The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world” (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.632). And then of course both my daughters majored in philosophy, so they remain still among the people with whom I most love speaking philosophy. Having been raised on our philosophical dialogues, they are the people who immediately catch what I’m trying to say, as I hope is reciprocally true for them.
Advice for philosophers with kids?
Have someone else in your life who will share the awesome responsibility of seeing to a child’s survival and flourishing. It’s stressful for the responsibility to be unshared. Lacking that, a pile of money would do.
Did Shelly change his tune about your decision to go into literature, in light of your success?
I think he was a bit surprised when he finally got to read The Mind-Body Problem and liked it. He definitely got a kick out of the splash it made in certain circles. He gleefully told me that at a conference in Europe he went to, soon after the book was published, the moderator jokingly introduced him as the spouse of the author of The Mind-Body Problem. Shelly doesn’t make a habit of reading fiction, but he loyally read every novel and short story I ever published.
Overall, was the literary world welcoming?
One day, soon after I’d published Mazel in 1995, I received a phone call from Catherine Stimpson, who was then running the MacArthur Fellowship program, informing me that I was being awarded a MacArthur in the field of literature. My first thought was that this was a prank call. But it wasn’t a prank. I later found out who had nominated me and, as I expected, it wasn’t anyone from the literary world, much less the philosophical world, but rather a physicist. Physicists have always been unaccountably good to me. The MacArthur was a validation that really mattered to me. The citation stressed exactly what I’d most hoped for in my fiction, that it worked on both a literary and philosophical level. It said that I was “a writer whose novels and short stories dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of imaginative storytelling,” and that “they emerge as arguments for the belief that fiction in our time may be the best vehicle for involving readers in questions of morality and existence.” The award made me feel as if what I was doing, though it fell outside of academic philosophy, was nevertheless philosophically worthwhile.
Amazing! How did you end up writing Plato at the Googleplex?
I wrote my next novel, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics (2000), riding the wave of MacArthur-induced confidence. It was a novel written from the point of view of the Bohmian interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it also concentrates on the tension between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. It was not a bestseller. It did, however, get me a wonderful invitation to spend time at the Santa Fe Institute, where I got to be with a lot of physicists, including the late polymath Murray Gell-Mann. I wrote Plato at the Googleplex there, while having conversations with Gell-Mann about Pythagoras, as well as quantum mechanics. He expressed disappointment in me when I said I liked David Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, but frankly to have Gell-Mann say he was disappointed in me felt like a high honor.
Ha! Describe the Sante Fe Institute, for people who are unfamiliar with it.
It’s an independent research institute in the most beautiful setting imaginable, perched in the foothills of the Sangre de Christo Mountains. It gathers together all kinds of thinkers—physicists, economists, biologists, psychologists, computer scientists, anthropologists, linguists—to put their minds to complex systems of every kind, trying to formulate the common mechanisms that govern their evolution and the phenomena of emergence (if indeed emergence exists). I have a picture over my desk in Boston of the sunset coming through the glass windows of the main building of SFI, the mountains in the background, and on the windows mathematical equations scrawled. The windows are used for working out equations. It doesn’t get much better—Beauty, Truth, and maybe even Goodness.
Career highlights, so far?
After I published 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction and was invited to be on the podcast Philosophy Talk, Ken Taylor and John Perry interviewed me as if I were still a member of the tribe, with not a trace of condescension. 36 Arguments, although a novel, has an appendix that formally reconstructs 36 arguments for the existence of God and analyzes their weak points. It was either Ken or John—at that point, I couldn’t yet distinguish their voices—who said that the book was two good books in one, a work of rigorous analytic philosophy in the appendix and also a satisfying novel. I came home from the interview and said to my husband—who’s now Steven Pinker—“Just shoot me. I’ll never be happier.”
Glowing praise. Hey, how'd you meet Steven?
I’d bought his book Words and Rules when it first came out, and the first thing I did was go to the index to look up Stephen Jay Gould, just because those two Steve’s had been arguing with one another in the pages of The New York Review of Books over the legitimacy of evolutionary psychology. Only I didn’t find ‘Gould’ but rather ‘Goldstein, Rebecca.” I assumed it was another Rebecca Goldstein—it’s a common enough name—but no, it was me. I was there because I’d used “stridden” as the past participle of “to stride,”—he quoted the relevant sentence, which was from one of my most obscure books, which nobody I knew had read other than my editor. And he wrote that “stridden” is uncommon and that good writers often favor the more unusual and archaic form of verbs. So that struck me as sweet, not to speak of surprising, since I would never have guessed he knew of my existence. It was several years after that that we met in person, though we’d exchanged a few emails.
A funny thing: Prompted by your question, I just now looked up the past participle of “to stride,” and I see that most dictionaries list “stridden” as the preferred usage, with “strode” as colloquial. So perhaps our whole relationship is based on an error that a copyeditor ought to have caught.
Ha! On a darker note, he's sometimes the target of nasty vitriol on social media. How do you deal?
It’s easy for me to deal because of Steve’s own attitude. He doesn’t take politically motivated criticism or ad hominem arguments to heart. In fact, he finds them to be interesting topics of analysis. He has a healthy capacity not to internalize criticism, which I find mysterious but, as a person who loves him, consoling. I suppose you’d have to have such a capacity—along with many others—in order to have the kind of career he has.
So, did you ever top the Philosophy Talk interview?
In 2015 I received the National Humanities Medal at a ceremony at the White House. President Obama himself put the medal around my neck, and the rumor was that he made the final choice. In the speech he gave before awarding all the medals, in addition to citing my work on Gödel and Spinoza and Plato, he spoke of me as the philosopher who sometimes chooses to write novels. Again, the suggestion that I wasn’t any less of a philosopher for writing novels is what made me the happiest. There are two other philosophers who have received the National Humanities Medal, both named John: John Rawls and John Searle. It’s blindingly obvious that had I remained where I’d always longed to be, safe and accepted within the circle of academic philosophers, there’s no chance that I would have found myself in such company.
Amazing! By the way, how did you end up doing that book on Gödel? It’s really good.
Thank you! W.W. Norton had decided to publish a series of books on scientific topics, to be written not by scientists but, as they put it, people who really know how to write. I was approached to write one of the books, and my first thought was Gödel. In the context of the Norton series, mathematics counted as a science. In fact, at the same time that I was writing my book, the novelist David Foster Wallace (who had spent a year as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard) was writing a book for the series on Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics.
So, why did I choose Gödel? First and foremost, his work is as much philosophical as it is mathematical, and therefore interested me. Secondly, I wanted to write about him because I’d read so many mangling descriptions of Gödel’s work, interpreting his incompleteness theorems as proving that there’s nothing objective about mathematical truths. In fact, David Foster Wallace makes such a claim in his book on Cantor. The truth is precisely the opposite. Gödel was a mathematical realist; he was a passionate Platonist. Interestingly, he credited an Introduction to Philosophy that he’d taken as an undergraduate at the University of Vienna, taught by a Professor Theodor Gomperz, as among the most formative of his life. I believe it was in that class that he was first drawn to Platonism, most especially for its implications regarding metamathematics. Because of that class, he later said, he changed his major from physics to mathematics. Sometime between taking Prof Gomperz’s Introduction to Philosophy and the conference in metamathematics in Konigsberg of 1930, in which he hinted at the Incompleteness Theorems, he had hatched the audacious ambition of coming up with a mathematical proof that had metamathematical implications. At first, he had thought to concentrate on number theory, which makes sense if you want to offer a proof for Platonism. He then switched to logic, presumably having seen its metamathematical possibilities. Not even his dissertation advisor, Hans Hahn, knew what he was up to. His official dissertation was a proof of the completeness of first-order logic. Secretly, he’d found a way to make arithmetical truths simultaneously speak metamathematically. Secretly he’d worked out the extraordinary proof that in any self-consistent formal system rich enough to express arithmetic you could produce a true proposition whose truth cannot be proved within that system (First Incompleteness Theorem). He’d shown that the semantic notion of truth and the syntactic notion of proof could be pried apart. And this brings me to my third reason for being drawn to write a book on Gödel. He was a thinker whose strong intuitions put him at odds with his immediate circle but who found a way to vindicate those intuitions and so to startle his contemporaries out of their dogmatic slumbers.
I love intellectual heretics, especially when they prove to be right.
What did you learn about Gödel, the guy?
One salient aspect of Gödel was his reticence. As a grad student, he sometimes attended the meetings of the Vienna Circle, over which the figure of Wittgenstein hovered like an absent god. Hans Hahn had invited him to attend. Gödel violently disagreed with the logicist view that mathematical truths reduce to tautologies. Of course, he did, being a closet Platonist. But rather than arguing in words—in which he’d never had much faith—he produced a mathematical proof to do his metamathematical talking for him.
Awesome.
Once when he was walking home with the mathematician Karl Menger after a meeting of the Vienna Circle, Menger remarked to him, “Today we have once again out-Wittgensteined these Wittgensteinians: we kept silent,” to which Gödel replied, “The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other.” No wonder he’d hoped that with the clarity of mathematics he could say what he most wanted to say. And how sad for him that the metamathematical import that he’d intended was often ignored, misinterpreted, or explicitly rejected. It increased another aspect of his personality, which can already be heard in his comment to Menger, which was his sense of extreme isolation from almost everybody else. This was particularly true after his best friend Einstein died. They’d both found themselves at the Institute for Advanced Study during WWII.
I once briefly met Gödel at the Institute, at a garden party for newcomers, when I was a grad student and Shelly was at the Institute. It was during a brief three-month period when the reclusive Gödel was enjoying a period of relative gregariousness. The economist Oskar Morgenstern reported gleefully in his journals about Gödel holding court amidst a group of worshipful young logicians. I read the journal entry, when I was writing Incompleteness, and realized that I had been in that group, duly worshipful.
Incredible! Is your first book the clearest expression of your voice as a writer? Was finding your voice, writing about philosophy in an informal, dramatic way, a struggle? I often think this is the natural way to express some of the most interesting and important ideas in philosophy…
I’ve written ten books so far, six of them novels, one a collection of short stories, and three of them non-fiction. Everything I’ve ever written has its own voice. I’m fascinated by voice and how different material requires different voices. I’ve been increasingly interested, when writing non-fiction, to utilize the techniques for voice that I’ve cultivated as a novelist. So, for example, in the last few pages of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity I switch to a first-person narrative of Spinoza’s life, trying to present, from the inside as it were, the points I’d tried to establish in the bulk of the book as to what his formative experiences had been.
In my last book Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away I experiment with Platonic dialogues, interspersed among the expository chapters. The expository chapters explain Plato’s thoughts and how they evolved, and also try to answer such questions as: why was it the Greeks who invented philosophy, and why did the Athenians, who prided themselves on their free expression and creativity, end up sentencing to death the freely expressive and creative figure of Socrates? The interspersed dialogues are set in our day and feature Plato himself discussing, for example, whether ethical questions can be answered through crowdsourcing and whether cognitive and affective neuroscience has answered the problems of free will and moral accountability. These dialogues presented unique difficulties for voice, as you can imagine.
I’d only decided to add on those dialogues as an afterthought, to dramatize the relevance to contemporary issues of questions that Plato had first raised—and also to add a bit of fun, for both me and the reader. I hadn’t thought of those dialogues as the meat of the book but only its seasoning, but the reviewers fixated on those dialogues to the exclusion of all else. One of the few exceptions was Colin McGinn, who reviewed Plato at the Googleplex in the Wall Street Journal and paid careful attention to the expository chapters, for which I remain grateful. Anthony Gottlieb’s review in the Sunday New York Times missed everything and was sexist to boot. He described both my books on Spinoza and on Plato as “love letters,” a kind of belittlement one would lodge only against a woman philosopher. If you’re a writer you soon get used to not-so-hot reviews—you’d better!—but I’d never received such an overtly sexist one. McGinn, whom I barely know, wrote to me about the Gottlieb review, explaining what he thought was going on. I thought that was extremely kind of him.
How did your conception of philosophy evolve in the process of writing the books? Or was writing the books just about expressing your pre-existing views?
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity was written roughly at the same time as Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel , and it, too, had been the result of an editor approaching me to write a book for his new series, this one featuring books on Jewish figures or Jewish themes. I originally rejected the proposal to contribute to the series, as it seemed too parochial to me. The editor took me out to lunch, and we discussed my reservations. Over the course of the lunch I said that the only philosopher of Jewish origins who interested me was Spinoza, but to write about Spinoza from a sectarian point of view would be a betrayal of him (hence the title), since he was an apostle of universalism. The editor responded that I showed so much passion concerning why Spinoza didn’t belong in the series that he was convinced I had to write the book. (This editor has a penchant for paradox.) In the course of writing the book, I came to think that Spinoza’s experiences in growing up in 17th-century Jewish Amsterdam, in a community of refugees from the Inquisition, had a great deal to do with making him the radical thinker he was—so radical as to seed the European Enlightenment which flowered a hundred years after his death. The Jewish community of Spinoza, in which he received his only formal education, consisted of people reclaiming Judaism after having been living as so-called New Christians in Portugal, where, as in Spain, Judaism had been outlawed. Some of the Amsterdam Jews had even formerly been priests, and they all had relatives back in Portugal, still living outwardly as Christians, no matter their beliefs. Consequently, it was a community obsessed with the nature of Jewish identity. Seeing the obsession with identity with which Spinoza had been surrounded helped me to see that the nature of personal identity was at the core of Spinoza’s preoccupations, pushing him to become the radical thinker he was, arguing that, to the extent that we’re rational, which is what we ought to be, we all share the same identity. And my thoughts about Spinoza clarified for me a general insight about philosophy, namely that it’s not something that’s done, as philosophers like to pretend, in isolation from the larger story of who a philosopher is as a person and the forces that have made him or her that person. The philosophical can’t be neatly sliced away from the personal. Philosophers, qua philosophers, are as embedded in their stories as anybody else. Believing this, am I in danger of committing the genetic fallacy? Only if I fail to keep in mind Reichenbach’s distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. That personal story I’m so interested in belongs to the context of discovery.
Reminds me of Kuhn. Paradigm choice can’t be determined by reason and experiment alone! One reason I’m interested in these interviews. Could you explain your thesis that some philosophical convictions are under-determined by reason and experience?
This is an idea that connects up with the point that the philosophical can’t be neatly sliced away from the personal. Philosophical problems generally can’t be definitively answered by way of empirical evidence, though empirical evidence is often highly relevant, nor through pure reason, though reason is always highly relevant. And yet we have convictions regarding these problems. The space between grounds and convictions is filled with intuitions. So much is pretty accepted in philosophy and is consistent with, for example, the Humean point of view. After he finishes showing how some proposition, fundamental to our making sense of the world, can’t be justified through either a priori or a posteriori reason, Hume always follows up with the next question: why do we nevertheless continue to emphatically believe the unjustifiable proposition? And he answers that second question in terms of psychology—in his case an associationalist psychology. But whereas Hume is indicating the philosophical relevance of intuitions that we all share—for example that the future will be like the past or that there’s this extra thing, the self, in addition to the bundled experiences—I’m interested in the way that individually-variable intuitions are in active play in philosophical thinking. I’m interested in the kind of core intuitions that would be the last thing that an individual would give up in the face of recalcitrant experience. I think that’s one of the most interesting questions you can ask people. I often do, and you get quite a variety of answers. These individually-variable intuitions are expressions of individual character; they speak to a person’s entire orientation toward reality. They speak to the larger story of who that person is. I developed this theme in the Tanner Lectures in Human Values that I gave at Yale in 2012.
What's the last thing you would give up in the face of recalcitrant experience? I'm officially adding this question to my repertoire!
Oh, I’m glad! The last thing I would give up in the face of recalcitrant experience is the reality of experience.
How have cultural trends influenced your life and worldview?
Nothing has more consumed me over the years than the different ways people find to secure their own sense of mattering, a requisite for well-being, by undermining others’ sense of mattering. I think that this dynamic is key to understanding a great deal about politics, widely understood. It’s key to understanding, for example, what makes the #BlackLivesMatter movement necessary, and it’s key to understanding what makes the #MeToo movement necessary. It’s key to why the movement to support LGBTQ rights is necessary, as well as movements confronting ableism, ageism, classicism, talentism, and all the other ways we’ve found to undermine the sense of mattering of some so that others can feel chuffed about mattering more.
How have your thoughts on religion evolved?
For some years I’ve been somewhat involved with what I call organized non-religion. There are a great many pro-science-and-reason organizations in the U.S. that also have an emphatic anti-religion slant. After Shelly and I split up in 1999, it was such a relief to no longer be bound to Orthodoxy. It was such a relief to be able to just come out and say that I’m an atheist. It was such a relief to express the moral horror I feel when someone says that without God there can’t be any reason to be moral. I happily accepted invitations to speak at these organizations, which started coming in after Betraying Spinoza was published.
Not everything about organized non-religion pleases me. It’s overwhelmingly male, and there is an undercurrent of misogyny that sometimes surfaces. There is also, among some, a misunderstanding of how complicated religious life can be. It was my involvement with organized non-religion that prompted me to write 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. There’s that appendix, of course, but I meant the appendix to be in tension with the novel, in which I try to suggest that some of the same emotions that get expressed in religious contexts, often leading to absurd behavior, also get expressed in strictly secular contexts, leading to equally absurd behavior. Being a non-believer is no proof against being irrational.
Nevertheless, there are many pro-secularism organizations with which I continue to feel allied—including, among my favorites, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which goes after any encroachments on the Establishment Clause’s wall between church and state with lawsuits. FFRF has got its hands filled right now, under the Trump regime.
But then all the movements I support have got their hands full right now; they’re all under attack. I’m always thinking of something that Michelle Obama said to me, when we were saying goodbye. My family was of course with me at the White House, and so she’d met my two daughters, who had worked fulltime for the first Obama campaign. I was thanking her for all that she and her husband were doing for the country. “Well, tell your daughters to get to work again,” she said, “because we’re in danger of losing everything.” That was September, 2015.
Why do you think there is that undercurrent of misogyny in organized-nonreligion? It's so puzzling! Maybe it's a historical accident?
Oh, I agree with Kate Manne that misogyny, properly understood, is widespread. Or more precisely, the preconditions for its being provoked are widespread. Almost wherever one is on the mattering map, whatever it is that matters to you, there’s the general presupposition that the men there matter more than the women do. You can be a chef among chefs, a novelist among novelists, a nerd among nerds. The general presupposition is where the tiresomely common behavior known as mansplaining comes from (and what a stroke of genius is was to put a name to the behavior). The general law of misogyny is: you defy the presupposition, you provoke misogyny. Anything that hits a person in the place where he assesses his own mattering is bound to provoke a strong reaction, so it’s not surprising to see the ugly forms the reactions take. It’s all over the mattering map, and the men who don’t buy into the presupposition, not on any level, are the shining exceptions. I just read a piece in the Washington Post by Devereaux Peters, a WNBA player, about how random men are constantly challenging her to play one-on-one, saying stuff like, “you’re a pro, but I bet I can smoke you on the court.” When she’d take up the challenge then, as soon as the guy would realize that he’d badly underestimated her, he’d begin pushing and playing dirty, so that she often got injured. She has this one line: “There’s something about basketball that activates men’s egos.” I read that and thought, “Oh, Devereaux, you don’t get around much on the mattering map.”
Are the internet and philosophy a good mix?
I think of the internet, at its best, as the ultimate agora that would have delighted Socrates, bringing together all manner of people in discussion. At its worst, it reminds me of the mob that sentenced Socrates to death.
It's funny how important acceptance is to many of us, even those who would never care to admit it. Yet, it seems like it shouldn't matter...we should be independent thinkers! But still, if we didn't care what others thought, it might be difficult to identify our mistakes. So, when should we care what others think?
Actually, that’s one of the questions I’m considering in the book I’m working on now, which is called The Mattering Map: Where We Amuse, Abuse, Impress, Perplex, and Horrify Each Other. The short answer is that we all of us want to matter. A sense of mattering is a significant aspect of well-being--not necessarily desiring to matter in some transcendent cosmic sense (which is religious) and not necessarily desiring to matter more than others (which is obnoxious), but rather mattering at least enough to justify all the energy and attention that goes into pursuing a human life. We can’t help mattering to ourselves; it’s the conatus that’s baked into our identity—just as Spinoza said—but we want some affirmation beyond that self-mattering. How we seek that affirmation depends on what matters to us. What matters situates us in a specific domain of the mattering map, and many mattering domains have mattering adjudicators. That’s true for almost all academic fields, and it’s true for artistic fields as well. The mattering-adjudicators may be faulty—think of what happened to Vincent van Gogh or to the physicist David Bohm, about whom Robert Oppenheimer said “If we can’t refute him, we’ve got to agree to ignore him”—but there you are: you’re in a mattering-domain where there are adjudicators. Van Gogh and Bohm were made miserable by their respective faulty adjudicators. But in the majority of cases I bet adjudicators are useful. After all, there are many delusional people who think they’re doing groundbreaking work when they’re not, and it might be better for them to emigrate to a different domain on the mattering map. It’s different for those who are in mattering domains without adjudicators. As an example, think of those who seek their mattering by accumulating wealth. Their net worth speaks for itself. There are various domains that are like that, where what you do in seeking your mattering speaks for itself. I know a professional poker player who knows his precise ranking, making adjudicators irrelevant. How much acceptance of others matters to a person is largely a function of what matters to her.
Good stuff. Best philosopher you disagree with most?
If you had to, how would you define philosophy? Why should people study it?
It’s the attempt to get our bearings, as broadly and systematically as possible. People should study it because everybody’s trying, as best they can, to get their bearings.
Favorite books?
My favorite novel is George Eliot’s Middlemarch. She was Spinoza’s first English translator, and it shows in her writing. She’s a great ethicist who disagreed with Spinoza on one major issue: the role of the imagination in the moral life. The book that’s had the biggest impact on me is probably Spinoza’s Ethics.
What was your election night like in 2016? The day or week after?
I was in high anxiety throughout the election of 2016. I wasn’t lulled by the polls. I didn’t—and don’t—think of Trump as an aberration but an indication of profound systemic political/moral problems. His nomination was itself such an abomination that I was prepared for the worst. I’d spent election day as I always do since moving to Massachusetts in 2005, which is in New Hampshire, a swing state, going door-to-door, urging Dems to vote. I came back filled with foreboding—unlike in 2012 and 2008 when I was buoyant. I was supposed to meet Steve at a “celebratory” party, but I called him and said I was too depressed, so he decided to come home and watch the returns with me. He was still in a good mood when he walked through the door, telling me that all the people at the party—Harvard’s best and brightest—were still confident. By then I was comatose. He soon joined me in despair—probably worse for him since it was mixed with disbelief.
Who are you rooting for in 2020?
I’m rooting for anyone who can beat that abomination. I’m hardly a fan of Biden but will celebrate big time if he wins 2020. But where’s my heart? It’s with my senator, Elizabeth Warren.
What do you do in your spare time nowadays?
I’m afraid that I mostly devour political news, and that isn’t pleasant. As an insomniac, I listen to podcasts to try to get me to sleep, only now I listen primarily to political podcasts, which is insane. To console myself I also read history, to learn about other dark periods and what worked to lift the darkness.
Last meal?
Melons of every kind, and mangoes and papayas and strawberries, all of them at their most perfect and intense.
If you could ask an omniscient being one question, and be sure you were going to get an honest, comprehensible, answer, what would it be?
It would depend on my mood. If I were feeling philosophical then it would be my old obsession: how do the laws of nature, acting on the matter of the brain, produce consciousness? But if I was feeling more practical, it would just be: how do we make people behave better toward one another?
[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]