negative capability

English

Etymology

Coined by John Keats in an 1817 letter.

Noun

negative capability (countable and uncountable, plural negative capabilities)

1. The capacity of artists to pursue ideals of beauty, perfection and sublimity even when it leads them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty, as opposed to a preference for philosophical certainty over artistic beauty.
   • 2010, Jeff Mann, Binding the God: Ursine Essays from the Mountain South, →ISBN, page 167:

     His poetry helps me understand passion and mortality; his musings on negative capability help me understand how I can love and hate home at the same time. Negative capability, said Keats in an 1817 letter, “is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" (1818).

   • 2011, Sidner Larson, Captured in the Middle, →ISBN, page 147:

     It also, however, contains the potential for negative capability that might help transform genocide into something generative.

   • 2011, Daniel Markovits, A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy in a Democratic Age, →ISBN:

     The centerpiece of the chapter is an effort to redeem the promise that I have earlier attributed to the lawyerly virtues—in particular to fidelity and its attendant negative capability—by setting these virtues in a political context.