Emotion: the discerning engagement

Julia Romanowska

Chapter 18 in Leadership, Art, and Responsibility, 2026, pp 156-183 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter develops the emotional dimension of aestemethics as a leader's discerning, affectively attuned engagement with the world. Against the dominant instrumental and therapeutic language of leadership development – where emotions are regulated for performance, positivity, and “emotional intelligence” – it argues that feeling is ethically decisive: without emotion, no genuine judgement, and no responsible action. Emotions are intentional and world-disclosing. They do not merely colour experience; they participate in how reality becomes meaningful and move us – often before justification – to respond. Drawing on philosophy, contemporary emotion theory, and neuroscience, the chapter shows how thinking and feeling are interwoven, and why affectless rationality collapses precisely where life becomes morally urgent. Emotional responsibility is developed through two demanding movements: affirmation and vigilance. The chapter affirms emotional engagement and moral emotions – responsibility, compassion, tenderness, wonder, gratitude, and the paired tones of guilt and shame – as forces that render responsibility experientially real, attuning judgement to vulnerability and the singularity of the Other. At the same time, it insists on suspicion towards morally ambivalent emotions such as anger, disgust, and sentimentality, especially when shaped by distorted imaginings or collective contagion. Finally, leadership is situated within the tragic conditions of human existence. Negative capability is framed not as resilience rhetoric, but as existential preparedness: the capacity to endure uncertainty, sorrow, and non-knowledge without evasion, and to remain answerable to human dignity.

Keywords: Moral Emotions; Emotional Responsibility; Emotional Vigilance; Morally Ambivalent Emotions; Negative Capability; Tragic Wisdom; Ethical Judgement; Aestemethical Leadership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781049403991
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