Beyond Business Ethics: Leadership, Spirituality, and the Quest for Meaning

Part One: Modernity and the Crisis of Meaning

ALTHOUGH I DO NOT DENY the historical value and contribution of business ethics, I nevertheless cannot avoid asking whether a classical ethical approach to business problems is sufficient to resolve the real problems we are confronted with today. Members of the business community are not only faced with ethical problems, but with an increasing loss of meaning as well. The world of work, just like private and public life, becomes more and more pervaded by what one can describe as a suffering from meaninglessness, a suffering that, according to V. E. Frankl, is the disease of our time ¹ and that leads also to the incapacity to integrate work into a meaningful life project.

Some authors, such as Chantal Delsol, ² are extremely pessimistic in this regard: adapting the myth of Icarus, she suggests that Western culture for the past two centuries has attempted to escape the imperfect conditions of human life by soaring under our own technologically enhanced power toward the "sun" of human perfection, only to have fallen back into the labyrinth of the imperfect world in which we dwell. Imagining that Icarus survives his fall, she compares postmodern men and women to Icarus, no longer capable of reappropriating their human condition. They have lost the keys to understanding and interpreting life. They can give no more meaning to their lives; they live and work in a world without significance.

The general loss of meaning is not merely a religious problem, but an unavoidable consequence of modernity. The loss of meaning has at least three interdependent causes, each of which has immediate consequences for business:

1. the loss of a horizon of transcendence in frameworks of interpretation;

2. the disconnection among different spheres of life;

3. the impoverishment of the inner life.

The Loss of a Horizon of Transcendence

The loss of meaning is first of all a problem of interpretation. We have gradually imprisoned ourselves in a positivistic and objective language and in frameworks of interpretation that narrow the perspectives from which we look at our world in general and at the business context in particular: "Now and again . . . our perspectives become narrow, microscopic or even fantasy-driven, or a particular point of view becomes ingrained so that one begins to adopt only that perspective." ³

The situation resembles the context described by Plato in his myth of the cave.

The story describes the inhabitants of an underground cave who have lived in darkness since their childhood. Their legs and necks are chained, so that they cannot move. They can only see in front of them, being prevented by the chains from turning their heads. In a certain sense they are "forward-looking" people. They can interpret their world only in a unidimensional way. They see only shadows of themselves or shadows of objects projected by people who walk a path along which a low wall is built situated between a fire and the prisoners. The persons behind the wall are like marionette players—they manipulate reality. For the prisoners, the truth is nothing but the shadows of the images. They believe that their illusion is reality. In a metaphoric sense we could say that, for them, the virtual becomes real and reality virtual. They are prisoners of a closed horizon of interpretation.

The Disconnection among Different Spheres of Life

A second reason why contemporary men and women cannot experience business and work as meaningful is that they are caught up in a radical disconnection between the differentiated spheres of life and between those spheres and ultimate ends (although we should note that the problem is not with the process of functional differentiation as such). One can call this a "disconnection syndrome," ⁴ a syndrome that results in an incapacity to put the pieces together.

Before modernity individuals found themselves embedded in...