It’s so perfectly self-explanatory and I have titled it so clearly that I don’t know what other commentary you could expect from me here. Came to me via a highly esteemed colleague and I don’t know if I really got across to him how much I appreciate it.
negative capability is a very useful concept we can credit to keats
John Keats used the phrase only briefly in a private letter to his brothers George and Thomas on 22 December 1817, and it became known only after his correspondence was collected and published. Keats described a conversation he had been engaged in a few days previously:
John Keats used the phrase only briefly in a private letter to his brothers George and Thomas on 22 December 1817, and it became known only after his correspondence was collected and published. Keats described a conversation he had been engaged in a few days previously:
I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
Content with half-knowledge! I particularly enjoy this concept because in my own life I can immediately identify its absence (I’m sorry I have to interrupt the conversation to look things up on my phone but I can’t be okay with the hand-waved half-remembrance of a factoid) and presence (many more profound examples meriting illustration without a parenthetical).
The Wikipedia article elaborates on some other lenses on the idea, but I think the Keats quote itself is best.
