Aesthetic Philosophy and the Aesthetic Approach

This chapter discusses that the aesthetic philosophical sensibility, the hermeneutical philosophical sensibility and the performative philosophical sensibility are the principal aesthetic philosophies that have a profound influence on organizational theory. Research on organizational aesthetics could extend, in fact, through the two sociological paradigms that underline the organizational interaction and the collective construction of the organization. The relationality activated by mutual donating that distinguishes the philosophical concept of community is central to the post-humanist awareness of the "aesthetic approach", as well as is the sense of finitude, the process of hybridization, and the opening to otherness. The "aesthetic approach" favors the evocative process of knowing in the study of work and organization, and considers aesthetics as a dialogue for non-causal knowledge and which avoids normative knowledge. The Methodenstreit gave rise to the modern philosophical legitimation of "rationality" and causal-based explanation, favoring the aesthetics of objectivity.