Reading Philosophy and Practicing Leadership: Ethical Hermeneutics in the Age of Instrumental Reason
This book makes two major claims, one philosophical and one practical. The first claim is based on the fact that we live in a world characterized by individuals using the tools of reason in order to promote themselves and their agendas. That sounds obvious, but it is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of thought, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Charles Taylor describes this history, that way of thinking began as a way of placing the individual into a new moral order, characterized by rational and increasingly efficient systems of exchange, but it has now reached a point where the promotion of the individual is seen as a good on its own, and reason, facts, and logic are often seen not a route to truth or shared understanding, but rather as tools, even weapons, whose purpose is often to vanquish one’s enemies rather than achieve a shared understanding. Examples abound across the political spectrum, from Donald Trump’s politics of self-promotion to the notion of self-empowerment as a good in itself, and the sometimes narrow understanding, by both proponents and detractors, of DEI as individual empowerment. Educated elites are shocked at the proliferation of unfounded conspiracy theories and factual misstatements, but these phenomena are less surprising when viewed as consequences of this failure of shared understanding.
The topic of this book is even more relevant after the 2024 presidential election. What the result made clear is that the range of issues at play–democracy, race, truth, reproductive rights, treatment of immigrants, and national economic health were all overshadowed by the voter’s individual ego—“how will this election affect me personally” was the overriding voting rationale in polls and interviews, and Trump’s implicit and explicit message was that what individuals wanted–even from their basest instincts–was OK and what he would deliver. An innocent but telling example of the normalization of this ego-based approach is an interview with a voter who had not voted in 2020 or 2016, but who had heard that Trump would remove taxes on overtime. “I work a lot of overtime,” he said, “so I’m voting for Trump.” Not exactly a comprehensive political rationale.
The resources of the hermeneutic tradition, broadly defined, provide a practical means for tempering the negative consequences of these aspects of the modern world. I use “interpretation,” “understanding,” and “hermeneutics” interchangeably, reflecting the hermeneutic philosophies developed by Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, both influenced by the fundamentality of understanding in Heidegger, for whom understanding is not a behavior but a fundamental mode of being that occurs in the process of interpretation. I include Charles Taylor and Emmanuel Levinas, because they share with hermeneutic thinkers the premise that ethical actions reflect fundamental human states of being and are not simply actions controlled by rational egos. What is prior to and what conditions the ego is different for each, from Gadamer’s already interpreted world into which we step, to Ricoeur’s histories of others in which one’s own history is engaged, to Taylor’s inescapable moral frameworks that ground the self, all the way to Levinas’s radical grounding of the self in responsibility for the Other. I use “ethics” somewhat as it operates in “virtue ethics,” not restricted to virtues per se, but broadly defined as a disposition at a deep level of character, or even (for Levinas) that which is the foundation of the conscious self, as opposed to ethics that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism or teleological ethics) or compliance with duties or rules (deontology). The philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer is rooted in Aristotelian phronesis, an important touchstone for virtue ethics, and neither deontology nor consequentialism present the same kind of problems and solutions as does a hermeneutically informed ethics, which eschews simply determining rules or calculating consequences.
What I call an “ethical hermeneutics” thus draws on the insights of philosophers linked by an interest in how humans interpret each other and define ethical relationships in order to provide an alternative to our world’s individual-based instrumental rationality. Gadamer counters instrumental reason and the primacy of the individual by subsuming the individual and the proliferation of technical understanding within the dialogue of historical consciousness. Aristotelian phronesis, or practical judgment in practical situations, is preferable to a sole reliance on techne, or ahistorical technical knowledge. Paul Ricoeur’s work adds the dimension of showing how rationality, written language, and individuality operate as intermediaries rather than foundations in the process of understanding. Although hermeneutics is not necessarily ethical (Gadamer points out that even immoral people want to understand each other), Emmanuel Levinas’s notion that the ethical relationship to the Other precedes, grounds, and circumscribes rational thought adds a foundational ethical dimension to this book’s model of ethical hermeneutics.
I believe it is important to revive these somewhat neglected ideas of the hermeneutic tradition as a still-viable counter to our era’s individual-based instrumental rationality unmoored from a shared value system. The critiques of the self that proliferated, especially in humanities departments, in the 1960s and 70s era of structuralism, post-structuralism Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Derridean deconstruction, and which eclipsed the brief popularity of hermeneutics, rarely escaped from those departments, because they offered little to replace the absence that was repeatedly identified at the core of language, the self, and the ego. I have argued for most of my academic career that hermeneutics, broadly conceived, offers such an alternative for literary interpretation and understanding in general.
The book’s second claim is more practical. That claim is that understanding both the prevalence of the contemporary conditions described above and the hermeneutic alternative to that way of thinking and acting can help enable a leader’s success. Here I draw on two decades of work in higher education administration, where I have often applied the lessons I have learned from my study of hermeneutics in contexts as large as institutional strategic planning and as small as running an effective meeting. For example, I critique the instrumentality of “critical thinking” in favor of a more expansive and hermeneutic concept of “interpretive competence.” I address the limitations of our modern faith in innovation and expertise, which include an overemphasis on technical solutions delivered by autonomous egos and an inattention to judgment within historical contexts and human dialogue. In a world in which we tend to think of another person as an individual whom we can understand more or less completely, we thereby place unethical and potentially violent limits on the other person. We base our lives and work on texts, from the supposed permanency of laws to the ephemera of online posts, without a clear understanding of how texts function within the larger contexts of historical understanding. Planning for the future, whose importance has increased since the increasing control of humans over nature dating to the late eighteenth century, is made more flexible and useful by a recognition of its own historicity and changeability through a hermeneutically aware version of human-centered design. Diversity, equity, and inclusion, often oversimplified by both its proponents and detractors as the advancement of the individual as a representative of an identity group, can be better understood and implemented through the lens of the individual’s existence within overlapping historical dialogues.
The practical significance of this project is to demonstrate in specific ways how an ethical hermeneutics can provide insights that will help organizations become healthier by (1) bringing to the surface the often unacknowledged moral frameworks and conceptual contexts within which people in organizations talk to each other, make decisions and act; (2) showing how those frameworks enable some kinds of organizational activity and constrain others; and (3) demonstrating how ethical hermeneutics can both challenge the underlying moral framework of modernity and help organizations work more effectively.
By bridging this gap between big philosophical questions and the practicalities of organizational health and success, I am also attempting to restore the interpretive fields of the humanities, which tend to be inward-directed and removed from practical application, to their rightful place as resources for successful organizational leadership. Studying the humanities used to be the preferred training ground for civic and organizational leaders, and although only a minority of CEOs and even college presidents have humanities degrees, as a college administrator I was constantly surprised by the practical value of my humanities studies.
Chapter Outline:
Chapter 1: Individual-based Instrumental Reason vs. Ethical Hermeneutics
This chapter lays out the book’s theoretical approach, illustrated with practical examples. I begin with a brief history of the rise of individual autonomy, portraying modern assumptions about the priority of the individual as an historical evolution worthy of critique through what I call “ethical hermeneutics.” Using Charles Taylor’s characterization of the “social imaginary,” I discuss how individualism has devolved from a notion of the self rooted in a moral order to a concept of the self as dissociated from any particular moral order. The negative results of this move can be seen, for example, in education’s move from a public to a private good and the radical priority of individual choice represented by Trump’s first and second presidential administrations. The critiques of the self in the humanities that occurred through deconstruction and its heirs in the 1970s and later did not provide any usable alternatives, and in fact contributed to the separation of agency from any concept of truth, since signification itself was seen as arbitrary and everything a matter of interpretation. I describe what I see as more useful alternatives to the autonomous self, using Teresa Brennan’s movement from individual agency to trans-individual “affect” as a lead-in to what I call “ethical hermeneutics.” I analyze the relation between ethics and understanding (a subject I have treated at length elsewhere), I treat the issue of whether ethics or understanding comes first, and then I draw on Hans Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Jeffrey Stout, and others to develop a model of ethical understanding that provides a useful alternative to the modern notion of individual autonomy. The chapter concludes with a discussion of a true but particularly unproductive discussion in a university meeting which could have been much more productive if it had proceeded more hermeneutically.
Chapter 2: Interpretive Competence vs. Critical Thinking
This chapter presents a model for what I call “interpretive competence” as a better alternative to “critical thinking.” Critical thinking is a useful but limited concept that arises from an individually-based instrumental rationality: individuals use the critical instrument of analysis in order to arrive at valid conclusions that often take the form of dismembering an argument. Interpretive competence uses a hermeneutic-ethical lens to view critical thinking as a subset of a larger interpretive process characterized by human dialogue occurring within a historical context and an ethical orientation. Where critical thinking is often presented in educational circles as a tool for self-actualization and the control of one’s environment, an “interpretively competent” person sees the individual as constituted in a process of dialogue and changing historical horizons, which requires a more complex set of skills, attributes, and knowledge than does critical thinking. Questions are prioritized over analytical statements, reasoning is aware of its historical and ethical context, and interpretation is seen as a fundamental human activity rather than a skill to be applied by individual egos.
Chapter 3: “Innovation” and “Expertise”
Chapter three critiques the often unexamined notions of “innovation” and “expertise.” Innovation is often seen as a good in itself, but such an approach ignores its ahistorical, often destructive aspects and fails to place it in the important hermeneutic conversation of historical reinterpretation. The solution to assessing innovation and making it work is (1) to acknowledge the dialogic historicity of the hermeneutic situation as more powerful than any objective method (Gadamer), (2) to incorporate innovation-generating theory into cultural practice (Taylor), and (3) to use innovation not as a goal in itself, but as a way of making an external good less external and more integrated into our internal goods (Stout). Similarly, the cult of the “expert,” which evolved from the increasing specialization of disciplines, while a necessary part of modern life, leads to an overemphasis on technical solutions delivered by autonomous egos, a false binary between “specialist” and “generalist,” and a neglect of the importance of non- or anti-technical hermeneutic/ethical understanding (what Aristotle called phronesis, as opposed to techne). The chapter closes with some advice on how to evaluate a consultant—the modern “expert” promising “innovative” solutions—based on four criteria for evaluating their hermeneutic awareness.
Chapter 4: Applied Hermeneutics: Further Lessons for Organizational Health
Chapter four will pursue the notion of “applied hermeneutics,” a term I have often used in my work as an administrator in higher education. Other fields have applied hermeneutics to professional situations, including bioethics, health care, education, and even social media, though it has rarely been applied to organizational leadership. This chapter continues to develop specific ethical-hermeneutic concepts that can inform effective administrative practices. For example, even when people disagree at a deep level, arguing from different premises or reaching different conclusions from the same premises, we tend to assume that everyone shares a common bond as rational selves who can ultimately understand each other. However, this is not always the case, and it can be more useful to view disagreement through a hermeneutic lens. This can be illustrated through Levinas’s notion that defining the other according to a limited concept is an act of violence: once you think you have figured someone out, you have impoverished the relationship and have started down the road toward violence. Levinas can help us understand one of the greatest impediments to administrative teamwork: when a team member or the leader fails to understand that the other always comes from a place beyond one’s own comprehension. Similarly, Gadamer’s notion of the hermeneutic conversation as open-ended play (Spiel) guided not primarily by individual subject positions, but by the subject matter of authentic dialogue, constitutes useful advice for the leader of any meeting who attempts to overcome the egos in the room and produce positive results that rise above those individual egos. If a meeting’s authentic conversation generates new meaning that was not there at the beginning, no one will leave saying “That should have been an email.” I also invoke Jeffrey Stout’s concept in Ethics after Babel that partners in a discussion operate according to different “internal goods” (what one is invested in by virtue of their position) and “external goods” (the goods that are external to one’s position, and thus less worthy of personal investment). This framework helps us understand why doctors and hospital administrators, or faculty and deans, find it hard to come to agreement. We also often fail by putting too much stock in the idea that if we just had the right data, we would make the right decisions. Critiques of rational choice theory, such Richard Robb’s Willful: How We Choose What We Do, help explain in detail why this faith in individual-based instrumental reason can result in impasses or poor decisions. Additionally, given the prevalence of e-mail, texting, and social media posts, the written text, whether well or badly written, plays an outsized and often misunderstood role in organizations. I use Paul Ricoeur ‘s analysis of how a written text is not the final result of hermeneutic understanding, but rather an intermediary step in the process of understanding, to suggest a way to give the text its due, but at the same time place it in the context of a hermeneutic conversation. For example, emails and social media posts are often generated in a very localized present moment and then later acquire excessive significance, while the significance of texts that are intended to be foundational, such as the five-year strategic plan or core value statement, often decays quickly. The point is not to eliminate these texts, but rather to understand more accurately their role in the process of understanding.
Chapter 5: Planning for the Future: Design Thinking and the Hermeneutic Conversation
Part of the “modern social imaginary” is that we have moved from understanding what is to planning the construction of new worlds. This can be seen as early as Humphrey Davy’s excitement at the dawn of the nineteenth century that science will enable us to master nature, and it is repeated by Gadamer in the twentieth century with trepidation rather than enthusiasm. Human centered design, popularized at Stanford as a tool for technical innovation, provides an alternative to traditional strategic planning by eschewing the myth that planning can occur in the abstract (the myth of “blue sky thinking”) and instead seeing planning as implicated in constraints and historical contingencies, though it does little to tamp down the modern enthusiasm for humans’ control over nature. Rather than seeing design as a linear, objective process, human centered design parallels Gadamer’s dictum that prejudices are not to be removed, but rather tested against reality in order to expand horizons. Its iterative process reflects the back-and-forth between the part and the whole that characterizes the hermeneutic circle. Drawing on some of my recent publications in this area, as well as my experience leading planning processes informed by these ideas, I try to show how a hermeneutically informed approach to design, with an attention to results embedded in historical contingencies, can aid in institutional planning, while tempering human centered design’s sometimes excessive faith in technological progress and control.
Chapter 6: Hermeneutics and DEI
Both proponents and opponents of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion often oversimplify the relationship of the individual to society, either by seeing the individual solely or primarily as a representative of their race or by assuming that DEI is about making one group of individuals feel guilty about how they view another group of individuals. Gadamer’s rehabilitation of “prejudice” not simply as a moral failing, but rather as the “prejudgment” that is an inevitable part of human understanding (we can never understand any situation without some kind of initial judgment about it) helps to demonstrate how our goal should be to expand the horizons of our biases rather than remove them. Levinas’s argument that reducing the other to a concept is an act of violence, and his ethical mandate to assume that the other exceed the boundaries of our conceptualization, can also illuminate the ethical problems implicit in reducing people to their racial and ethnic identity. Gadamer’s emphasis on the historical embeddedness of the individual in dialogue that transcends individuality helps amplify and ground Ibram X. Kende’s important but widely misunderstood insight that racism is less a moral failing than a function of historical and economic systems (slavery required racism in order to exist, because in the modern world you can’t enslave equals). The usefulness of these insights is illustrated by accounts of actual conversations among a very diverse group of college students in the wake of the first Trump election. These open-ended conversations helped them emerge from what Eli Pariser called the “filter bubble” of the contracted horizons that result from restricting our lives to the culture we agree with (the group included White students from New Jersey suburbs who had never had serious conversations with Black students, and Black students from inner-city Newark who had only limited associations with White students.) I addressed some of these issues in “An Unhealthy Bubble” (Inside Higher Ed 2016).