A Marriage of True Minds | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein | Big Think

A Marriage of True Minds

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Novelist and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is married to cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. What have they learned about love, from study and experience?

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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein:

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a novelist and philosopher. Her novels include "The Mind-Body Problem," "The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind," "Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics," and her latest, "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction" (Pantheon Books).

In 1996 Goldstein became a MacArthur Fellow. In 2005 she was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship. In 2008, she was designated a Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Emerson College, where she gave the commencement address.

Goldstein has taught at Barnard College, in the Columbia MFA writing program, and in the department of philosophy at Rutgers; has been a visiting scholar at Brandeis University; and has taught for five years as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2006-2007 she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Currently she is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychology, Harvard University.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is love?

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: What is love? When you love somebody then I mean we all want good things to happen to ourselves and keep the bad things at bay. You know when you love somebody you want that as much for them if not more than you do for yourself. I mean that is just the world has to go right for them or you won’t be able to bear it. I think that is you know we are all just naturally for good evolutionary reasons we feel that way about ourselves. We all want things… our lives to go well and to flourish and when you love somebody you feel that as keenly for them as for yourself and often more keenly and that’s what the feeling… I think the feeling of love is. My life, I won’t be able to survive, really. It will be very hard to recover if something does… if bad things happen to that person.

Question: What is it like when two prominent intellectuals attempt a marriage together?

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: It’s very nice, actually, and we had known of each other through our works. When I read "How the Mind Works" I, like so many other people, just my way of thinking forever changed. The kinds of questions I could now ask forever changed. New sorts of questions opened up, new sorts of speculations and I just thought it was great and then Steve was arguing on the pages of The New York Review of Books with Steven J. Gould. It was a quite contentious argument, letters back and forth because Steven J. Gould hated evolutionary psychology. He really had… He had strong… You know somewhat political strong Marxist reasons to dislike the more deterministic aspects of evolutionary psychology, so there was this heated debate going on. In the midst of it Steven Pinker published a new book, "Words and Rules," and I ran out to my local bookstore and bought it and went immediately to the index to look up Gould. I wanted to see if this really interesting argument was going… he was going to get a few more swipes in and I didn’t find Gould. I found Goldstein. I found Rebecca Goldstein and I thought, okay, it’s a very common name. It’s another Rebecca Goldstein, clearly. I have nothing to do with this argument or indeed with the subject matter of the book, which was about irregular verbs. Steve Pinker has this great passion for irregular verbs. They’re his little friends. He is obsessed with them. And he quoted my use in one of my more obscure writings of an obscure past participle. I had said, “had stridden” rather than “had strided,” and he said you know some of our… He wrote this, “Some of our finest writes will always choose the more obscure form of a verb.” “You know, it’s more poetic, and they’re keeping it in play.”

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