Negative Capability in a Culture of Mastery

or, why we should listen to John Keats

Don’t worry about explaining the Northern Lights. Just witness them. Photo by Bror Anders Eriksson on Unsplash

In late December 1817, John Keats wrote one of the most famous letters in literary history to his brothers, George and Tom. This passage is why it is so famous:

Brown & Dilke walked with me & back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & 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.

Why is this letter so significant? For one thing, it defines a central aspect of Keats’s aesthetics—this privileging of beauty as a form of truth above scientific fact or knowledge. The mystery of beauty is most of its point, and to reduce it or confine it to a set of scientific principles or component materials is to destroy it. As Wordsworth writes in “The Tables Turned”:

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Negative capability, for Keats, then, is the ability to resist the desire for total scientific knowledge and to accept the power of aesthetic experience. His counter-example of Coleridge suggests that such ability opposes what he sees as the older poet’s philosophical system building. There is no need to explain the beautiful phenomenon; one should just experience it and leave it unexplained. What are the Northern Lights? Don’t worry about it. Witness them. What happens in our brains when we listen to music? Who cares? Just listen.

Posthumous portrait of Keats by William Hilton, c. 1822

Perhaps the most surprising element of the letter to the modern reader is the way in which Keats defines a “Man of Achievement,” especially considering the career that he abandoned in order to pursue poetry. Keats studied to be a physician at Guy’s Hospital in London after finishing an apprenticeship with an apothecary and surgeon. His background was in what we would now call a STEM field—which is at the very center of twenty-first-century notions of achievement and progress. He gave it up for poetry.

For Keats, the most powerful example of a man of achievement is not the scientist, Newton, but the poet, Shakespeare. And the key to this achievement was his ability to allow mystery to remain mystery—negative capability.

Another word for negative capability might be “receptiveness,” or, as Wordsworth calls it in “Expostulation and Reply,” “a wise passiveness.” In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth claims that this receptiveness of the poet, this radical empathy, means “that it will be the wish of the Poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs.” This is what a “Man of Achievement” does, for Keats and Wordsworth: he surrenders the self, receives the feelings of others, gives in to beauty, allows mystery to be mysterious. This is negative capability.

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I propose that we need negative capability on a societal and cultural level as we have never needed it before, just at this moment in which it is being devalued, stripped away from us, excised from educational curricula, and made to seem ridiculous in a culture of mastery, which pervades every aspect of our lives.

“Master Spanish in only minutes a day.” (You won’t.)

“Master the piano.” “Master your feelings.” “Master differential calculus.” “Master the algorithm for Instagram success.”

Master this or that skill for a secure future. Master your free time (!) and become more efficient. Master your hobbies. Master your steps-per-day. You won’t believe how easy it is.

Except it’s not.

The culture of mastery pushes in on us from all sides, everywhere, even in our fleeting hours of leisure. University students have been programmed by a culture of mastery to be uncomfortable with any ambiguity, any uncertainty. University administrations are utterly dominated by the culture of mastery, to the point that all programs must be reduced to measurable numbers to indicate success and progress, even the arts. Every year, academic departments create rubrics and score themselves with results that can be reported to accrediting agencies.

“What is the level of mastery of your biology department?” 8.36.

“What is the level of mastery of your economics department?” 7.78.

OK, I guess biology wins. “Economics department, you need more mastery, so you will raise your assessment score next year to at least 7.93, or else you will be required to write a new rubric and file it, along with a new action plan.” The culture of mastery requires it.

All negative capability is being wrung out of us, on an individual level, on an academic level, on a societal level.

As I have written elsewhere (see this post), this wringing out includes a defunding of the arts and humanities in colleges and universities at the very moment that we need them more than ever before. It is not a coincidence that the literature classroom, one of the targets of this defunding, is one of the few places on a modern campus where students have a chance to be still for a moment and experience ambiguity and aesthetic wonder. There are a few others: the art studio, the music recital hall, which, of course, are also venues that are suffering under the culture of mastery.

Negative capability is not just a measure of literary creativity; it is also necessary for our wellbeing, to restore balance in a life that demands a constant striving for improvement.

We need to be able to find a “wise passiveness,” to listen, to receive without trying to figure out how we can use it to get ahead. Keats may be right that negative capability is necessary for great art, but it is also necessary for living.

I hasten to add two qualifications, lest I give the wrong impression:

• First, I do not deny the value of science, technology, and economic progress. They all, of course, have their place. Nor do I deny the value of ambition, hard work, and striving. Not only do we need these attributes to make a living, but they are also essential aspects of our nature, the other side of the coin.

• Second, I do think that the study of literature and the arts should be rigorous and challenging. We don’t just sit in class and daydream; we do the serious work of critical analysis. And anyone who has ever tried to play an oboe knows that learning a musical instrument or any other art form requires a lot of hard work before you can even approach aesthetic pleasure. Art is work.

These qualifications aside, however, we need respite from the culture of mastery. We need the chance to sit with a poem without treating it as a problem to be solved, to listen to a piano sonata without checking our email, to receive without the need to optimize.

Try it. Practice some negative capability. Here is a poem by Keats. Just read it, aloud if possible, and be still with it. Let the syllables taste like candy in your mouth. Don’t try to analyze it. Let it wash over you:

On a Dream

As Hermes once took to his feathers light,
When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon’d and slept,
So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright
So play’d, so charm’d, so conquer’d, so bereft
The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes;
And seeing it asleep, so fled away,
Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies,
Nor unto Tempe where Jove griev’d that day;
But to that second circle of sad Hell,
Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows—pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.

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Thank you to the wonderful Mary Tabor for the invitation to write here at Inner Life. Mary writes

Mary Tabor "Only connect ..."

, which is appointment reading for me and for many others.

And thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Andrii Leonov on Unsplash

John Halbrooks

writes