Marsha Familaro Enright has been attracted by the pleasures and problems of education since the third grade. Trained in biology and psychology, she has written research articles on psychology, neuropsychology, development, and education for a number of publications. She founded the Council Oak Montessori School near Chicago in 1990 and has served as its president since then. Recently, as founder and president of the Reason, Individualism, Freedom Institute, Marsha and her colleagues have been developing a new college informed by the Montessori Method, the Great Books, Ayn Rand’s ideas, and classical liberalism. Information about that project can be found at its website, www.rifinst.org. Marsha also contributes articles and reviews to The New Individualist, including popular profiles of famous authors such as James Clavell, Cameron Hawley, and Tom Wolfe. Recently, she spent time with TNI contributing writer Sara Pentz to discuss the state of modern education, the prospects for its reform, and her own college project.
Category: Objectivism
Q: How did the ideas of Ayn Rand impact your life?
Marsha: I read through Atlas the summer following The Fountainhead, and all the books and essays I could get my hands on after that, over the next few years. This included Nathaniel Branden’s The Psychology of Self-Esteem, which greatly influenced my thinking in psychology, directly, and, indirectly, by introducing me to the works of Arthur Koestler in a footnote. I have been immensely influenced by Koestler’s ideas in both biology and psychology and, when it comes to writing science well, he is my hero.
(Christmas carols celebrate the Nativity as being, above all else, an event that brings hope to mankind. “O Holy Night,” one of the most beautiful carols, makes the point explicitly: “a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.” But I suspect that Christmas is not unique among winter festivals in this emphasis on hope. The Winter Solstice, after all, is the moment of greatest darkness and, also, necessarily, the moment when the Sun begins to return to the world.
In the following, I plan to summarize the essence of Binswanger’s argument on goal-causation, and then expand on the issues he brings up and discuss any problems or objections I have with his arguments. Time has not permitted me to be as complete and persuasive in my objections as I might like – I only hope to stimulate discussion of the issues.
In this chapter, Binswanger outlines his theory of how non- conscious actions can be teleologically caused. He defines an action as teleological when the goal causes the action for the sake of achieving the goal. This is what he calls “goal- causation.”
Music is an art without an apparent object – there are no scenes to look at, no
sculptured marbles to touch, no stories to follow – and yet it can cause some of the most
passionate and intense feelings possible. How does this happen – how can sounds from
resonant bodies produce emotion (1) in man?
Navigator: Perhaps you could begin by telling us something of the history of the New Intellectual Forum. Who started it, and when?
Originally published in Objectivity, Volume 1, Number 2.
In Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, Ken Danagger asks Dagny Taggart:
“And if you met those great men in heaven, . . . what would you want to say to them?”
“Just . . . just hello, I guess.”
“That’s not all,” said Danagger. “There’s something you’d want to hear from them . . . you’d want them to look at you and say, Well done.”
She dropped her head and nodded silently. . . . (Rand 1957, 735)
