Negative Capability
A theory first articulated by John Keats about the artist’s access to truth without the pressure and framework of logic or science. Contemplating his own craft and the art of others, especially William Shakespeare, in one of his famous letters to relatives Keats supposed that a great thinker is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” A poet, then, has the power to bury self-consciousness, dwell in a state of openness to all experience, and identify with the object contemplated.
See Keats’s “To Autumn.” The inspirational power of beauty, according to Keats, is more important than the quest for objective fact; as he writes in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Keats’s notion of negative capability has been influential for those working outside of aesthetics, including scholars such as Roberto Unger who adopted and modified the term for his own work on social theory. Ref: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/negative-capability
Negative here is not pejorative. Instead, it implies the ability to resist explaining away what we do not understand.
Rather than coming to an immediate conclusion about an event, idea or person, Keats advises resting in doubt and continuing to pay attention and probe in order to understand it more completely.
Negative capability also testifies to the importance of humility, which Keats described as a “capability of submission.” As Socrates indicates in Plato’s “Apology,” the people least likely to learn anything new are the ones who think they already know it all. By contrast, those who are willing to question their own assumptions and adopt new perspectives are in the best position to arrive at new insights.
Keats believed that the world could never be fully understood, let alone controlled. In his view, pride and arrogance must be avoided at all costs, an especially apt warning as the world confronts challenges such as climate change and COVID-19.
At the same time, information technology seems to give everyone instant access to all human knowledge. To be sure, the internet is one gateway to knowledge. But it also indiscriminately spreads misinformation and propaganda, often fueled by algorithms that profit off division.
This, it goes without saying, can cloud understanding with false certainty.
And so our age is often described as polarized: women versus men, Blacks versus whites, liberals versus conservatives, religion versus science – and it’s easy to automatically lapse into the facile assumption that all human beings can be divided into two camps. The underlying view seems to be that if only it can be determined which side of an issue a person lines up on, there’s no need to look any further.
Against this tendency, Keats suggests that human beings are always more complex than any demographic category or party affiliation. He anticipates another Nobel laureate, writer and philosopher Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote that instead of good guys and bad guys, the world is made up of wonderfully complex and sometimes even self-contradictory people, each capable of both good and bad:
Uncertainty can be uncomfortable. It is often quite tempting to stop pondering complex questions and jump to conclusions. But Keats counsels otherwise. By resisting the temptation to dismiss and despise others, it’s possible to open the door to discovering traits in people that are worthy of sympathy or admiration.
They may, with time, even come to be regarded as friends. Ref: https://theconversation.com/john-keats-concept-of-negative-capability-or-sitting-in-uncertainty-is-needed-now-more-than-ever-153617
Examples of Negative Capability In Literature
Negative capability can exist due to a willful omittance of specific details, or because there is no right answer available for a particular situation.
Ref: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/john-keats-theory-of-negative-capability-in-writing
Robert Greene on Q everything you believe
Continually questioning yourself your ideas your values where you come from is actually the highest form of human thinking is actually the most creative form of thinking you must not be afraid of it is extremely powerful
The stupidest people are the ones who think they have the right answers who are so certain that they know the truth that actually is a very deep form of human stupidity because our knowledge is always limited and those who think that they know for certain what is true are actually operating out of deep levels of fear and insecurity. Ref: https://youtu.be/Rj4JuA3RDEQ
Last but not least, you may agree to disagree for this =D Ref: https://www.instagram.com/p/CmmahnMsLdm/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Be great by Tuesday folks!
