"Negative Capability" - Quareness Series 138th "Lecture".
John Keats that great English poet of the early 1800s was reportedly enamoured of what he called "negative capability"...a concept involving suspending judgment about something in order to learn more about it. In the course of his short lifetime (25 years) he appears to have developed a deep sense of life's uncertainties. Being very much inspired by the works of Shakespeare, he described this negative capability as "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Implied here is the ability to resist explaining away what we don't understand. Rather than jumping to conclusions, Keats advised resting in doubt and continuing to pay attention and probing in order to understand an event/idea/person more completely...urging caution against the naive view that "what we see is all there is".
Shakespeare's comedies are full of mistaken identities and misconceptions and Keats reminds us that we are most likely to gain new insights if we stop assuming we know everything we need to know by shoehorning people, etc. into preconceived boxes. These ideas of Keats also point to the importance of humility...which he described as a "capability of submission". In this he's in good company given where we can see Socrates indicating in Plato's "Apology" that the people least likely to learn anything new are the ones who think they already know it all. By the same token, those who are willing to question their own assumptions and adopt new perspectives are more likely in a better position to arrive at new insights. In essence Keats came to believe that the world can neither be fully understood nor indeed controlled and that arrogance and pride needs to be avoided at all costs. And this surely is an apt warning for our world today where our understanding continues to be hugely clouded with false certainties.
Given the widespread gender based, generational, political, racial, religious, scientific, etc. polarisation happening throughout our societies, it's increasingly easy today to automatically lapse into the facile assumption that all of us 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. But, like Keats suggests, us humans are always more complex than any categorisation. As another writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out...
instead of good and bad guys, our world is made up of wonderfully complex and sometimes self-contradictory people, each capable of both good and bad. In truth the dividing line between good and evil runs through the heart of every human being.
Uncertainty can be uncomfortable but by resisting the temptation to dismiss or despise others, it's possible to open the door to discovering traits in people deserving and worthy of sympathy and admiration.
Maybe an answer without a question is just an edict
and any answer we must not question is just dogma...
deployed all round within the lure of social cohesion.
Maybe in formulating, discovering and investigating hypotheses
we get to understand scientific method as not about proof...
just about reasons for preferring alternative theories.
Maybe we're all here subject to ongoing mental metamorphoses,
at first soaking up information to gain some confidence, and
with later undermining inclination feeding into our need for
regularly recycling where we can find our place in the world.
Maybe dogma, commonly skulking in the guise of doctrine,
can prevent our aspiring to genuine faith, hope and love,
leaking instead into prideful seeding of our own downfall.
Maybe preference is necessarily based on questions and answers,
and when questions are forbidden and answers are imposed,
we are unavoidably driven to rebellion and renewal.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
March, 2021.