negative capability

plural negative capabilities

1. countableuncountableThe 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.

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

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

   2 more examples

   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).

   2010, Jeff Mann, Binding the God: Ursine Essays from the Mountain South, →ISBN, page 167

   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.

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