My goal for today is to work on my research problem (i.e.) define it. The major issue is getting at what do I mean when I assert that the current organizational leadership crises is loss of meaning. I've looked at the literature on meaning in leadership and meaning in organization. However, it appears that the crisis goes much deeper than what is happening in contemporary organizations. Indeed, what is happening in organizations today is merely symptomatic of the world catching up to (in an experiential) way to Nietzche's understanding that the logical outcome of Kant's work to unify transcendental idealism and empirical realism. In the end, Kant regulates God, freedom, and immortality to the realm of cognitive meaninglessness. Thus producing two important philosopical assumptions:
(1) the radical finitude of the human subject i.e. there is no-God-like point of reference that humans can know and that could otherwise serve to evaluate human experience and (2) human experience is completely contingent and created. Human experience is made and remade by humans embedded in contingent circumstances(Critchley, 2001).
If human experience is a contingent creation, then it can be recreated in other ways. This is the demand for transformative practice of philosophy, art, poetry, or thinking that would be capable of addressing, criticizing, and ultimately redeeming the present. The demand, then, that runs through much Continental thought . . . is that human beingsemancipate themselves from their current conditions. (p. 64)
Nietzsche clearly identifies nihilism as the unforeseen crises in Kant’s criticism of metaphysics (Critchley, 2001). “For Nietzsche, nihilism as a psychological is attained when we realize that the categories by means of which we had tried to give meaning to the universe are meaningless” (p. 84).
It is clear then, that by the end of the 19th century, Nietzche had correctly foreseen the trajectory for humanity intent of pursuing empirical realistic knowledge through a positivist epistemological paradigm.Yet it is the positivist epistemology that has dominated the practice and scholarly understanding of organizational leadership through the 20th century. Johnson and Duberley point out, "the dominance of this perspective is such that it is ingrained into commonsense assumptions about how to do research . . . . . Even some of those who clam to reject positivism have not necessarily eschewed all the elements of the positivist approach" (p. 38). Much of the criticism directed at positivist research and practice in organizational leadership in the later half of the 20th century centered on its disconnect self-induced disconnect of theory and practice. "In searching to identify causal relationships, the focus has become narrower and narrower, to the extent that propositions being tested do not reflect the complex situations in which managers actually find themselves" (p. 43).
Consequently, the contemporary loss of meaning in organizational leadership is the logical out working that Continental philosophers identified in the late 19th century as the double failure of the Enlightenment (Critchley, 2001):
(1) The values of modernity or Enlightenment do not connect with the fabric of moral and social relations, with the stuff of everday life . . . . Enlightenment values lack any effectiveness, and connection to social praxis.
(2) However, not only do the moral values of Enlightenment fail to connect with the fabric of morel and social relations, but - worse still - they lead instead to the progressive degradation of those relations. (p. 86)
Consequently, 21st century leaders and organizations are left with a meaningless universe. In the face of nihilism how do leaders and organizations emancipate themselves from a situation that in which Dostoevsky identifies as suicide as the only solution (Critchley, 2001). The crisis is how do leaders and organizations construct meaning in their nihlistic world .
