Negative Capability
It can sometimes be hard to understand how someone can ‘know’ something through emotion. In our
society the word ‘know’ is so strongly associated with the words reason, rationality and logic that is hard
to imagine being able to know something in any other way. Sure, we can know things through language
and through perception, but those are basically just two different kinds of input – in the end it’s our reason
working on what we perceive or what is communicated to us through language that makes us know
something.
Indeed, from a typically Western atheistic-scientific perspective, emotion and faith are actually often
dismissed as ‘ways of knowing’ and are perhaps more often thought of as ‘ways ofbelieving’ or better
still, ways of coming to a belief.
However, this way of thinking does not have to be the case and, throughout history, there have been
examples of people who have tried to downplay the importance of reason and emphasise how important
emotion is in really knowing something, in really coming to the truth. Keats, one of the English Romantic
poets of the 19th Century, believed this and, although this is a bit of a simplification, he called direct, nonrational, emotional access to the truth ‘Negative Capability’.
Negative Capability is complex, but essentially Keats means that he wants his consciousness to become
at one with the universe/nature - a bit like when people try to connect with God or become enlightened
through prayer, spirituality or meditation. In this state of direct contact between his soul or mind and the
rest of the world Keats will appreciate immediately and directly, (without the need to think about it, without
the need for reason) the truths of the universe.
Some people try to achieve this direct contact with the truth, this oneness with the universe, by
experimenting with mind altering drugs (Aldous Huxley, for example, took mescalin so that he could see
the truth more clearly and wrote a book called ‘The Doors of Perception’ about his experience) but for
Keats, the main way of becoming at one with nature is through poetic experience. In his odes, the beauty
of the song of the nightingale or the beauty of Autumn are a powerful enough emotional experience to
transport the imagination into direct contact with the truth and this is Negative Capability. For Keats, the
ultimate truth is the beauty of intense experience and this can only be an emotional experienc, not a
rational one. The moment you begin to dissect something rationally, the moment you start to think about
things, you lose that sense of direct contact and you lose your grip on the truth.
Think about how you go through your life being you. Because you are who you are and that person is
separate from the rest of the world there will always be a gap between the world as it really is and what is
going on inside your head. Sure, you can bridge that gap by using your senses to perceive the world, by
using language to learn about it from others or by using reason to think about it … but nonetheless that
gap is always there and still needs to be bridged, in Keats’ own words we spend our lives ‘grasping after
facts’. And that creates a problem: what if the stuff on one side of the bridge (the stuff in your head)
doesn’t match up with the stuff on the other side of the bridge (the stuff in the real world)? This problem
will always exist when there is a gap between you and the world although there have been many attempts
to prove that it doesn’t.
Keats’ solution to the problem then, although he wasn’t really a philosopher considering this as a
problem, is that negative capability does away with the gap and the bridge altogether. Negative capability
allows you to jump directly over the gap, to do away with the bridge and to hurl yourself (through the
power of your emotional experiences) directly into the heart of the world as it really is. In a sense Keats
didn’t want to think about what love was or what music meant, he didn’t want to have to interpret these
things because that would let the gap back in and allow the possibility of error. Instead he wanted
to be love or to be music. When you are the thing you want to know about, there is no possibility of
making a mistake. In essence Descartes, one of the earliest modern philosophers who was also worried
about the gap between us and the world, tried a similar trick, only he called these moments of oneness
‘clear and distinct perceptions’, perceptions so obviously true that they carry you along with the emotional
force of their certainty.
Nice though this sounds, there is, however, a problem. Even if negative capability or this sense of
oneness is possible (and many Buddhists might believe that it is) it is only ever something that you can
experience for yourself. Any attempt to communicate the truths you have found out would have to be
made using reason and using language and would thus lose the power of the direct emotional
experience. As such, if negative capability can provide us with an emotional way of reaching the truth, the
truth that it provides us with is one that we can never share with other people … and part of the whole
point of the truth, is that it is something that we can all have in common.
This is perhaps why Keats wrote poetry. He was attempting to evoke that emotional sense of oneness
within his readers, to capture that sense of emotional intensity so that they could experience their own
truths, because he couldn’t explain to them directly the truths that he perceived through negative
capability.
We may be skeptical about Keats’ success and the possibility of trying to actually be music, or be a
beautiful sunset, but, if nothing else, this example illustrates one possible account of how emotions can
help you know about the world.