Transcript: Marsha Enright on Education, Psychology, and Philosophy

 

Date of recording: July 3, 2024, The Savvy Street Show

Hosts: Vinay Kolhatkar and Roger Bissell. Guest: Marsha Familaro Enright

 

For those who prefer to watch the video, it is here.

Editor’s Note: The Savvy Street Show’s AI-generated transcripts are edited for removal of repetitions and pause terms, and for grammar and clarity. Explanatory references are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits [in square brackets].

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Good evening, and welcome to The Savvy Street Show. I am joined again today by my regular co-host, the three-in-one, four-in-one should I say: writer, editor, musician, and philosopher, Roger Bissell. Welcome to the show, Roger. It will be Roger’s turn to introduce our special guest. We’re going to talk about education, so we have an expert on education. Over to you, Roger.

 

Roger Bissell

Thank you, Vinay.

Marsha Familaro Enright is an educational entrepreneur, educator, and writer with a BA in biology and an MA in psychology. She created The Reliance College Fund, which runs the Great Connections Seminars. It’s a Great Books-based liberal arts program informed by the Montessori method, Ayn Rand’s ideas, and classical liberalism, and it uses a powerful methodology to provide a broad education that encompasses the full range of influential ideas in civilization. Marsha is also the author of the book, Teaching Freedom, Why the Way We Teach Students is as Important as the What, and she has written on a broad range of other topics from neuropsychology to philosophy to contemporary literature. Several of her essays have appeared in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and I will be referring to them in some of my questions. Welcome to the show, Marsha.

 

Marsha Enright

Thank you for having me.

 

Roger Bissell

My first question deals with Ayn Rand’s ethical philosophy. She argued that “selfish” is the correct way to designate a person who lives according to the Objectivist ethics and that selfishness is a virtue. However, in your 2014 essay, “The Problem with Selfishness,” you question the wisdom of her using the term “selfishness” in this way, [saying] it has many problems, it confuses people, and you have suggested that a better way to convey the noble qualities of her ethical views might be a term such as “inspired egoism” or “inspired individualism.” But I’m wondering, aren’t “egoism” or “individualism” or even “rational self-interest,” which is another term she [Rand] uses, aren’t these really “dirty words” to many people?

 

Marsha Enright

I think those are the two basic and fundamental problems with this [use of the word selfish in Objectivism].

Well, certainly they are, but they don’t have the same problem as the word “selfishness.” As I said in my essay, “selfish,” from the beginning of its use, which was some centuries ago, was equated with a very negative ethical point of view. The second, major problem I think that we have with it, is that if we use “selfishness” to mean the kind of rational, long-term, life-enhancing ethic that we want to advocate, then what do we call the people who don’t act altruistically but will do anything for an immediate pleasure or immediate money or anything like that? What do we call them? We don’t have a concept for them, then. So, I think those are the two basic and fundamental problems with this. It was a brilliant use of it, marketing-wise. I know a lot of people who were very interested in the book because it was called The Virtue of Selfishness. The very paradox of that drew people to read the book. So marketing-wise, it was a brilliant use, but I think it’s a problem. People have known me for decades and they’ll say, “I know you seem to have your own set of ideas. What are you following?” I’ll try to use the word “selfishness” to explain, and their eyes just go up in their head because they don’t understand how that fits with the way I’m acting. So, it’s a big problem, I think.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I decidedly agree with you [re usage of the word “selfish”], I have had the same view since 2010. But [not re marketing]. My wife, for instance, refuses to read The Virtue of Selfishness because she looks at the title and says, “I’m not going to read it.”

So, on Rand, generally, would you call yourself an Objectivist? And do you think that there are any errors or gaps in Objectivism?

 

Marsha Enright

If you mean, do I agree with much or most of the philosophy, especially the basic premises? Yes, I agree with a lot of it. But you know, Rand herself said that there were things that needed to be worked on. She called her book The Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. What does that imply? That there’s a lot more work to be done.

I was talking to some friends of mine the other day, Carrie Ann Biondi, philosophy professor, and Stephen Hicks [also a philosophy professor], and I think one of the major problems for people coming to Objectivism and trying to incorporate it into their life is that we have the very abstract ideas from her essays, like The Virtue of Selfishness, justifying ethical egoism, and then we have the instantiation of those ideas in her novels. We have the particulars. But there are a lot of concepts in between that need to be understood.

If you think about the Founders of the United States, they were very interested in these kind of intermediary lists of virtues and how to live your life and implementing [the ideas]. Think of Franklin with his Junto [Club] and his list of virtues and his thinking, every day, “Did I live up to my own virtues?” There are so many intermediary concepts that need to be explicated, because not everybody’s going to be able to figure it out on their own. So, I think that’s a big problem. And there are lots of other aspects to the philosophy that could be worked on.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Many gaps, but are there errors?

 

Marsha Enright

I haven’t found anything that I particularly think is an error. Did you have something in mind?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Maybe not for today, but yes, we’ve discussed that in our own podcasts, and we also spoke about it in our co-authored book Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics.

 

Marsha Enright

I haven’t read your book, but I’m sure you talk about it in there. If you read the Nicomachean Ethics, you realize how Aristotelian Rand’s ethics are. She just has a certain different way of approaching certain things, and she’s putting arguments in that Aristotle does not have. But Aristotle has a lot of the discussion of the intermediary problems and concepts. I’m in a group that was discussing in detail the Nicomachean Ethics, and somebody said, “Well, why does he say that he can’t give an exact principle for judging X or Y in a particular situation?” I said, “Because it involves the measurements that in any particular situation where you’re making an ethical judgment about an individual action or a person, you have to take into account many different features of it, many different principles, and the exact amount of whatever is happening. That’s something that can’t easily be explicitly written out.”

In the novel Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo, there’s a scene in which one of the heroes has to make a judgment about something, and he takes all night to think about it.

In the novel Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo, there’s a scene in which one of the heroes has to make a judgment about something, and he takes all night to think about it. He thinks about this aspect and that aspect, and what he’s doing is weighing the importance of these different ethical principles and acts and facts in order to come up with his judgment. So, that’s something that Aristotle talks about quite a bit, but Rand doesn’t, and I think it’s something that is worth knowing about. So, in some respects, I’m sure your book does this, invoking Aristotle’s ethics can fill in a bunch of the things that maybe aren’t in the intermediary concepts in Objectivism.

 

Roger Bissell

Right. You can’t read the answer to some ethical questions or problems like you would off the side panel of a cereal box. You know, the RDA (recommended daily allowance), 30% of potassium, etc. [This is a paraphrase of the point made a number of times, together and separately, in writings of the Dougs (Rasmussen and Den Uyl), going back at least to Den Uyl’s 1991 book The Virtue of Prudence.]

In another essay, in 2002, you objected to Rand saying, “emotions are not tools of cognition” and you wondered, well, what are they, then? I would grant that emotions are highly important material to use conceptually, to use in reasoning, thinking, and I would point out that wood, for instance, is an important material for use with tools like hammers and screwdrivers, but we wouldn’t call wood a tool. We’d call it a material. And so I’m wondering, doesn’t it make sense if we just start out by admitting emotions are very important information or data, but they’re not tools of cognition? They’re material, they’re data, like our sense perceptions or like our thoughts, our introspective data. What would you think about that?

 

Marsha Enright

I think that’s a sensible way to approach it. It all depends on what you mean by “tool,” right? That’s part of the issue, because if I am trying to make an ethical decision . . . For example, people don’t realize this, but even a hunch is an emotion, a kind of cognitive emotion. It’s telling you that this is the right way to think about X, Y, or Z, and there’s a feeling that goes along with it. You don’t talk about a hunch as if it’s just a cognitive thing itself. So, it can be a tool. I guess the way I was thinking of it is, it’s a tool in the sense that it’s indicating to you—or you can use it to help plumb—your own thinking about things. But you’re right. I mean, you could call it the material that you’re using, too. I don’t have a big objection to that.

I just think that there’s more importance to being aware of your emotions and what they imply about what’s going on in your subconscious. You can’t hold everything you need to know in your conscious mind. It’s just impossible. So, your subconscious holds a lot of material. It holds a lot of facts. It holds a lot of integrations of things that you have experienced and your values. So, your emotions can be a way to get at what’s going on in your subconscious and really enrich your judgment about things. That’s one of the problems with people who take philosophy rationalistically. They try to take certain principles and come to logical conclusions about them without taking into account the whole bigger richness of their experience and what they know.

 

Roger Bissell

I like what you said a minute ago, that hunches are not exactly thoughts. They’re material from our subconscious. Would you say the same thing about an intuition or an insight that you have? Like a flash of insight? [Marsha: Oh, yes.] This whole field—I think there’s a name for it that twists everybody’s tongue, psycho-epistemology—is about the relationship between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind. It almost sounds like an Alfred Hitchcock movie, “Psycho-Epistemology.” Anyway, this isn’t on my list of questions, but have you looked into this area very much and studied or thought about it?

 

Marsha Enright

Psycho-epistemology is very important when it comes to education.

Oh, this is a prime area of interest for me. Psycho-epistemology is very important when it comes to education, because you have to ask yourself: How do you know somebody really understands what you’re teaching them? And how is it getting into their mind? How are they processing it?

One of the people that I think is the most brilliant at talking about something like this is the author Arthur Koestler, especially in his book, The Act of Creation. I thought it was just a brilliant insight about what’s going on. He makes the argument that the conscious and subconscious processes in science, art, and humor are basically the same. He has loads of data about it and explains what’s going on there. I think that everybody should read it to understand more about their own mind. And you know what’s interesting? I remember him in the book arguing that we hold our knowledge in our mind in a matrix of multiply-connected ways. In recent years, neurobiology has found that it’s literally that way. Neuronal connections are all matrical.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

[Nods agreement with “matrical” connections]. Since we are moving on to education, I wanted to ask you a question about this book that came out 10 years ago, Teaching Johnny to Think by Leonard Peikoff. It’s actually based on a series of lectures he did in the 80s, and it’s been edited, but there are no complaints [about the accuracy of the editing], so, I assume that the quotes that I’m going to quote are true. In chapter three, “A Proper Curriculum,” Leonard Peikoff says, “I am not an advocate of Montessori past a certain age. I see no merit in continuing on the perceptual level after age six,” which obviously implies something. He also says, “I do not advocate what is called freedom in education. I’m uneasy with the idea of children following their own direction.” So other than for artistic prodigies, Peikoff seems to imply that there should be a rigid curriculum from age four to 15. And he also says philosophy is too abstract to teach at a pre-college level. Do you agree with Peikoff’s views on education and on Montessori particularly?

 

Marsha Enright

Well, I remember listening to those lectures years ago and being a bit astonished that he was criticizing Montessori at the same time that he said he didn’t know that much about it.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

That didn’t make it into the book, that transcription. I just reread the [relevant] chapter.

 

Marsha Enright

That’s what he said in the lecture. And I mean, just the quote that you said there, that he doesn’t believe children should stay at the perceptual level, that’s not what happens in a Montessori education. Montessori education is developmentally oriented. So, you’re getting the kind of learning you need at your level of development. When you start to be about six years old, that’s when children start asking bigger conceptual questions about: How did the universe get there? What are human beings? How did language arise? They’re very philosophical, starting at about the age of six. In Montessori, we have plenty of materials and ways of addressing that, starting with what’s called The Great Lesson, where we do a dramatic presentation of, for example, the origin of the universe.

Montessori said is that you want to inflame their imagination, to capture their minds and make them really motivated to learn.

Then from there, one of the things that Montessori said is that you want to inflame their imagination, to capture their minds and make them really motivated to learn. The ironic thing is, if you know two-year-old children, you have to beat them to stop them from learning. They are such incredibly motivated learners. So, what happens by the time a child gets to be eight or nine, and they don’t like school? Something’s wrong there because human beings, like Aristotle said, desire to know. Montessori is an ingeniously designed system that addresses what children need at each level of their development that allows the child to work at an individual pace. That doesn’t mean they have to work individually. In fact, because they’re not forced to share with each other, they love to work together.

The one other thing I wanted to say was, he also misunderstands, and a lot of people do, that it’s not total freedom in a Montessori class. It’s freedom in a structured environment. In other words, you have a lot of freedom and a lot of choice within certain limits. For example, the materials are like games that we use in the Montessori classroom. You can’t use them just any old way. You have to use them as materials. You can’t just play with them as any kind of toy that you want. You can play after school or during free time. So, he just doesn’t understand what goes on in Montessori.

 

Roger Bissell

Well, Marsha, I know that what you’re saying is absolutely the case, not just in your school, but in other schools around the country. My five children all went to Montessori school, and I know that preschool is one thing and elementary is another. I don’t want to be unfair to poor Leonard, but I think he just overgeneralized. He says, this is a preschool, so it must all be that way.

Anyway, you sent a fundraising letter recently for your college and your Great Connections program, and you spoke about the various projects and endeavors that you have put a lot of time and energy into to help children learn better, be more confident and self-reliant. You did have a Montessori school for nearly 30 years in Chicago. Now you’re planning a college, and the Great Connections summer get-togethers is kind of a pilot program for high school and college students. Could you give us just a little bit of the history of this, how it came about, and why for you this is such an important mission.

 

Marsha Enright

Well, I don’t know how many people I’ve told this, so they may have heard this before, but when I was a child, I loved school, I loved to learn, and I was really annoyed at the other kids in class who were goofing around, until I realized that they were really frustrated, and that’s why they were goofing around. So, I said to myself, I don’t want that for my own children. I want to find a method of learning that will keep them engaged in learning the whole time they’re in school. Then I read the Montessori Method articles by Beatrice Hessen in The Objectivist, and that got me interested, and then I read everything I knew about it. I put my children in Montessori preschool, and then I started the elementary school because I wanted them to have as much opportunity as possible.

But my own interest has always been in the education of young adults.

But my own interest has always been in the education of young adults. And I could see a long time ago, and Ayn Rand really tipped me off to this, what was going on in the colleges and the universities, that the Left was getting control of it, and they were making it more and more politicized. They were taking away a lot of the kind of learning that you need in order to really develop your mind, in order to be independent in your thinking and to know about the world and what’s made the world the way it is. And I thought a long time ago that people of our point of view, not just people interested in Ayn Rand, but people who believe in classical liberalism and a free society should have their own colleges that should be independent. So, I started talking about this some time ago and I decided to take everything I knew about optimal education and put it into this summer program. And I have to say, from the first year, even I was surprised at the outcome. From the first year, the students said to me at the end of the week, I feel like my life has been transformed because now I can judge anything myself.

In the program, we have readings and learning activities across the domains, from philosophy to physics to economics, literature, art, history, so that the students can become skilled in readings of any kind. Then we have a specialized form of what’s called the Socratic Seminar, where the teacher is the guide, but the teacher is not telling the students, this is the right answer, this is the wrong answer. The teacher is helping the students in the group to use facts and reason about what you’re reading to understand what the author said and to come to your own conclusions about it.

What happens is, these young people who’ve had 12 years of sit down, read this, learn this, take a test, show me that you know what I just told you, they’re just on Cloud Nine that not only can they talk about what they think about this reading, but they’re learning how to make what they have to say valuable so that other people want to hear it and other people want to respond to it. They have to use facts and reasons, so it really hones their thinking skills. They have to refer to the material in the text to justify whatever they’re saying, and they get to hear the way other people interpret the same thing. So, what happens is, you expand your toolbox of reasoning, because another person might come at it a different way than you do, and the next time you read something, you think, yeah, I could do it like Bridget was thinking about this, I might apply that idea to this reading. Just the very fact of being treated as if they had valuable things to say but guiding them on how to have valuable things to say really transforms them.

So, we do the text readings. Then we also do activities, we’ll go out into the city. I think everybody tends to take for granted whatever’s around them. So, I try to raise their awareness about how did this place get here and the shape that it is and why, and the amazing achievements of human beings that have made it the way it is. We’ll go out and we’ll learn about architectural styles. We’ll go look at the buildings. Then I’ll send them on an architectural scavenger hunt in little groups, where they have to go find different areas of the city and take a picture that they got there, to make it more fun.

We do improv comedy, not classes, but exercises, because it’s fun and it’s also another way to learn how to collaborate with other people. That’s another thing that our kind of discussion does: you really learn how to listen to what the other person is saying deeply, not just sit there and wait till it’s your turn to talk, but to listen to what the other person is saying and sincerely respond to it so that you actually have a dialogue. This is an amazing skill for when you go to work. Recently, I interviewed a number of my students from Great Connections from 2009, 2010, so now they’re in the workforce. They’re executives, they’re engineers, they’re software people. They said they use that skill all the time, being able to hear what other people say and to have a really productive conversation with other people for a goal.

 

Roger Bissell

This is kind of a follow-up. In your letter, you also pointed out that so many young people these days are looking for direction. They’re adrift and they don’t know what to do with their lives and they are in pursuit of “career clarity.” I’m sure that’s true. I think I was when I was in my late teens. Now, because such a sense of purpose or mission for young people could also play an important role in how they feel in control of their lives and their self-esteem. Have you given thought to including in your curriculum such skills as personal SWOT analysis or setting one’s life purpose, personal values, clarification, goal setting?

 

Marsha Enright

You know, I meant to look up what SWOT was before we got on, but I forgot to.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537302/ and https://www.mindtools.com/aaiakpy/personal-swot-analysis).

 

Marsha Enright

I see, okay. Well, my basic answer is yes, not those particular tools, but something like that is an integral part of the curriculum. Even in the summer program, we have a session on the psychology and practice of introspection. I have a paper I wrote that I have them read and talk about, talking about the nature of the mind and how it’s organized, the conscious, the subconscious, the unconscious, why it’s difficult to deal with psychological problems, the nature of emotions. So, even in our own little weeklong program, I’m trying to raise their awareness about that.

In the college program that we’ve put together, regular meetings with your tutor about your goals and how to go on to achieve them is integral to the program. We’ll be using all kinds of psychological methodologies to help people with that. Then, of course, being introduced in the very first year to the basics of philosophy and how important knowing what the universe is, examining the different theories about how you know, how to live, how do you live with other people—the first part of the first year is all centered around learning things about that. So, my answer is yes.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay. Now that we’re speaking about the mind, I want to leap to evolution. The evolutionary leap, if you will, from apes to humans is in two big areas. One is the sheer increase in brain size and brain power and the ability to use reason is enormously improved. Secondly, human beings have what we call a self-reflective consciousness. You are aware of yourself. You can remember and reminisce about your past. You can plan your future, like a time traveling machine in a sense. Julian Jaynes said those two things are entirely different, the ability to reason and the self-reflective consciousness. Randian literature and Rand’s followers often conflate the two abilities as if they always go together. So, who do you think is right? Is it Rand or Jaynes or is the answer somewhere in between?

 

Marsha Enright

Well, maybe you could tell me a little more. I read Jaynes’s book decades ago, and I think he has really interesting ideas. I don’t know if I know enough to have a judgment about whether his theory is right or not, but maybe if you could explain a little bit why he thinks there are different activities, different skills or abilities, then I might help answer the question.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

He says, and this is leading to the next question, that self-reflective consciousness arises “lexically” within a mind, so, in a nutshell, that when you know language, you can talk with yourself. And when you’re talking with yourself, with the help of parents—mothers, typically—you gain that understanding that you are an entity, that you have a past and a future, and memory comes into it. Somewhere along the ages four or five that begins to happen, whereas the ability to reason, he thinks, is kind of instinctual in human beings, and the two are completely separate. So, you can have an advanced ability to reason without having self-reflective consciousness, and vice versa, which seems very odd for us. In Randian literature, consciousness is a leap, and reasoning is a leap, and it’s almost the same leap, as if the two things are the same. My own answer, probably the real answer, is somewhere in between, because Jaynes also said, how did a few Spaniards who had self-reflective consciousness (SRC) easily overcome thousands of Aztecs? Now, could be that that SRC led to better reasoning. So, I don’t quite know the answer . . .

 

Marsha Enright

In the case of the Aztecs and Cortés, maybe he didn’t know that the Aztecs were oppressing many of the tribes in the Mexico area, and so they helped Cortés. So, that helps understand better how a small band of Spaniards overwhelmed a large force of Aztecs.

Language is reasoning.

But going back to your question, what’s a little confusing to me is to talk about the skill being lexical, while language is conceptual. So, language is reasoning. Rand said reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material of the senses. So she’s not limiting it to deductive reasoning, for example, or kinds of things that people might normally limit the meaning of reason. I don’t exactly know what he [Jaynes] means that you can reason instinctively. I don’t know what that means exactly.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

It’s as if this activity is going on subconsciously, but he doesn’t try to prove it empirically. He just asserts that reasoning is going on subconsciously. Meanwhile, self-reflective consciousness arises at a certain age; and then, of course, once you have it, you have it for the rest of your life.

 

Marsha Enright

Well, you know, it’s funny because it makes me think of Koestler. We can think things in the conscious mind and material comes in, we are aware of it, we process it, the processing, the making it into a concept or an abstraction is not like we’re consciously doing it, like we’re saying, okay, I’m going to make this into an abstraction. Later on, yes, maybe you could do that, but when you’re a child, you’re not. So, you’re putting that material in your subconscious, but language and other kinds of symbols are the things that tie the perceptual level of consciousness together with the abstract level of consciousness. So, reasoning is about using those abstractions.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

The word “me,” for instance, is an abstraction that begins to have meaning, as you said, with reasoning. You understand the “me” is a certain kind of a self with a body and a mind, and then we have thoughts, and we have a past and a future. So, that itself, I agree with you, is a process of reasoning, and it’s probably wrong on Jaynes’s part to make such a harsh distinction between the two.

 

Marsha Enright

You know, it’s pretty amazing if you know young children, the things that they can figure out when they’re three years old. It’s just astonishing sometimes what they’ll come up with or the questions they’ll ask about why the world is the way it is. The fact that you go from hardly being able to move yourself to being able to ask those questions in three years is mind blowing.

 

Roger Bissell

Yes. I think that one little modification in Rand’s definition of “reason” would have probably fixed all of this. If she had said reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material of direct awareness, that could include not only perception, but also our direct awareness of what’s going on inside our heads. You know, we have thoughts, we have feelings and at some point we learn that not only are there things out there to look at and to pay attention to, but also things in here [points at his own head]. Once you’ve figured that out, then you become self-aware. You become aware of what you’re thinking and feeling and imagining. So, if you would grant that we are directly aware of things out there and we’re directly aware of things in here, then that would solve it. I think most of the early thinking was, we’ve got to prove that we really are aware of the external world, otherwise we’re trapped inside our brains, and that freaks out a lot of philosophers. It never bothered me, but . . .

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

To use a crude example, do you remember Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his concept of “flow”? When you’re in flow, you’re not continually conscious of “This is me, I’m doing this, I want to concentrate.” You are already concentrating, and you get a better result. In some card games, for instance, you turn the cards upside down and you have to remember which card was where, I found when my daughter was two or three years old, she was fantastic and could beat any adults. But as children get older, they become less fantastic at those simplistic memory games. Very young children beat adults very easily, but they become conscious of their own thinking as they age, which is a good thing for deliberative reasoning, but for these simplistic tasks, the flow breaks and we become slower at these kinds of things. Maybe that’s what led Jaynes to this kind of belief that, for simplistic tasks, yes, reasoning is subconscious and it just goes on automatically.

 

Roger Bissell

I know Marsha must remember that Koestler, in The Act of Creation, talked about the centipede. If he paid attention to what his legs were doing, he wouldn’t be able to walk because all of that’s automatic.

 

Marsha Enright

Yes. The other thing I was thinking, with young children, they’re putting all their concentrated attention on that game, but once you get older, I don’t know about you, but while I’m waiting to play the game, I’m also thinking about other things.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

It’s happened to me even in examinations, “Oh, wait a minute, I’m in a three-hour examination, I’ve got to concentrate here,” I had to tell myself, and that ended up wasting time.

 

Roger Bissell

Just last year, you had an essay called “Life is not a Machine or a Ghost.” That’s one of my favorite false alternatives, and you gave us a third alternative. You took a look at the ruling paradigms that most people are caught up in, whether it’s supernaturalism or mechanistic reductionism, and you said that when we look around the world, at plants and animals and human beings, we see all this goal-directed activity, all this hierarchical structure, and that there’s a natural scientific explanation for all these things, for not just life but also consciousness and free will and meaning. You had a nice leisurely opportunity to explain all that, but in just a few moments here, can you tell us how science can help us avoid this trap of materialism, of mechanism, without falling prey to the notion that the order we see requires a supernatural creator?

 

Marsha Enright

Well, my basic answer is, for one thing, you have to let go of the material reductionism coloring your thinking and just look at the world and say, OK, there’s loads of stuff out there that’s acting in a very goal-directed manner and admit that, and then say, now I have to figure out how does it do it. That’s the basic question the scientists should be asking.

One of the people who I thought was the most brilliant at starting to give an answer about how it can do it is an Austrian scientist named Ludwig von Bertalanffy. He’s actually one of the founders of “systems theory.” He had what he called the organismic conception, which is that living things are matter that’s organized in a certain kind of way that makes it act to perpetuate its own existence—that’s what survival is about—and it captures energy and material in order to do that. Some people call it anti-entropic, because of the theory that everything in the universe is just dissipating [the theory of entropy], that’s the natural tendency. What a living thing does is take in material from outside of itself, and it’s a system of matter that keeps itself going. The question is, how does it do that? Interestingly, it’s got degrees of freedom in it that enable it to respond to the variability of what’s going on in the environment. An example of that is a principle that Bertalanffy called “equifinality,” which means that you have different conditions that end in the same goal, and you don’t ever have that in machines. Machines are created by human beings to fulfill goals, but if you change the initial conditions, they can’t reach the same goal. If you have, for example, an embryo, and at a certain point you split it into two parts, it doesn’t become two halves of an embryo. It becomes two whole living beings. It becomes twins. That’s different than any kind of mechanical thing, and that’s because the system is set up to fulfill the goal of making a certain kind of living thing that is going to survive.

Bertalanffy said, for example, when you have large chemical reactions with lots of different things going on, the system can respond in different ways to what’s going on in the environment, and this is one of the ways in which a living thing can have degrees of freedom in the way that it acts. Feynman had a very interesting example in his book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, where he is watching a paramecium under a slide in an environment where it was losing moisture. It looked like it was trying to decide, should it go this way, should it go that way? At one point, it started splitting itself into two, and then it went back again. So, it’s trying out different ways to respond to what’s going on, to the environment, and that’s a kind of creativity. So, you can see that creativity is basically the essence of being alive, a system responding in different ways to what’s going on in the world.

It seems to me that consciousness is just a later development of this ability to respond to the world in different ways.

Now, in terms of consciousness, it seems to me that consciousness is just a later development of this ability to respond to the world in different ways. And this is an evolutionarily newer form, which allows it. If you think about when animals first arrived on the scene, they only had the sense of touch and what’s called chemotaxis, like a kind of a smell; of course, they didn’t have noses or anything. The different senses that developed are different ways in which you can interact with the world to get information in order to be able to adapt to it. So, living things developed this way of responding to the world in a gradual way that ended up developing into consciousness. To my mind, consciousness is a relationship between the world and a certain kind of being that has these abilities. So, it’s not just in your head, it’s in your whole body. The mind and body are integrated. It’s about your relationship with the world. Free will seems to me to just be another advancement in terms of degrees of freedom. This ability to think abstractly is a new way to respond to the world, and it’s a new degree of freedom.

I have a lot more data and argument in the paper. All my essays are available at www.marsha-familaro-enright.com

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

It’s been very, very invigorating, but I want to conclude on a very open-ended question. Would you like to name maybe two or three psychologists that you admire? And if you do so, briefly tell us why.

 

Marsha Enright

Yes, I learned a lot especially from Nathaniel Branden’s first book. Some of his later books, too, were good.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

The first book being The Psychology of Self -Esteem?

 

Marsha Enright

I also learned a tremendous amount of psychology from Aristotle.

Yes. I also learned a tremendous amount of psychology from Aristotle. There are certain works, for example, his Rhetoric, that are amazingly psychological. So is the Ethics, really; he goes into a lot of detail there. Arthur Koestler, I learned a tremendous amount from him. Carl Rogers was a psychotherapist, a humanist. and one of his students, Eugene Gendlin, has done some fascinating work on what we would call psycho-epistemology. He was very interested in what he calls “the psychology of the implicit.” How do we know things? He’s got some great essays that I highly recommend and that will get you thinking about how your mind is working.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, I think we’re almost done for the day. Is there anything else you want to add, Marsha?

 

Marsha Enright

Well, if people are interested, I’d love them to look at our website for our new college, Reliance College (https://reliancecollege.org/), where we’ve got everything organized. Now we’re in the phase of trying to get the final funding to open it. The program is a combination of a unique and very rigorous classic liberal arts program in which the students will be learning ideas across the ideological spectrum and historical ideas, and they’ll be learning it in a way so that they can judge for themselves what they think is right and wrong and combining it with many skills. We have a special writing program, We’ll be teaching them economics and personal finance, the role of art in a well-lived life, and they’ll also every year be working on a real-world problem in an area of their professional interest. What we’re trying to do there is combine this rigorous classical liberal program that will prepare them for the rest of their life, especially because we want them to become the entrepreneurs of their own life. They’ll be able to change what they’re doing, have the vision and the courage and the self-confidence to decide what’s good for them and which way they should go and if they should change their jobs or whatever. But we also want to give them a lot of practical experience so that they can go out there and be successful.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

That sounds very, very exciting, and we wish you all the best. To those of you who have been tuning in, we want you to keep tuning in because that’s how you become savvy. Bye for now.

End of transcript.

 

For readers, see also:

https://www.youtube.com/@reliance_college, and https://reliancecollege.org/2024-seminar/