The One You Feed - Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Episode Date: March 22, 2016This week we talk to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein about the relevance of philosophy in today's worldRebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American philosopher who is also a novelist and public intellectu...al. She is the author of ten books, many of which cross the divide between fiction and non-fiction. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton.Her latest book is called Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, an exploration of the historical roots and contemporary relevance of philosophy. In the book Plato is brought to life in the 21st century and demonstrates the relevance of philosophy by arguing with contemporary figures such as a software engineer at Google headquarters, a right-wing talk show host, an affective neuroscientist, and others.Goldstein is a MacArthur Fellow, has won the National Jewish Book Award, and numerous other honors. In September of 2015  she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in a ceremony at the White House. In This Interview, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and I Discuss:The One You Feed parableWinning a National Humanities Medal and meeting President ObamaCultivating the positive emotionsHer latest book Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go AwayWhat Plato would say about the Parable of the Two WolvesPlato's Parable of Two HorsesWhy virtue is good for usThe story of Socrates deathThe most famous sound bite in the last 2500 years For more show notes and a free download of the best quotes from Plato at the Googleplex visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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We deceive ourselves with highfalutin reasons that aren't the real reasons.
We're hiding the real reasons.
Welcome to The One You Feed.
Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.
Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet,
for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious,
consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other
people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
I'm Jason Alexander.
And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast
is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like
why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,
what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?
We have the answer.
Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast,
or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein,
an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual.
She is the author of 10 books, many of which cross the divide between fiction and nonfiction.
Her latest book is called Plato at the Googleplex, Why Philosophy Won't Go Away.
The book is an exploration of contemporary relevance of philosophy.
Goldstein is a MacArthur Fellow, has won the National Jewish Book Award,
and numerous other honors. In September of 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by
President Obama in a ceremony at the White House. To get a free download of Eric's favorite Rebecca
Goldstein quotes, go to oneufeed.net slash Rebecca. And here's the interview with Rebecca
Neuberger Goldstein. Hi, Rebecca. Welcome to the show. with Rebecca Neuberger-Goldstein.
Hi, Rebecca. Welcome to the show.
Hi, Eric.
I'm happy to have you on to talk about your latest book, Plato at the Googleplex,
Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, and also to talk with you a little bit about the fact that you just won a National Humanities Medal, which was presented to you by the President at the White House.
Can you talk a little bit about what that was like and then the ceremony itself?
You know what it reminded me of was in the Iliad, when a warrior is in great danger and he's about
to be killed and the God who favors that particular warrior just sort of swoops down
and picks him up and puts him someplace on some beautiful,
tranquil field. And he looks around and he's like, what just happened to me? And that's what
it felt like. It was just somebody swooped down and picked me up. And then I was back in my life and thinking, what just happened to me?
I can't believe this happened to me.
So, yeah, it was a kind of transcendent experience.
Yeah, I bet.
Well, congratulations.
That's really a big deal.
It was great.
And I have to say that the fact that it was, I don't want to get political, but the fact that it was that particular president meant a great deal to me.
Yeah. Yeah, that sounds amazing. Well, our podcast is called The One You Feed,
and it's based on the parable of two wolves, where there is a grandfather who's talking
with his grandson, and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
One is a good wolf,
which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf,
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks
about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that
parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I certainly am a great believer that
there are certain emotions in us that we ought to cultivate and enlarge and others that we should
try to shrink as much as possible. I was interested in the parable, as you just told it,
because they're both called wolves,
and wolves are usually thought of as, I don't know,
it's kind of not particularly lovable beasts,
very, very clever beasts, but not particularly lovable, not like dogs.
You know, that they're both called wolves.
lovable, not like dogs, you know, that they're both called wolves. And I do think that actually those negative emotions are more, they are more wolf-like and they're more voracious. They're
very strong and that it's very easy to let things like, you know, resentment and anger and hatred overtake you, and it's much harder to cultivate and to enlarge the loving wolf emotions.
Gratitude is another one that I would put there on the list.
I think that's a very, very strong, a very important emotion to cultivate, gratitude.
And that can be more difficult,
especially to make them grow
so that they're not just directed to the people
who are genetically connected with us,
our own family and tribe and kin,
but the world at large.
That's very, very hard.
But one of the things I was thinking about
was that they're both wolf-like in the sense that they can, you know, they can take you
over. They can kind of eat you up. And what we want is for the loving, ennobling, grateful
emotions to take over one's personality as much as possible.
But that's hard.
I think one has a bigger appetite than the other, frankly.
It certainly seems to be, and it seems there's plenty of the bad wolf food kind of laying around.
It really is.
You know, and it's probably an evolutionary legacy that we are very devoted to ourselves, our own will to survive, and for our own kin to survive.
And we have natural feelings of empathy towards those who are very close to us.
But it's much harder to feel it for the world at large.
And that takes real effort.
So one seems to just sort of naturally be there,
and the other takes great effort.
Yeah, we had a guest who said that the good wolf
was kind of the runt of the litter for him,
which made sense to me,
that that one takes a little bit more effort to feed.
So your latest book is called Plato at the Googleplex. And it's pretty
clever in that what you do is you basically cast Plato into a bunch of modern settings. One of them
is, you know, going to Google and the other is going to a book reading like we were just talking
about before the show. And so if I were to be able to get Plato on the show, which would really be
quite a guest, they'd have to feature us on iTunes
if we had Plato, I'm pretty sure. If we were able to get Plato on, what do you think he would have
to say about the parable? Plato would have a lot to say about this parable. I mean, in some sense,
this is exactly what he was most concerned with, which was, how do we nourish what's good in us,
which was how do we nourish what's good in us and how do we starve what's not good in us? And he believed that it was reason, that it was the kind of philosophical reason and ethical, moral thinking
that he was trying to develop the various techniques for that,
for seeing our way clear of our innate selfishness and self-centeredness.
He knew it as well as we did.
He didn't have the benefits of knowing about evolutionary psychology,
but he knew.
He was a great observer of human nature,
and he knew that there was a great tendency in human nature
to be self-centered,
to be egotistical, to be greedy, to be angry, to be resentful.
And in fact, he actually used, oh, you know what?
He uses a parable that features two animals, not wolves, but two horses and a charioteer.
So there's this chariot, and it's being pulled by two horses,
and one is good and noble and can be easily controlled by the charioteer,
and the other is wild and lustful and wants what it wants.
It's only aware of its own desires.
And there's that charioteer, which is, you know, one's controlling self,
trying to rein in the bad horse and goad on the good horse.
And so it's very similar, actually. So he's very concerned with this.
And you could actually say that he was developing philosophy, and he really is, in some sense,
the founder of the Western tradition of philosophy. He was trying to answer precisely this question,
how do we reign in what's bad in us and cultivate what's good in us. And he felt it was reason. And it was trying
to gain perspective, trying to gain some sort of objectivity over one's own life and understanding
the nature of virtue, what it is and why it's good for us and why it's good for all of us,
and why it's good for us, and why it's good for all of us,
you know, why it's good for society as a whole.
So this is really the roots of Western philosophy,
lies in trying to answer precisely the question that you're posing. Yeah, the subtitle of the show is
Conversations About Creating a Life Worth Living,
and that idea of a life worth living, you have it in the book many times,
that that's what Plato was concerned with.
Exactly. So, you know, he was very much under the influence of Socrates, and so much so that, you know, Plato wrote in dialogue forms, which is wonderful because it's art.
great philosophy, but it's great art. It's kind of philosophical drama, and there's really, there are sort of, you know, real characters and almost real stories that run through a lot of them.
But he features Socrates, who was this eccentric character in ancient Athens. In almost all of the
dialogues, we have 26 of his dialogues, and in 25 of the 26, Socrates is often the main character.
Sometimes he takes a more marginal position, but he's often the main character.
And one of the earliest dialogues is Plato's presentation of Socrates' defense,
his apology, because he was brought up on charges, capital charges, of having
challenged the gods and been impious and corrupting the youth. And in the apology that Plato gives
us, Socrates utters what is probably the most famous soundbite in, you know,
2,500 years of Western philosophy, which is that the unexamined life is not worth living. hey y'all i'm dr joy harnon bradford host of therapy for black girls and i'm thrilled to
invite you to our january jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal
growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community
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it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket,
it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about
beauty is so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were,
how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little
bit of past, present and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity.
It can be something that you love.
All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready.
Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple
Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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And I'm Peter Tilden.
And together on the Really Know Really podcast,
our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like
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Let's work our way back to how Socrates got himself into that position. And it's going to be sort of a long journey, but I think we're going to come right back to this point in a minute.
One of the things that you talk about in this book and in some of your other books is this idea that as humans, we have this incredible will to matter.
You talk less about meaning and about the fact that we are desperate to feel like our very short time on this earth actually matters in some way.
And you sort of play off of a couple different ways that we as humans go about that.
And you talk about the Greek approach to mattering, which we'll follow down the road here back to Socrates.
But you also talk about, at the same time, the Hebrews were coming up with a different approach to mattering.
And you say that Western society has kind of bounced back and forth between those two ever since.
Can you explain a little bit about each of those approaches to mattering?
Yeah, so it's really amazing because in this period that we're talking about,
when the Greeks are inventing philosophy,
there's a tremendous kind of normative ferment in a large part of the world.
So there's the Hebrews across the Mediterranean
who are quietly at this point working out their own view
as to what it is to live a life worth living,
a life that matters, that features.
Eventually, they come round to the idea of one God.
It takes a while.
But of one God who created the physical universe without and the moral universe within.
And to live a life that matters is to live as he wants you to live.
So, you know, the beginnings of a real supernatural answer to this question of what it is to live a life that matters. And the Greeks, even before philosophy, even going back, I argue, to the Homeric times, to the Iliad and the
Odyssey, although their society was filled with gods, it was a polytheistic society,
when it came to asking this kind of question,
what is it to spend one's short time here in a way that matters,
they didn't look to their gods.
They actually gave a very human answer to it.
It was to do something outstanding.
You see this in the Homeric Code. I call it the ethos of the extraordinary, to do something so that you don't really want to impress the gods.
In fact, if you attract too much of the attention of the gods, something bad usually happens,
you know, a rape or a murder or something pretty bad usually.
So you really don't want to attract too much attention from the gods.
What you want is to really wow others so that your name will live on.
This idea of doing something glorious, and the word for glory was kleos, to do something
glorious so that you would win fame. And that also was the word for glory was kleos, to do something glorious so that you would win fame.
And that also was the word kleos.
So the glory and the fame,
the measure of the glory is the fame,
to have your name on other people's lips
so that it won't be as if you had never been.
This was how they saw living a life that matters.
And that kind of propped up, you know, certainly the Athenian society, and you're saying far more than that, in that it created a group of people who were very, very focused on being exceptional, a lot of competition, a lot of striving that made some of this civilization possible.
But then Socrates comes in and he sort of turns that on its head.
Exactly.
So, yeah, I mean, you know, so the Greeks, I mean, they were amazing, right?
They created a culture that, you know, still makes our jaws drop.
And they were quite impressed with themselves also.
But they're, you know But they're highly competitive.
They were divided into many different city-states, and they would compete with one another. I mean,
the Peloponnesian War was fought between the two leading city-states, Sparta and Athens. It was a highly competitive society. They would compete at theater, they would compete in war, they would
compete in rhetoric, and they competed in thinking, too. So, you know, it was,
there are many parallels between their society and our society. So when Socrates gets around to
considering this question of what is it to live a, you know, a life worth living, a life that matters.
Again, he's very Greek in the sense that he doesn't bring the gods into it.
It's nothing like the monotheistic answer that the Hebrews are working on.
But it is an answer in terms of achieving something great. So in that sense, he's also very Greek.
But the greatness has nothing to do with impressing others.
It has to do with achieving real knowledge and achieving real virtue,
figuring out what is just and what is good and doing it.
And you may not impress your fellow citizens.
And the proof is, of course, that Socrates didn't impress his fellow citizens.
Well, he did many of them.
He certainly impressed Plato and many other thinkers,
but he didn't impress his fellow Athenian citizens.
You know, they sentenced him to death, and then they voted him guilty,
and then they voted him that he deserved to die, and he died by hemlock.
And so it is, in some sense, a very Greek answer.
It's not in terms of the gods or God.
It's in terms of what we can achieve, and it takes all of our work. It's very, very hard,
but it's not measured in terms of the acclaim that we win.
It's really more in our character.
In our character and our mind, you know. It is a good thing to know more, and it is a good thing to
be a good person, yes. And that, you know, depending on the society you live in,
that may not be valued, but it is of value. And that's where he, Plato and Socrates, too,
really diverged from the rest of their society. Yeah, you say that Socrates is presented as
asserting something so radical that his hearers think it has to be a joke.
He would, he says, rather be treated unjustly than treat others unjustly,
which sounds, at least for that time, right, a crazy thing to say.
No, absolutely.
And so this is, well, he says it in various places,
but he says it very, very strongly in a dialogue called the Gorgias,
and that he would far more rather be the victim of a tyrant, imprisoned and tortured, than
be the tyrant who has ultimate power and can do anything he wants, because that tyrant
and his power, what seems like power, is simply
destroying himself. He's destroying his soul. He is not living a life worth living. He is wasting
his brief time here on Earth by committing injustice. And I think it's an extraordinary message. It's one I believe in very, very strongly.
And it's one I think that still sounds shocking, you know, that when you say, look,
you know, I wouldn't want to have all this power if what I did with this power was pursue,
you know, silly things or even unjust things, inflict injustice on others,
then I'd rather be powerless.
Right, and that is certainly a statement very out of vogue
in most of today's world.
You came up with this idea that you called the will to matter,
and you came up with a concept actually in a fictional book,
but of something called the mattering map.
What is a mattering map?
This idea of a mattering map, which is caught on, I hadn't realized that it's been used in
all sorts of contexts, even behavioral economics. I had first proposed it in my very first book,
which was a novel. It was called The Mind-Body Problem, and it was published in 1983,
so a very long time ago.
And I came up with both these ideas of the will to matter and the mattering map
because I'd written this novel about this young woman,
and my editor at that time said to me,
you know, I don't understand Renee Foyer. This is this character.
She's so beautiful and, you know, she's so sorrowful and she's so bright and she's so
miserable. She's always on the verge of despair. Why? And I thought about this, you know, what was
it about this character? And I realized she didn't feel like she mattered, that she wanted to matter
in a particular way. And that's the idea of the mattering map, that we all want to matter.
We don't want it to be the case that, you know, it makes no difference that we lived,
you know, that if we hadn't shown up for our existence, it would have made no difference
at all.
Sometimes it's a terrible thought to us, maybe even more terrible than the thought
of death itself.
But we all find different ways of trying to feel like we matter.
You know, for some people it's, you know, I know people from, you know, just being the best person in the room is the way that they really feel, you know, that they matter.
If somebody else is more flashily dressed, they take a hard hit.
Or through some sort of art,
through music, or
poetry, or her novel writing,
or for being very, very smart.
Now, for Renee Sawyer,
that's what mattered to her.
She was in philosophy. That was the
field she'd gone into, as I had.
And it's a field in which you're judged very narrowly on how smart are you.
It's said about people when they're in graduate school.
How good is he?
How good is she?
Meaning, you know, how smart are they at this kind of very subtle and difficult reasoning?
And she worried that she didn't matter in the region of the mattering map that mattered to her.
Therefore, she didn't matter.
And so she was the one who really came up with this whole idea of the mattering map.
And she comes, you know, at the end of the book to the realization that, you know, we all of us matter.
To be human is to matter.
And yes, there are things that each of us feel, you know, are worth pursuing and it differs among
us, but our sense of, you know, our right to live, you know, whether in that really fundamental sense
we matter shouldn't depend on that, on whether we matter in this particular region of the mattering map.
There's complete relativism there.
You want to matter as a flashy dresser.
I want to matter as a good philosopher.
There's complete relativism and subjectivity there.
relativism and subjectivity there, but on the level in which it really matters, we all matter exactly the same amount.
To be human is to matter.
I think actually realizing that, realizing that about ourselves and about others, it's
another way of understanding what human dignity is, is a way of feeding the good wolf.
I think it's one of the most important ways we have of feeding the good wolf,
to realize to the extent that any of us truly matters,
we all matter in exactly the same way. Thank you. Hey, y'all.
I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls.
And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests
who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations.
We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow.
I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar.
You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love.
So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were,
how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be.
It's a little bit of past, present and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for
Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever podcast. In the book, you have a dialogue between Plato and his book publicist about an idea that
Plato holds that she finds pretty difficult to stomach at first. And the basic idea is that
in the same way that a dentist, for example, is better able to, you know, fix our bite and adjust our bite in our
mouth than, say, Chris sitting over here, that there are also people who are better able and
trained to determine what a life worth living means, what living well means, that that decision
is not necessarily made best by the person themselves, that there's a class of people
that might be better able to make that decision.
Yeah, so Plato does truly believe this, and in fact he thinks this is what philosophy is all about,
and that these are the most difficult questions that we could ask.
We all naturally ask them. To be human is to ask these questions and to have opinions about it, but that they are subtle
questions and difficult questions, as difficult as math or physics or any of these questions
that require experts, and he calls these people who devote their lives to trying to answer
this question philosophers.
That's really what he means by a philosopher. And he understands very, very well how odious this sounds, and the natural
resentment of philosophers. I mean, they are at the very dawn of philosophy as it's being created
by Plato. He understands the kind of resentment that it will cause.
And it's true.
It still does even in our day.
It's like, you know, to be human is to have a point of view on these questions about,
you know, what it is to live a life worth living.
How dare somebody claim to be an expert about this?
It seems somehow to diminish a person's humanity to be told,
no, no, there are experts in this field.
Plato understood he was saying something very radical,
and it is something radical.
And I think it justifiably, understandably causes resentment.
you know, justifiably, understandably causes resentment. And yet, the philosophers have helped us to inch along in making progress
and seeing our way clear to these difficult questions.
They really have.
That's one of the things I try to argue in the book,
that, you know, they have helped to enlarge our points of view
and to feed our better worlds.
A lot of the theme of the book is why philosophy matters today. And you say that progress in
philosophy consists, at least in part, in constantly bringing to light the covert presumptions that
burrow their way deep down into our thinking, too deep down for us to even be aware of them. Yes, exactly. So, you know,
we are very complicated creatures. We are reasoning creatures. We have beliefs, and we,
and we, if challenged, we'll give the reasons for our beliefs, and we act. We don't just behave,
we act. We have reasons for our actions. You know, if challenged, we will give our reasons.
We're justificatory creatures. We try to give justifications
for things. And reasons for actions and reasons for beliefs can be evaluated. Some are not so good.
Some are better than others. And so that there are actual, you know, there are ways these can be
evaluated. But we're also, you know, we're very compartmentalized creatures,
and we're self-deceiving creatures.
You know, interestingly enough, I mean, he's a great expert on the ways in which we deceive ourselves,
and we deceive ourselves, you know, often with highfalutin-sounding reasons that aren't the real reasons.
We're hiding the real reasons from ourselves.
And so there is a kind of excavation that ought to take place, Plato says.
And the way you do this is you dialogue.
So philosophy is very much a community effort.
It should be many people coming together, challenging each other, you know, really butting heads.
It tends to be a quite aggressive sport, philosophy.
But, you know, and sometimes that's dumb stuff.
That's ego stuff, right?
People showing off.
But sometimes, at its best, it's sincere.
It's authentic, it's trying to
examine, to get down to what is really our reasons for our actions, for our beliefs,
and evaluating them. And, you know, sometimes they're so core to us that, you know, it's hard to see that they even require a justification.
And that's why philosophy is done better when many different people from different
backgrounds, different points of view, different genders, gender orientations are brought together.
And so in this sense, philosophy has made great progress just in
my own life because when I entered into it, I was always the only woman, always the only woman
at the table, at the seminar table. And there are more women now, and that has made a big difference
because we often find ourselves challenging presumptions that our colleagues weren't even aware were presumptions.
They just went unseen.
So it's very, very important to dialogue and to dialogue with as many different cultures and points of view and orientations as possible.
Excellent.
Well, we are nearing the end of the show.
I'd like to end with asking you a question, something that you bring up in the book.
Chris and I, as listeners will know, are both huge dog fans.
We love dogs.
And you say in the book that the dogs are the most philosophical of all animals.
Can you tell me why you say that?
Yeah, you know, that's another thing.
Plato actually said that dogs have a kind of love of truth, and they'll follow it.
They follow the scent.
You can't, you know, a dog following a scent cannot be turned away.
The dog knows what he knows, and he's going to go there and not be turned away. And that's the way we ought to be, Plato says,
when it comes to truth and virtue.
You know that even if others are pulling us away,
we know the scent.
We're going to go after it.
Excellent.
Well, thank you so much, Rebecca, for coming on the show.
Congratulations again on your recent award and all your success.
Thank you so much.
It really was a pleasure.
Excellent.
I enjoyed it also.
You too.
Take care.
So long.
Bye. you can learn more about rebecca newberger goldstein and get a free download of eric's favorite quotes of hers at one you feed.net slash rebecca