ABSTRACT
As I argued earlier, the will to transcend is an example of what Sartre called “bad faith.” This will to transcend takes us out of our particular situations and our responsibilities to them. In the last two chapters, I looked at how an engagement with art and aesthetics (often a site of transcendent knowledge claims) was situated by a series of often incommensurable evidentiary claims-including those of teachers, artists, administrators, and other community stakeholders. I have tried to sketch out a disposition towards intellectual work that avoids the lure of both “transcendence” and “facticity.” Our circumstances cannot be willed away by force of the imagination alone. Nor does the world simply present itself to us as a series of ready-made facts. The rise of particular forms of “expertise” (outlined earlier) cannot serve as a substitute for the kinds of “good faith” engagements about which Sartre and others wrote. Unfortunately, much public policy to date is ground in this will to transcend-the conscripting of evidence into ready-made political positions. A broader sense of the “ethical” or the “the good”—however that is defi ned-often trumps evidence, radically distorting public discourse. In the following two chapters, I look at the limits of both facticity and transcendence when thinking about public policy debates. I focus on the limits of ethical claims and the importance of good faith engagement with evidence. Unfortunately, both the Left and the Right have been complicit in this marginalization of evidence, though in diff erent ways.
