Levinasian ethics & leadership

For Emmanuel Levinas “the whole history of metaphysics…, in its search for foundations, certainty, presence-to-self, unity and so forth, has proceeded by subsuming alterity” (Roffe, J., p39 of Reynolds & Roffe, 2004). Says Roffe, the whole history of western thought, for Levinas, insists on the primacy of being and ontological concerns rather than with alterity or what is otherwise than being (p.39). Levinas calls this the ‘imperialism of the same’, or as executivezen is calling it, the overdetermination of being and ontology, or of the metaphysical reducing of otherness to similarity. Instead, as Levinas claims in Totality and Infinity, it is the radical otherness that structures our existence. Our overburdening (e.g. in Heidegger) of ontological concerns within philosophy is only possible if alterity is continually marginalised. Levinas states that before there is an identity of any kind, there is an other who calls me forth, who constitutes me as that being who is responsible for the other. Not surprising, then, the line of sight between Derrida’s Saussurian concept of words relying for meaning on and being instantiated in other words, and his priviledging Levinas’ ethics.

Now, to executivezen, this has important implications for the study of leadership. Not so that a Levinasian ethic can be applied to or be seen in leadership, leadership studies or to leadership development: rather, that leadership becomes Levinasian ethics. Leadership is called forth by the other; before there is leadership there in an other who constitutes leadership, for whom the leader is responsible; leadership is responsibility for the other, for alterity. Levinasian ethics puts pay to the tendency within exec.ed to reduce leadership to foundations of the subject (via psychologisms) and its prior metaphysical correlate of being. Instead, it serves an injunction on the ontology of leadership by deconstructing ontology’s limits and its comprehensive claims to mastery, as evidenced by the bulk of the leadership literature. The other human being is the one by whom leadership is called to justice and to justify itself/him/her self. An ethical (Levinasian) relation is based on avoiding all forms of totalization and responding to the call of the other, without instituting an imperialism of the same.

Levinasian ethics annuls traditional notions of leadership development.