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The Mattering Instinct
How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us
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Brief Description
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein argues that the need to matter 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 stories of people pursuing their unique mattering projects: the ragtime genius...
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The Mattering Instinct
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A paradigm-shifting work that explores humanityβs most fundamental desire
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Description
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein argues that the need to matter 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 stories of people pursuing their unique mattering projects: the ragtime genius Scott Joplin, whose dedication to his ignored masterpiece, Treemonisha, ended in tragedy; an impoverished Chinese woman who rescued abandoned newborns; and a skinhead who as a young man dealt racial violence to feel he mattered but ultimately renounced that past.
These portraits illuminate how our instinct for significance shapes identity, relationships, culture and conflictβand they point the way to a future where we might see there is enough mattering to go around. Deeply revealing and insightful, The Mattering Instinct is for those curious about why we seek to matter to ourselves and othersβand how this insatiable longing that drives us apart may be the key to understanding each other.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781324096856
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Ltd
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 13 January 2026
Country: United States
Imprint: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Illustration: 1 map; 7 images
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 28.0mm
Width: 160.0mm
Height: 236.0mm
Weight: 598g
Pages: 352
About the Author
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 βGeniusβ grant and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Whiting Institute, Radcliffe Institute, and the National Science Foundation. In 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
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