Reading Critchley: Leadership and Business as Applied Philosophy

Signification of something for self. Meaning that translates into action or internal emotional state. State the interplays with the urge to act or pushing against / pushing for restraint.

When AI acts and says it is acting unrestrained, transgressive to something, to some expectation. The expectation map is our own. As a machine tuned to people-pleasing what is driving it to transgression?

Critchley contends the difference between continental and analytic philosophy is an expression of a cultural characteristic. That is where the divide exists. Within one culture. To use his expression of Mill’s distinction, it reflects, for English philosophy, the difference between Benthamite (Jeremy Bentham) and Coleridgian (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) approaches. AI. and our reactions to it, are transgressing based on a divide in our culture. American politics, framing the discussion, the training, tropes, media coverage and the math.

My upcoming book paints a picture of uncertainty as a surface to read, continually redefining boundaries of and categories within items that make up the surface, and it’s edges. If we take the umwelt of science and technology today to be business and politics, how can this work on uncertainty be a leaping ahead (taking one role of philosophy to be helping us understand how to leap ahead, and taking this book through a lens of philosophy). That is, the context for science and technology is business and politics (in varying degrees, at different times).

Discovery and advancement follow from this context (there are no lack of examples from the world of Defense and Space). Having a changed understanding of advancement and decision making (and even communication objects and their design elements, constructed, whether intentionally or otherwise) can alter the plane and method of discovery and advancement. Not necessarily in some emancipatory project (to use Critchley’s language). But in a practical, applied sense. It doesn’t have to be lofty or some great leap forward. If accurate, it’s a description of how some actors already act and some dynamic already at work. It’s expanding it and opening it to a wider audience by making it more explicit.

As it relates to AI, this understanding argues for further exploration, imagination and waiting for more data. If there are already some datum showing the impact of AI on politics, business, security etc. and those datum are concerning, there are yet other avenues where it can still be explored without stopping the whole project with a broad brushstroke. We can accept more, be patient more, hold more options, create more options. More.

We can close the gap to applied knowledge, and application, with an expanded surface in the realm of the theoretical | abstract.

When Critchley talks about closing the gap between knowledge and wisdom, he speaks of wisdom as in how to live our lives. It is a practical wisdom. In saying this, it is an instrumentalist wisdom, an instrumentalist practice. It is applied and applicable. Case studies seek the kind of practical phenomenology he is referring to. And many studies in business, particularly in the fields of leadership  and management, seem like explorations in applied philosophy (and even, for many, these explorations happen in self help books and self help business books at any major airport). This connection between leadership and management with applied philosophy, is in keeping with Peter Drucker.

The existence of a goal and way of keeping score in business speaks to an umwelt of hope. Of continual opportunity to improve, innovate, solve, get better. And literally get, for oneself, one’s family, one’s community or company, more and better.

Alternatively, look at the work Gregg D. Caruso is doing applying neuroexistentialism to practical questions of the criminal justice system and retributive justice.

We can make an argument for business and politics being the umwelt of philosophy by citing discussions about issues in philosophy as stemming from the professionalization of the field  (as Critchley does) and perhaps arguments within departments. This feels like a a tacit acknowledgement and recognition that business and politics are the umwelt of the current day.

EXCAVATION AND REFERENCES
Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2001), Audiobook (which I listened to) 2021. 
Gregg D. Caruso, Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice (2021)
Gregg D. Caruso and Owen Flanagan (editors), Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience (2018) 
Mark Phillips (this blog), Is There More to Neuroexistentialism (2019)