The dynamics of aestemethical transformation

Julia Romanowska

Chapter 14 in Leadership, Art, and Responsibility, 2026, pp 101-128 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter develops the aestemethical transformation model as a theoretically articulated and empirically grounded explanation of why the Shibboleth programme produced psychological and biological change. The model arises from a systematic analysis of participants’ first-person experiences of Shibboleth and its after-effects, interpreted in dialogue with philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, and neuroscience. It argues that transformation arises not despite shock, negativity, and destabilisation, but through them. Aesthetic confrontation initiates a dialectical process in which rupture suspends habitual perception, loosens defensive structures of the self, and heightens affective and cognitive plasticity. These breaches open the conditions under which ethical maturation becomes possible. Five interwoven dynamics structure the process: confrontation, appropriation, destabilisation, reorientation, and recollection. Confrontation interrupts instrumental orientation through aesthetic shock, astonishment, and radical presence. Appropriation entails the demanding affirmation of life in its tragic complexity, made possible by art's aestemethical engaged distance and by the necessity of the negative. Destabilisation names the liminal oscillation that unsettles identity and prepares ethical reconfiguration. Reorientation unfolds in decisive epiphanies: the face of the Other, the awakening of responsibility, and the recognition of evil as a summons to resistance. Recollection concerns the future-directed force of memory, through which aestemethical traces resurface in concrete situations, orienting judgement and action. These dynamics illuminate how aesthetic experience reshapes subjectivity at existential, ethical, and neurobiological levels. The measurable outcomes of the Shibboleth study are thus understood not as isolated effects, but as expressions of a deeper transformation in how leaders perceive, respond, and assume responsibility in relation to the Other.

Keywords: Aestemethical Transformation; Embodied Distance; Radical Presence; Liminality; Surprise and Novelty; Tragic Wisdom; Epiphany of Evil; Ethical Memory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781049403991
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