Aesthetics: poetic insightfulness

Julia Romanowska

Chapter 17 in Leadership, Art, and Responsibility, 2026, pp 141-155 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter reclaims the aesthetic as a fundamental human capacity for perceiving reality before it is reduced to concept or calculation. The aesthetic is not ornament, taste, or creative self-expression, but a pre-reflective and imaginative mode of knowing through which the world becomes meaningful and ethically charged. It is the condition under which judgement, discernment, and responsibility become possible, shaping how reality appears and what comes to matter within it. Through poetic insightfulness, combinatorial play, and imaginative perception, human beings enter reality more deeply rather than escape from it. Imagination renders the absent present, discloses hidden connections, and allows complexity to be apprehended without premature simplification. It is through such imaginative acts that subjective experience acquires coherence. In this sense, the aesthetic is an entrance into the real and a precondition for phronesis. Yet imagination is irreducibly ambivalent. The same faculty that enables empathy, vision, and moral insight can generate distortion, ideological seduction, and violence. Because imagination shapes not only private perception but shared worlds, social orders, and power, it carries political and ethical consequence. The chapter therefore develops the notion of aesthetic responsibility, articulated through six acts of affirmation and culminating in vigilant suspicion towards one's own images and narratives. The aesthetic is thus presented as a decisive dimension of aestemethical leadership: a cultivated sensibility capable of perceiving without reduction, imagining without illusion, and assuming responsibility for the realities set in motion through vision, language, and action – and for the worlds such acts help bring into being.

Keywords: Poetic Insightfulness; Imagination; Aesthetic Responsibility; Ethical Judgement; Phronesis; Subjective Experience; Possible Worlds; Combinatorial Play; Estemethical Leadership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781049403991
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