The Absolute in Executive Education

Terry Eagleton suggests (in his short piece Marx, part of The Great Philosophers series, 1997, p19) that Marx was “profoundly hostile to such metaphysics” [as duty, morality, religious sanctions & the Absolute Idea]. It makes executivezen wonder about whether executive education holds something of that same absolute idea that was so anathema, not only to Marx, but to the a roll-call of ‘anti-philosophers’ such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Derrida & Rorty. Members of that same list of honour, says Santiago Zabala (in his introduction to Rorty & Vattimo’s Future of Religion, 2005, p4), view objectivity more as a question of a poststructuralist tinted “intersubjective linguistic consensus between human beings and not some sort of accurate representation of something that transcends the human sphere”. I’m equating here the Absolute Idea to objectivity: but I think what is expected of business school oriented executive education by its consumers is – mildly – adherence to this absolute, to objective truth and – strongly – to proclaim and justify such a truth through its research practices. As for executivezen’s evidence for this tendency (ahem), this is the subject of future study.