Leading Without Certainty: Applied Hermeneutics in an Age of Instrumental Individualism
(Forthcoming in 2026 on Springer Press)
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: Introduction
The introduction summarizes the book’s two major claims: (1) that we live in a world characterized by individuals using the tools of reason in order to promote themselves and their agendas, often as a means of control, and that the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics can provide resources to address the negative aspects of that world, and (2) that this tension can provide helpful insights for leaders. Tensions between the work of philosophers and the work of leaders are addressed, and theories of leadership that interact with these concerns are briefly surveyed, followed by a summary of the author’s journey that led to this book and a brief outline of the arguments to come.
Chapter 2: Instrumental Individualism vs. Ethical Hermeneutics
Drawing on 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 and characterized by the manipulation of reason as a tool, often a tool of control (my shorthand for this is “technical individualism”). 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 both self-empowerment gurus and Trump’s first and second U.S. presidential administrations, especially as instrumental reason is used without common moral frameworks. The critiques of the self in the humanities that occurred through deconstruction and its heirs in the 1970s and later (movements which also devalued hermeneutic approaches) 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 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-my, based on understanding as interpretation, a connection between ethical dispositions and interpretive stances, and the expansion of horizons in engagement with otherness. Practical examples include 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, a consideration of how “student success” in a college can be interpreted, and an account of a hermeneutic questioning that reframed an institution’s approach to enrollment and financial goals. The chapter concludes with a plea for institutions to approach their own traditions with authentic questions, as Gadamer did when he was Dean and then Rector of the University of Leipzig in the aftermath of World War II.
Chapter 3: Interpretive Competence vs. Critical Thinking
This chapter presents a model for what I call “interpretive competence” as an 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 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. Critical thinking and its absorption into interpretive competence is discussed in terms of Paul Ricoeur’s dialectic between “distanciation” and “attestation, which avoids locking critical thinking and interpretive competence into an either/or situation.” Practical examples include how to test potential hires for interpretive competence, how to engage workforce development in higher education with community engagement, and the author’s failure to fully engage interpretive competence in sending out a memo that ignored some recipients’ own history. While leaders cannot ignore the need to retain personal identity and agency, they can benefit from Gadamer’s discussion of the dynamics of translation when understanding is difficult. Practical examples of this include the need to translate a budget spreadsheet into what it means for the institution and how an executive coach can act as a translator for a leader.
Chapter 4: “Innovation” and “Expertise”
Chapter three critiques and contextualizes 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 (2) to incorporate innovation-generating theory into cultural practice 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. 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 social implications of expertise are examined in light of the relationship between current mistrust of expertise in U.S. politics and the hermeneutic critique of technical expertise. Gadamer’s stress on the experience of multiple unique encounters with the world over technical expertise (exemplified in the legal balance between precedent and codified law) provides a needed supplement to the cult of the expert. Practical examples include the innovation of “outcomes assessment” in higher education, how innovation functions in entrepreneurship, how to hire a hermeneutically aware consultant who provides understanding rather than simply expertise, and how the issues surrounding expertise inform the idea of expertise in leadership itself.
Chapter 5: Planning for the Future: Design Thinking and the Hermeneutic Conversation
Part of the “modern social imaginary” is that since the Enlightenment we have moved from an effort to understand what is to planning the construction and control of new worlds, from nineteenth science’s enthusiasm for controlling the future to Gadamer’s trepidation about the modern emphasis on technical control of the future. Hermeneutics and related approaches can help us explore different ways of thinking about the future and how “planning” relates to actual experience of the world. Human centered design, popularized at Stanford as a tool for technical innovation, does little to tamp down the modern enthusiasm for humans’ control over nature, but it usefully promotes “design” as implicated in constraints, historical contingencies, and the actuality of human experience. 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 practical experience leading planning processes informed by these ideas, I try to show how a hermeneutically informed approach to design can aid in institutional planning, while tempering human centered design’s sometimes excessive faith in technological progress and control. Solving problems, using constraints to encourage creativity, determining what people actually need, engaging in prototyping, all with a focus on results achieved rather than processes undergone, provide an alternative to the myth of technical control undergirding traditional strategic planning.
Chapter 6: Hermeneutics, Multiculturalism, 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. Tayor’s analysis of the uneasy coexistence of a demand for both equality and the recognition of difference, as well Gadamer’s rehabilitation of “prejudice” not simply as a moral failing, but rather as the “prejudgment” that is an inevitable part of human understanding 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 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. Multicultural conversations, in which participants put themselves at risk, should include the different processes of understanding issues that are important to the interlocutors and the recognition of the interlocutors’ otherness, as well as the distinction between the ethical obligation to the other person and the system of justice that requires equality. Objective certainty and even philosophical consistency need to be subordinated to participation in authentic conversation. The usefulness of these insights is illustrated by an account of actual conversations among a very diverse group of college students in the wake of the first Trump election, and in the design of a Black Lives Matter installation following George Floyd’s murder. 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 chapter concludes with a reflection on when action is needed, illustrated by the example of a leader who waited too long to act.
Chapter 7: Artificial Intelligence and Human Understanding
This chapter uses the resources of hermeneutics to explore the fraught notion of how agency works in artificial intelligence and how AI-generated texts change (and don’t change) the experience of interpretation. Rather than placing hermeneutics and AI at odds, I explore AI’s evolving role in the larger context of human understanding. Even “agentic” AI’s thin definitions of agency, which follow the path of technical individualism, are placed in the context of hermeneutics’ downplaying of individual human agency and thicker descriptions of individuals’ engagement with the lifeworld based on experience more than knowledge, which both differentiates human understanding from AI and give AI the positive but usually unacknowledged advantage of not having human-like agency. AI does not have “consciousness” in the sense of intentionality (though definitions of consciousness vary widely), but it can become a “structural actor” in its effects, including deception, which goes back to Turing’s test for AI’s ability to emulate human agency by deceiving humans. AI’s capability to induce false beliefs is less a danger of AI itself than an effect of individualistic human understanding detached from common moral frameworks. Definitive statements about AI are also complicated by the fact that both AI and human experience are evolving as horizons change, merge, and part ways. Practical examples of interaction with AI include a dialogue with AI that is productive partly because it does not emulate human behaviour and how to deal with an AI-generated institutional strategic plan. How AI affects the experience of reading is addressed through a discussion of metaphor’s role in understanding and the difference between transactional and experiential reading, with practical examples of how to negotiate between those two types of reading.
Chapter 8: Leading Without Certainty
Hermeneutics provides a way to avoid the conversation-stopping certainty that closes off authentic conversation, partly because it eschews foundational principles in favor of the functional principle of participation in authentic conversation. As described by Paul Tillich, doubt is an essential element of faith because it counters the dogmatic certainty that often accompanies technical individualism. An institution, according to Searle, is not an objective entity, but is constituted by the collective assignment of agreed-upon functions, which makes participation a constitutive factor in institutional existence. That assignment of functions works through symbolization, which highlights the importance of metaphor, which for Gadamer and Ricoeur is the means by which understanding itself develops. Metaphor asks us to combine invention and discovery and negotiate between the “is” of the literal and the “is not” of the figurative, resulting semantic innovation. Metaphoric transference enlarges our horizons, but it can also deceive, not because it is its figurative nature misrepresents the literal, as in the tradition form Plato to Hobbes, but because it can mask differences as well as express similarities. A practical discussion follows of common metaphors used in institutions, including “lead,” “pivot,” “merge, and “team.” The deceptive metaphor of “family” obscures the stark differences between families and institutions, and I argue for the consideration of “neighborhood” as a hermeneutically appropriate metaphor for institutions. The paradigmatic hermeneutic experience is that of reading a text, which can be extended to understanding in general and understanding institutions in particular, especially since understanding is dependent on the pre-judgment provided by root metaphors. This chapter concludes with the practical experience of a new leader “reading” an institution, not according to its founding documents, but as an active participant in the institution. The leader is an author as well as a reader, rewriting as well as reading the institution, but ideally practicing the humility before the text of the institution, putting one’s prejudices at risk rather than projecting them on the institution. Leaders cannot depend on a neutral “listening” that will lead to certainty but must balance listening and acting, just as interpretation always puts meaning and event in a dialectical relationship. Leaders must work as agents in a world in which actions separate themselves from agents as texts separate themselves from authors, with leaders and institutions presenting different, sometimes competing relations to history. The difficulty that leaders have in understanding this letting go of their actions is illustrated by the example of a program that a leader (the author) had difficulty letting go.
Chapter 9: Hermeneutics and Philosophy as a Way of Life
This final chapter expands the book’s focus from applying hermeneutics to specific leadership positions to addressing the question of whether and how a leader can “live hermeneutically.” This exploration draws on the movement known as “Philosophy as a Way of Life” (PWL), which strives to restore philosophy’s historical role as a way of living rather than an abstract discourse. Hermeneutics and PWL both intersect and differ on issues of history, language, and the role of the philosopher, which makes “living hermeneutically” both an application of and a divergence from PWL. Drawing on Gadamer’s characterization of “experience” as an open-ended, non-dogmatic dialectic between event and understanding, Ricoeur’s theory of action as a text, Hadot’s ideas on the separation of discourse and life in philosophy, and Setiya’s distinction between goal-oriented “telic” activity and presently-valued “atelic” activity, the chapter examines experiential learning for both students and leaders, the complexities of choosing a leadership role, and the tension between the care of the self and the responsibilities of leadership. Because career transitions highlight those issues, the author’s seven experiences of transitioning between leadership positions are evaluated in terms of their fidelity to an ideal of living hermeneutically. Finally, the act of writing this book is examined as both a telic production of a discourse about life and leadership and a lived hermeneutic engagement with life and leadership.
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