“‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
—John Keats, from Ode to a Grecian Urn
Poetic imagination
I’ve been thinking about the English Romantic poet John Keats for the past month or so as I prepared to moderate a panel on Keat’s concept of “negative capability.” The panelists included poet Luke Hathaway, visual artist Gwenessa Lam, and Buddhist scholar Jeff Wilson. The event is part of a virtual series entitled Café Philo, organized by Inter Arts Matrix.
Keats developed the concept of negative capability to describe the poetic or artistic imagination. But, our panel approached negative capability more expansively, not only in relation to creative processes.
In this post, I will not provide an interpretation of negative capability. Rather, I think through some of the insights I gleaned from the panelists and their discussion with the audience.
The meaning of “truth”
Two definitions of negative capability jumped out at me. First is how negative capability is a different kind of mental activity than cognition. As he defines it in a letter to his brothers:
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 man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. (21 December 1817)
It’s not just rational thought that Keats seems to target as contradictory to poetic imagination. He also questions empiricism. In a letter to Benjamin Bailey, Keats confesses, “I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consequitive reasoning—and yet it must be. [. . .] However it must be, oh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!”
The dichotomy he draws between imagination and experience on the one hand, and cognition and intellect on the other, reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s distinctions in the Life of the Mind between truth and meaning. Scientists investigate experience to uncover hidden truths about the world. In contrast, the quest for meaning—the activity of thinking—is about what it means for something to be in the world.
The poetic paradox of the annihilation of the self
The poetic imagination is stimulated by experience, and more specifically, by feeling. Keats wrote to his friend, the lawyer Richard Woodhouse, of a poetical character as thus:
It has no self—it is everything and nothing—it has no character—it enjoys light and shade—it lives in gust, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one—because both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence, because he has no identity, he is continually in for—and filling—some other body. (27 October 1818, my emphasis)
Drawing on Japanese Buddhist traditions, Jeff described this non-identity as letting go of the ego or control. Instead of seeking to impose concepts on experience from the get-go, one opens oneself up to listening to the world. He described two ways mental cultivation gets framed in his areas of study. One way is analytical and questioning. Another is spaciousness. With the latter, attention focuses on something embodied, like the breath, and involves an emptying of the mind. But, this allows for insights to emerge that a person might miss if they were too focused on something specific.
In some ways, Jeff’s description of spaciousness and the expansiveness of Keat’s poetic imagination remind me of the unbound nature of thinking, as Arendt describes it. Thinking cannot be contained by accepted categories. It questions and destroys familiar or habitual assumptions.
The two-in-one
What is harder for me to make sense of, however, is how negative capability entails an annihilation of the self. For Keats, a great poet achieves a way of dwelling within beauty such that their art channels and embodies it. He states, “That with a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration” (letter to Tom and George Keats, 21 December 1817).
For Arendt, thinking emphasizes the duality of the self. As she says in the Life of the Mind, thinking is a conversation one has with oneself, “the partner who comes to life when you are alert and alone is the only one from whom you can never get away—except by ceasing to think.” This internal thinking partner, or conscience, can be ignored or forgotten, which would be one way of translating Keat’s “annihilation of the self” into Arendt’s terminology. And, ignoring your conscience means removing a condition which makes thinking possible in the first place.
A haunting and a toggling
Although the panel focused more on the “dwelling with uncertainty” aspect of negative capability, I found the panelists’ contributions productive in interpreting the annihilation of the self.
As Luke described it, negative capability is a haunting. It is a condition of anticipation, both patient and desiring, a willingness to be delighted and surprised. Perhaps then negative capability is not so much an annihilation of the self, but rather, a getting over oneself. This resonates more with the sensibilities I have developed from reading Arendt, particularly her work on judgment and how we much enlarge our perspective to consider pluralistic points of view.
Gwenessa described negative capability as a toggling between an openness or receptivity and an active search. Openness generates questions, but a question is an invitation to a conversation. Here is an excerpt from an August 2020 interview with Gwenessa:
When I’m making a painting or drawing — or, for my colleagues and friends who are writers or poets, that blank page, that blank screen — we are actually placed in relation to an absence,” she says. “You begin with an absence, and the process of making is trying to make whatever you want to communicate become present. That’s an oversimplification of a more complicated experiment in the studio. But the studio is a space for that negotiation, of trying to communicate.
The studio as a space of negotiation captures something like Arendt’s two-in-one, the duality of thinking process when making sense of an experience. Where Gwenessa speaks of “toggling,” Arendt speaks in terms of withdrawing from the world. When we withdraw from the world we enable ourselves to question our presuppositions. Hence, thinking can begin.
Friendship
One final metaphor. Until I revisited passages from the Life of the Mind in writing this post, I had forgotten that Arendt describes the two-in-one of thinking as akin to friendship. Socrates and Aristotle describe dialogue as taking place between friends. This provides Arendt with a metaphor for thinking and conscience, “the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home” (p. 191).
Love, humility, and grace
One thing that stood out to me from the discussion is the affective way in which the panelists described dwelling with uncertainty. For Luke, following Simone Weil, imagination is a kind of intelligence illuminated by love, uncertainty a mode of humility. According to Jeff, letting go of the self and being open is a moment of grace and an opportunity for co-creation with the world. And for Gwenessa, negative capability provides a consolation between self and world.
Love, humility, grace, consolation—these all remind me of the humanizing quality Arendt associates with friendship in Men in Dark Times (well, perhaps not love).
For Keats, the experience of beauty was paramount. It is, as Luke put it, constitutive of reality. Keats said, “That with a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration” (letter to Tom and George Keats, 21 December 1817). The sensation of beauty is truthful, for Keats, in a way reason cannot be.
Arendt too was skeptical of the primacy of science and reason. Science excuses any belief in the name of objectivity. But what, she questions, would happen if someone were able to scientifically establish that there was a hierarchy between humans? What if racism were scientifically proven? Her response, which she puts in italics: “Would any such doctrine, however convincingly proved, be worth the sacrifice of so much as a single friendship between two men?” (Men in Dark Times, p. 29).
Dwelling with mystery, unsettling the need we feel for certainty—these might be capabilities that great poets embody, but that all of us need to cultivate.
Credits
Photo by “My Life Through A Lens” on Unsplash
Thanks to Gwenessa, Luke, and Jeff for such a fascinating conversation. And a special thanks to Inter Arts Matrix, and especially Hannah Gardiner, for inviting me to be the moderator for the Café Philo series.
The next Café Philo is on the subject of masks and will feature two very special surprises! Mark your calendars for October 27, 5-6 p.m. Follow Inter Arts Matrix on Facebook or Twitter to stay in the loop.