Negative capability
The poet John Keats had a term for this crucial capacity to stay patiently in nonconclusion until you discern that it is time to conclude: negative capability, which he defined as “being capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Adam Kahane • Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together
Aristotle, is limited to the things that cannot be otherwise than they are (in other words, things that are determined by necessity). By contrast, the other four ways and capacities of grasping the truth apply to all the other contexts of reality and life. They are art or producing (techne), practical wisdom (phronesis), theoretical wisdom (sophia)
... See moreC Otto Scharmer, Peter Senge (Foreword) • Theory U
The Keatsian endeavor has never been popular, but is particularly unfashionable today. Religious fundamentalists reject it on the grounds that revelation and commitment are needed to orient oneself in the world. The amorality of a poet who is a “thoroughfare for all thoughts” risks heresy or destabilization. Tell me where you stand, where your loya... See more
Zohar Atkins • The Liberal Arts Are Dying Because Liberalism is Dying
Pater’s lines, as when he declaims at the start of The Renaissance, “What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.”
Natalie Dykstra • Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner
But the wanderer endures uncertainty. The wise wanderer holds off and restrains, possessing what John Keats called negative capability, the ability to be in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
David Brooks • The Social Animal
Inherent in this vision of “perfection” is the embrace of trial-and-error learning and experimentation as necessary aspects of any worthwhile human endeavor. Integrating this commitment to tolerating and learning from error as part of one’s ideal of self-perfection is, by the way, one of the most powerful correctives for neurotic perfec... See more