The Mattering Instinct: Human Drive, Strategies, and Ethical Pitfalls

Key Quotes

"The core approach is curator, not essayist. You are: A curator presenting selected highlights with brief notes. You are NOT: An essayist synthesizing material into coherent analysis. Present separate pieces that each stand alone. Stop building cumulative arguments."

This quote establishes the fundamental directive for the output: to act as a curator of key points rather than an essayist who synthesizes information. The emphasis is on presenting distinct, self-contained pieces that highlight important aspects of the text without attempting to build a continuous, overarching argument.

"The reason why i wanted to have a symposium on moving naturalism forward is that especially at that time 2012 there was still a lot of public discussion about atheism versus religion and the public discussion was uh it took different forms from different directions but a lot of it was you know the atheistic side the naturalistic side just explaining how bad religion was in various ways and i was on that side but i always felt that that was the easy part of the whole discussion to have we needed to not only discuss why the world is naturalistic at heart but all of the problems with naturalism all of the not reasons to disbelieve it but the unanswered questions that we really needed to address."

Sean Carroll explains his motivation for organizing a symposium on naturalism, highlighting a perceived gap in public discourse. He argues that while debunking religion was a common focus, the more crucial task was to address the challenges and unanswered questions inherent to naturalism itself. This suggests a need for deeper philosophical engagement beyond simple refutation.

"The fact that we human beings conceptualized things in terms of mattering in terms of what matters to us and how we matter to other people and things and ideas is part of what makes us specifically human it's both what helps us in many ways it provides purpose and meaning to our lives and it hurts us in certain ways if we feel that we don't matter for one way but also if we want other people's idea of what matters to line up with ours and to say that only our idea of what matters is what's important."

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein posits that the human capacity to conceptualize "mattering" is a defining characteristic of our species. She explains that this instinct provides purpose and meaning but also serves as a source of conflict when individuals or groups insist their definition of what matters is the only valid one. This dual nature of mattering, as both a unifier and a divider, is central to her argument.

"The word mother was first and the word matter came later yes yes yes all right so here's you so it's an interesting story it's a full etymological story so aristotle wanted this word for what we call matter the stuff the basic stuff and you know contra his or pacha his mentor plato who thought real being is in the forms he said you know with kind of stuff informed you know and that's how a thing is made there is this what we call matter but there was no such word and so he used the word for in ancient greek for wood highly and it and it but just think of it as he thought of it as pure potentiality having no characteristics of its own it was just pure passive receptivity the latin translators of aristotle didn't want to use the word wood and they were trying to come up with a concept for pure receptivity passive formless receptivity and they just grabbed hold of the metaphor of motherhood because according to them following aristotle the master women have no role to play in conception other than being pure passive receptivity for the informing male and and of course this stood to reason because aristotle thought that what women were his definition of women were people who failed to be men so so to me this is such an amazing story because the very word we use for the stuff of the universe that you physicists study right is and the verb that we in english have derived from it the verb to matter to be worthy of attention has written into it the ancient and still ongoing view among some people that men matter more than women so what a story that is a great story."

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein delves into the etymology of the word "matter," tracing it back to Aristotle's concept of "hyle" (wood) and its Latin translation, which drew a metaphor from motherhood. She highlights how the philosophical concept of matter as passive receptivity, combined with ancient views on gender roles, embedded a historical bias into the very word used to describe the fundamental stuff of the universe and the concept of "mattering." This etymological exploration reveals a deep-seated, potentially problematic, historical perspective within the language itself.

"The four types of mattering that i have come in contact with is what i call transcendent mattering or cosmic mattering and that is sort of religious spiritual the a metaphysical belief that there is some author of one's being who created you for a purpose and and and you matter to that being otherwise he or it wouldn't have created you but you know he may very well be judging you and you better do what he wants you know so that's yeah right and i was born into that you know i come from a orthodox jewish family and i believed that for the first 12 years of my life that that kind of mattering and i used to pray three times a day i mean i was even though women aren't required to but of course i'm in you know i i took it to the extreme you know but so there's transcendent mattering there's social mattering and that is mattering to others and there are those who i call intimate socializers and they're the belonging belongingness and and the mattering instinct are collapsed into one it's to matter to those who are in one's life okay and that is and that's what mattering means and an awful lot of people are of this type and it you know and they're not necessarily doing it right you know though the advice columns are filled with people who you know are doing it all wrong you know my mother always says you know you're not you know you want to run my life and blah blah blah you know and so yeah so it's not necessarily doing it right and then there are the non in what i call the non intimate socializers and that's like you know wanting to matter to hordes of strangers you might be a call leader or you might be a fame seeker or you know something of this sort but that is you so it doesn't have to be people who are in your life you know just tons of people paying attention to you so these are the social socializers then there are heroic strivers that sounds like a good one to be yeah i mean not necessarily easy not necessarily nothing's easy really but it's yeah it's hard to be it's hard to be human i think that's my major takeaway it is hard to be human you know to be trying to not only live according to the laws of nature that have shaped us but to prove to ourselves that we're worthy right that we matter right we matter yeah that's right and so if it's a real burden and so but heroic strivers have some standard of excellence in mind it could be intellectual it could be artistic it could be athletic