Prolegomenon

The Leader as Instrument

Leadership is not merely a technique, nor is it an application domain. Leadership is a hermetically and genealogically privileged surface into and through which metaphysics leaks. Like few other dimensions of social experience, the evolution of the leader is a strange attractor at the intersection of ontology (what does it mean to be human?), epistemology (how do we know anything?), ethics (what should we do?), power (who decides?), and praxis (how should we act together?).

When we talk about modern leadership theory, we’re really talking about metaphysics. We think the discussion is practical. We think we are discussing operational efficacy in the context of the task of leadership. Or perhaps we’re discussing how to optimally empower members of a team. These are reductions.

When we talk about leadership in this way, we disarticulate it from the deeper compulsions that drive leadership as a purpose-driven concept. This distills leadership into a desire, or a toolkit, or a function, which papers over the awesome and awful reality of leadership as it has been understood for most of human history. Perhaps we must understand leadership not as something pursued or bestowed, but as a terrible and impossible burden for which one is chosen through the irreducible needs of the moment.

In any case, leadership commands extraordinary discourse. We talk about it in great quantity. Google Scholar tells us leadership is the 4th most voluminous topic in academic content, surpassed only by science, technology, and health. On LinkedIn, leadership content has been estimated to account for anywhere from 10-20% of all content, surpassed only by technology at 20-30%.

Given leadership’s discursive volume, we must be direct—even disagreeable as necessary—in pursuing metaphysical justifications for how we imagine it. Contemporary leadership theory is enjoined by a demand: it cannot address metaphysics, or at minimum, it must keep any metaphysical assumptions hidden. In practice, the philosophy that describes our conceptualization of science is defined by this expectation.

To understand how the modern paradigm resists metaphysics, we must examine the claim’s credence and origins. Modern science emerged in part from the recovery of ancient Hellenic thought in Europe from the 12th to 16th centuries. Also contributing was an historical convergence in which Greek formalism, Christian metaphysics, new instruments, and institutional experimentation combined to reopen the question of what nature could be, rather than merely what it was said to be.

With this, some basic metaphysical concepts were cemented, and at least in practice they persist to the present. Primary among these are individualism, reason, skepticism, and empiricism. Anyone with a phone, or computer, or plumbing, or vehicle, or any of a host of other modern tools, expect these tools—these systems—to work. Inasmuch as we have faith they will work, it is because we give some metaphysical credit to the material, the physical. This assumes the material is ordered as instruments and mechanics that are essentially rational. We believe that we can understand how things work because we believe what is (ontology) is material, and how we can understand it (epistemology) is rational.

Skepticism determines the veracity of the systems we’re being sold. Will this system work? Does my understanding of it suffice? Through skepticism, we can choose among the systems and understandings we encounter.

Empiricism exercises our reason and skepticism to prove claims to ourselves. A salesman says, “this knife can cut through lead.” The customer can produce a piece of lead and attempt to cut it with the knife. This is empiricism.

The individual is what gives coherence to these concepts. The individual has a rational capacity. The individual can muster skepticism at a proposition. The individual can generate a test of the claim and perform it.

Oddly, these assumptions are presented as non-metaphysical. Their metaphysical origins are only visible to those who recognize the sleight of hand. The strictest modernist claims reality is just stuff doing things, any further inquiry is meaningless because metaphysics itself is meaningless. Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg, in his book, The First Three Minutes, says, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” More directly, philosopher Rudolf Carnap (of Vienna Circle fame) wrote a book called The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language, in which he tells us, “The alleged statements of metaphysics … assert nothing, are mere pseudo-statements.”

“Our claim [is] that the statements of metaphysics are entirely meaningless, that they do not assert anything.”
—Rudolf Carnap

One might object that this narrative over-indexes on logical positivism and analytic philosophy, failing to account for the persistence of theological or spiritual metaphysics. The assertion seems to be corrected by noting that some believe in God, or the Ideal, or Gaia, Vishnu, Muhammad, Mani, Zoroaster, Gautama, or the oneness of the suchness of the wholeness. Yet these vestigial metaphysical commitments are not felt as fully as one might imagine.

The dedicated Thomist still expects their car to start in the morning. The pious Muslim still expects their phone to connect to the cellular network. The Buddhist in Singapore does not assume bodhicitta is sufficient to make the financial markets operate in their favor.

What of the continental tradition in western philosophy? What of those who think reality is not out there, but rather in our minds? They too remain in thrall to the methodological assumption that the systems work, and they work because they’re rational. Only the most zealous solipsist would claim mind’s primacy completely abjures reason as foundation for coordination between people and technology.

In the developed world, most of us act as if these metaphysical assumptions—individualism, reason, skepticism, empiricism—are, at core, how the world works. When pushed to provide metaphysical grounding for these assumptions, the best the liberal philosophical tradition can provide is the claim that asking the questions at all is a form of nonsense. Many have carried along supernatural metaphysics from older paradigms, but even then, in practice, these beliefs play a subordinate role to the primacy of reason, formality, systems, and tools.

Perhaps the relationship with leadership is already intuitive. We already think of the world as things, systems, tools. Why would we not apply this frame—even if we’re not aware we’re doing so—to leadership? Why wouldn’t we want to reduce the leader to its place within a world of things, systems, and tools? Philosophically, this is precisely what contemporary leadership theory does.

Whether through Jesus, Nagarjuna, or Hegel—once we accede to the hegemonic influence of the impersonal, rational, cybernetic, casuistic world—no metaphysical out-clauses can even be attempted, let alone realized. We are the creators, emperors, and destroyers of the reality we think we know. This is true for each of us, and this is true for all of us.

This orthodoxy is by no means necessary. These postulates are hundreds of years old. We have long been capable of imagining alternative metaphysical premises.

The leadership essays on The Subjunctive are predicated on a set of metaphysical premises that stand in contradistinction to the orthodoxy just described. This set of premises coheres: they are mutually reinforcing and interrelated. For the purposes of user experience, we can call this philosophy subjunctivist. The body of thought taken together can be called subjunctivism.

These writings do not (yet) provide a thoroughgoing description of subjunctivism in extenso. Neither will this effort be attempted here. Nevertheless, there is good cause for providing an essential primer regarding what subjunctivism entails as a sensemaking tool for readers of good faith.

Subjunctivism on One Foot

Subjunctivism originated as a criticism of the “objectivist epistemology” of Ayn Rand. While subjunctivism rejects Rand’s philosophical project, her device of delivering philosophy, “while standing on one foot” provides fruitful articulation regarding how subjunctivism saw the world differently. She would often ask detractors to articulate their philosophical principles while standing on one foot. Ignoring Shaolin monks and gymnasts, the presumption is that most cannot successfully stand on one foot for very long, and articulating one’s philosophy in that time measures its gravity.

Here then is subjunctivism on one foot:

Ontology - What is real?
Reality is best understood not as what is, but as what could be. What exists at any moment is a provisional crystallization within a wider field of unrealized possibility. Being is therefore downstream of becoming. Possibility exists only because reality is constitutionally imperfect. Failure is not a state of reality, failure is reality.

Epistemology - What is knowledge?
What we know matters less than what we could know. Knowledge is not the accumulation of correct representations of the world, but the cultivated capacity to sense, navigate, and respond to possibility. Formal reasoning, models, and theories arrive after judgement, not before. At the moment of decision, there is no rule or algorithm, there is only discernment.

Ethics - What should we do?
The good is the ability to continue to make moral choices. The moral quality of an action is not legible in isolation, in declared intention, or in professed character. Ethics becomes visible only over time, through how choices expand or contract future possibility. Moral evaluation is diachronic, not episodic. Moral failure is not an outcome; it is an inherent principle of the field in which moral choices are even possible. Every moral choice eventually fails.

Agency - What is the individual?
Human agency consists not in control, optimization, or rule-compliance, but in maintaining possibility under pressure. Will is not domination nor the antithesis of care. Will is the capacity to keep futures open when circumstances push toward closure.

This “one foot” exposition clarifies subjunctivism’s objection to modern leadership theory. Rather than viewing reality as pushing toward perfection with leadership as vector, subjunctivism sees reality as constitutionally imperfect. Subjunctivism demands we notice reality must be imperfect to exist. Failure is not an outcome of poor leadership. Failure is reality. Being is impossible without failure. Leadership does not measure the opposition of failure, it is choice-making within the expectation of failure.

Subjunctive leadership is not empathy, service, vision statements, or moral signaling. It is disciplined stewardship of conditions under which those led can act, choose, and become. A subjunctive leader’s success is measured not by intention, but by whether the systems they shape remain capable of adaptive response.

Modern institutions mistake legibility for truth and procedure for wisdom. In doing so, they attempt to formalize what cannot be formalized without being destroyed. When form turns inward and consumes its own conditions of emergence and becoming, meaning collapses. This does not happen because the formalizations were necessarily false, but because they were constrained toward ossification and death.

Subjunctivism begins after certainty fails. It does not promise reconciliation, harmony, or a final explanation. It demands courage to act without guarantees, to judge without rules. Subjunctivism recognizes we have no choice but to accept the world is not a machine to be tuned, but a field to be navigated.

Even this “one foot” exhibition will be misunderstood. Many will draw conclusions unsupported by the animating philosophy. There is good reason for this.

Description, Prescription, and Prospection

This prolegomenon is not a response to any particular criticism. It is an attempt to clarify the philosophical conditions under which critique itself is possible.

Most wrongly presume philosophy is not only dry and boring, but delivered exclusively through ponderous tomes containing abstruse articulations beyond normal life’s ken. It was amusingly said of Heidegger (who wrote in German) that he could not be translated … even into German. That this is not necessarily the case is lost on many.

The predisposition of most upon encountering new philosophical ideas is to collapse discovery into existing knowledge. Plato said learning is anamnesis (recollection) of pre-existing knowledge. In Meno, Socrates extracts geometric knowledge from an uneducated slave boy through questions requiring him to recall experiences that yield probative geometric conclusions.

As the soul is immortal, has been born often, and has seen all things here and in the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and other things.
— Plato, Meno

The neophyte, encountering novel philosophy, queries their conceptual scaffolding to find a category into which to conscribe it. That this new data may not fit well matters less than the effort of finding a better fit. This kind of taxonomic violence is the default posture of the human.

Whether love of wisdom (which is what philosophy is supposed to be) can overcome this challenge in any given instance depends upon much. Charisma and rhetoric matter for any philosophical expression. There are other variables as well. Less obvious is the confusion around what the philosophy attempts. We must wonder whether the meditations we encounter concern what is, what should be, or what could be.

Most commonly, the reduction from is to ought serves not only one’s own philosophy but also—as often—the misapprehension of novel insights. Philosophy, in describing something, is assumed to be prescribing something else. Nietzsche says “God is dead,” and detractors misapprehend this as “God should be dead (and it’s good he is).” Derrida says, “Grand narratives have lost their coherence,” and detractors misapprehend this as, “Grand narratives should have lost their coherence (and it’s good they did).” Max Weber says, “Reason produces disenchantment,” and his detractors claim he’s saying, “Reason ought to be producing disenchantment (and it’s good that it did because reason is bad).”

Many philosophers have advanced positive programs. This means they are making claims about what should be. This is especially true in moral and political philosophy. Still, critique remains central to any philosophical project. To dissolve whatever might arrest new understanding, philosophy must critique, dissolve, even satirize. The more philosophy one encounters, the more obvious critique’s central role becomes.

Philosophical critique generally takes the form: “What we believe is producing outputs that are in conflict with what the belief was supposed to do.” If the belief is “God created the universe” and the critique is “The universe is filled with suffering,” the critique is often assumed to mean “We should abandon God.” The assumption doesn’t necessarily follow, but because we identify with our beliefs, the critique’s cognitive dissonance is painful, and we salve our pain by misattributing normative malice to the critic. We cannot understand what a philosophy posits if its critiques have already tripped this circuit.

Social psychology calls this gambit identity-protective cognition. Cognitive dissonance is painful and cognitive biases regulate this pain. Identity-protective cognition is a bundle of such biases. When belief binds to identity, social belonging, or moral self-image, our minds interpret challenges as threats to self or group, triggering defensive rather than evaluative cognition. Thus critique becomes existential threat. The listener imagines: “If this critique is allowed, what I am dissolves.”

This manifests as category errors. If the critique is epistemic and suggests a belief is incomplete, or flawed, or overstated, it is misapprehended as an ontological claim the belief is false and must be destroyed. If the critique is methodological, suggesting a framework has limitations, it is misapprehended as a moral or ontological claim that the framework is illegitimate. If the critique is interpretive, saying there might be alternative readings, the misapprehension suggests the claim is political, demanding one’s sense of the meaning will be erased. Mind collapses critique into negation, negation into annihilation.

Identity protection exposes a bundle of biases that make up the phenomenon.

Belief Perseverance
When critique undermines belief, the belief persists because abandonment feels like self-negation. The critique threatens not merely the belief but the continuity of self. We force the belief to persist even against legitimate criticism.

Sacred Value Protection
When beliefs are treated as sacred, they become non-fungible, rendering them incapable of revision. We can only defend them, never revise them. Critique becomes desecration. Nuance becomes betrayal. Tradeoffs become immoral. Rational critique often intensifies certainty.

Binary Moral Framing
This bias smuggles an implication: if a belief is morally good, questioning it is morally bad. This eliminates neutral space for inquiry. Critique becomes synonymous with hostility. The result is an implicit logic that says, “If you are not affirming this belief, you are advocating its destruction.”

When critique is treated as negation, philosophy collapses into moral signaling, and inquiry gives way to self-protection. Design thinker and oblique philosopher Dave Gray writes in Liminal Thinking, “Consider the possibility that seemingly different or contradictory beliefs may be valid.” Were this trivial to realize, he would not need to say it. What we permit ourselves to consider is constrained by forces we don’t—and often *can’t—*recognize, let alone resist. This cognitive feature need not be final. We can see more, even if doing so is singularly rare.

“If someone’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, you’re probably missing something.”
— Dave Gray in conversation

To the subjunctivist, Gray’s insight that we’re probably missing something is not merely local, but ontological. We’re always missing something. This is not a state to be avoided, but a precondition for reality.

Similarly, our identity preservation efforts are deeply justified. We, too, must be imperfect to exist. The cost of that imperfection is paid in part through our cognitive composure toward novel philosophy. But this is not the only way to pay the toll.

A tool aligned with the subjunctivist frame is to read all new philosophy as if it were written by God. Taking an initial posture of total credulity does not prevent us from dismantling the philosophy later. It often better situates us to judge it.

Much of what will be presented on The Subjunctive will be animated by the Nietzschean disposition of shattering idols. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche permits us to imagine that much of what we take for granted as proven, given, sacred knowledge about our world, when tapped with a hammer, will sound hollow, and when struck, will shatter. Were they able to bear the load they claim to bear, they would be solid and the hammer would only chip them. Subjunctive philosophy provides a lens through which the supports for modern leadership we’re told are load bearing may also prove hollow and shatter.

The pieces here are written from the subjunctivist perspective. They assume some readers will start with preconceptions that produce misconceptions. They assume some readers will grasp their purpose and still resist and perhaps even hold these thoughts in contempt. They assume their insights will necessarily fail. Yet as they exist at all, they assume some readers—however small a cohort—will register their intent, seize their direction, and employ them to generate possibility.

The Subjunctive Leader

Still, some readers may already be asking for directions. They will be seeking less idol smashing and more solution-ing. For these, there is good news and bad news.

The Good News
Subjunctivism is an incipient platform for a strange, new leadership. Subjunctive leadership is the disciplined practice of preserving and expanding the field of future possibility in human systems. This is not the common schema for contemporary leadership theory. Subjunctive leaders aren’t responding to uncertainty, conflict, and risk, they are acting within a reality composed of these properties.

The Subjunctive will increasingly deal with the core commitments of subjunctive leadership, though it begins by shattering idols. Subjunctive leadership suggests possibility outranks harmony. It requires us to see that judgment is not cruelty. It is ecological, not therapeutic. The ethics of the subjunctive leader are diachronic and not episodic and require longer time horizons than the ones we currently employ. Within the subjunctive understanding of leadership, authority is something a leader needs to exercise, not something for which the leader needs to apologize.

The Bad News
Subjunctivism does not provide the solution for leadership because it compels us to realize there is no solution that will not fail. There will be no means offered to resist all critique because all answers are subject to replacement by new answers. There will be no simple formula to solve the problems leaders face because to do so would rob leaders of what makes them what they are.

Subjunctivism requires leaders to adopt a new posture toward the choices they make. Contemporary leadership theory tells leaders the correct posture is, “make the right choice and that choice is whatever conforms to this newest, best, most peer-reviewed theory.” The posture of the subjunctive leader is, “what choice will account for what otherwise might have been and what otherwise might be?” Contemporary leadership is factual, subjunctive leadership is counterfactual.

Taken together, the work of The Subjunctive is not partisan. Its purpose is not to enjoin membership in an ideological tribe, or heap scorn on some other. The teams for which almost everyone believes they are playing and their totalizing requirements are not within the interests of the writings here. The Subjunctive is trying to exit the playing field altogether in search of one that is more honest about what we’re doing not only as leaders, but as agents in an extraordinarily complex and confusing cosmos.

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