Must New Worlds Also Be Good?

Abstract

The present writer contributed recently to another symposium, on the literary theorist E.D. Hirsch’s best-seller, Cultural Literacy.1 Like the essay now before us, ‘Disclosing New Worlds’, by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores and Hubert Dreyfus (henceforth SFD), Hirsch’s book contains more than meets the eye. Each work is driven by roughly the same unspoken agenda. Both eschew polemic, and both, Hirsch’s much more openly, are positive, therapeutic responses to the current American mood, whether justified or not, of national self-doubt, guilt, anger and despair.

The activities analysed by Spinosa et al., viz. entrepreneurship, citizen action and cultural leadership, are all central to the American experience. They have a common phenomenological structure and a common purpose, which is to ‘disclose new worlds’, i.e. so to reconfigure the collective perceptions as to bring about ‘large-scale cultural and historical changes’. Each, more or less unselfconsciously, is an exercise of skill, an expression of freedom, and a building of solidarity through the recovery or discovery of human meanings. I argue that unless we know the ends to which skill and freedom tend, and in which meaning is found, all three (which the authors treat rather as ends in themselves) are underdescribed, and impossible to see as possessing or conferring value simply per se. The same goes for the original three activities. Cultural leadership, citizen action and entrepreneurshipcan as work as easily towards bad ends as good. To see them as virtual ends in themselves, then, is premature, and a kind of formalism.