Negative Capability
The Zen of John Keats
By
Rev. Dr. Todd F. Eklof
November 24, 2013
There old saying that "only the good die young," certainly applies to the
English poet, John Keats who was born in 1795 and died at the tender age of 25.
Despite his brief time on Earth, however, Keats experienced much loss, beginning
with the death of a brother who died in infancy. When he was only 10-years-old his
father, a livery hand, was thrown from a horse and killed. Just four years later his
mother died of tuberculosis. In another four years one of his beloved brothers died
of the same illness. And just two years after that, this young surgeon turned budding
poet, after ending an engagement with the love of his life, would himself succumb to
the unforgiving illness that had already taken his mother and brother.
It’s obvious this young man experienced a lifetime of tragedy and sorrow,
albeit crammed into just a quarter century. Despite such turmoil and the fact that
his life was cut so short, however, he proved capable of accomplishing a great deal,
and, to this day, is considered one of Romanticism’s most important literary figures,
and one of the greatest poets of the English language. This point is all the more
remarkable when we consider Keats didn’t discover his love for poetry until only
the very last few years of his short life.
That he has emerged at all, let alone so successfully, as a literary giant, despite
his humble beginnings, his personal tragedy, and his all-too-brief life is nothing
short of extraordinary! Even so, we cannot help but wonder what more he might
have accomplished had he not met such an early demise. Perhaps, as a poet, he
would have come to rival Shakespeare himself. As one with a more philosophical
interest, however, I wonder most, had his thoughts the opportunity to mature, if he
would have expounded more upon an unusual phrase he once coined in a short
letter to his brothers, “Negative Capability.”
These two words are an odd juxtaposition given that their meanings seem to
cancel each other out, making the phrase more like Eastern mysticism than English
wisdom. As with some of those peculiar Taoist sayings like, “Act without doing,
work without effort,” the term Negative Capability presents us with a logical
paradox. What could Keats have possibly meant by this, Negative Capability?
Negativity would seem the opposite of capability, given that capability suggests
something can be positively accomplished. Negativity is like a minus sign, and
capability a plus sign, if you will, and the two, together, should be void of any
meaning all. Perhaps this is what Keats was simply getting at with the expression,
suggesting that negativity is no ability at all; that it amounts to nothing. Or, maybe
he meant the ability to remain capable, to remain positive, in the midst of negative
circumstances. Certainly this ability to accomplish extraordinary things in the face
of great difficulties proved true of him.
Negative Capability
But Keats himself suggested something much deeper and more profound than
even this in the letter he wrote to his brothers on October 27, 1818, in which he said
the entire notion struck him suddenly while wondering, “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 a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and
reason.”1
So it seems Keats was specifically referring to the ability to empty one’s mind
of the prejudices that comes with foregone conclusions and certainty. He was
talking, that is, about the ability to live comfortably without knowing, without
having all the answers. Yet he seems to go further still, by implying not only that we
must let go of our established ideas and beliefs—our paradigms and
presuppositions— but that we must move into a state opposite of thought, wherein
we are without any explanation or understanding. Just as with mathematics wherein
it’s possible to calculate on the negative side of zero, Keats suggests it’s possible for
us to function on the negative side of thought, in that space from which the mystics
get their name, mystery. Negative Capability is not merely the power to dwell
comfortably in mystery, but to thirst for it! It is to actively and intentionally seek out
states of disbelief, awe, and wonder. To the poet, or any artist, he suggests, Negative
Capability is like water to a fish, soil to a tree, or sunlight to a seed. Without it,
without mystery, the artist cannot create anymore than the fish can swim without
water, the tree stand without earth, or the seed open without sunlight. Negative
Capability is the caldron of creativity, the dark womb of life, the empty void from
which all of existence begins. Keats himself expressed it well in his poem, A Thing of
Beauty;
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkn'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon2
In this sense, Keats’ Negative Capability becomes reminiscent of the Zen
Buddhist notion of no mind—mushin. But such a state, becoming empty of all
thoughts, seems nearly impossible to achieve except, perhaps, for the most
accomplished Zen masters. But it’s really much simpler than this; Mushin is kind of
like saying, “never mind,” or, “don’t give it a second thought.” So the idea isn’t so
much about emptying our heads, as it is about not obsessing about one’s own ideas
about things. It’s about opening ourselves to being comfortable without having to
explain everything. As Master Morihei Ueshiba, a Shintoist, used to teach his
1
2
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237836?page=2
Excerpt from, A Thing of Beauty (Endymion), John Keats
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Negative Capability
students, “Always keep your mind as bright and clear as the vast sky, the great
ocean, and the highest peak, empty of all thoughts,”3 which was just another way of
saying, “always keep an open mind.”
Even in these simpler terms, however, maintaining an open mind isn’t easy to
do. It takes effort, practice, and discipline, which is why Zen masters teach mushin to
their students. It’s very easy to get locked into our own ways of thinking, into our
habitual ideas, our paradigms. Humans, like all beings, are creatures of habit, shaped
over evolutionary eons through repetitive behavior. Our habits give us form and inform us by predetermining what we do in ways best adapted for our environment,
in ways that best assures our survival. This is why we are so reluctant and slow to
change our ways, even our ways of thinking, because straying from the tried and
true, from what has proven to keep us safe for decades, maybe centuries, could kill
us! So humans, being defined mostly by our big heads and large frontal lobes, are
thinking beings, and, as such, we cling especially to our patterns of thinking, to our
habitual ideas, because they make us feel safe.
We also use our big brains, primarily, for making sense out of the world. This is
why our ancient ancestors explained what they saw by creating myths and gods, and
why, later, philosophy, then science, including psychology and sociology, emerged.
It’s why every one of us is in the habit of continuously creating an interpretive
matrix representing the world around us. As holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl
famously concluded, “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his
life.” Though a little more gender neutral, contemporary psychologist, Robert Kegan
concludes the same, that “what a human organism organizes is meaning.” So most of
the time it is our nature to find explanations, not rid our minds of them. Even if it
isn’t the whole picture, we prefer, at least, to have some picture of the world we live
in. We would prefer some semblance of order to the chaos that often defines what
we consider the disorder of troubled minds.
So, again, even couched in the vernacular—always keeping an open mind,
never mind, don’t give it a second thought—mushin, or, what Keats called, Negative
Capability is much easier said than done. Our species can easily become very
possessive of our ideas—an obsession that is at the root of many wars and much
injustice. We don’t typically like ideas that counter and threaten our own. As history
proves, we are sometimes willing to even kill those with different ideas, or else force
our way of thinking upon the most vulnerable in our society, including our own
children. We can be so convinced of the truth of our own thoughts that we are
certain such behavior is just and good and righteous, if not even ordained by the
Almighty!
As the oldest of Zen poems puts it;
Ueshiba, Morihei, The Art of Peace, Stevens, John, trans., Shambhala, Boston, MA, 1992, p.
32.
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Negative Capability
The perfect Way is without difficulty,
Save that it avoids picking and choosing.
Only when you stop liking and disliking
Will all be clearly understood.
A split hair’s difference,
And heaven and earth are set apart!
If you want to get the plain truth,
Be not concerned with right and wrong.
The conflict between right and wrong
Is the sickness of the mind.4
This, again, is why Zen masters teach no mind and why Keats valued Negative
Capability, because peace cannot exist in the world until we are able, as individuals,
to be at peace with not knowing, “without,” as Keats put it, “any irritable reaching
after fact and reason.” As the Tao te Ching says, “When people see some things as
beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other
things become bad.”5 You see, mushin, Negative Capability, never mind, isn’t about
opening our minds to bigger ways of thinking, but to the experience of not having
any answers at all. It is to admit we do not know without the need for anything else.
It’s about learning, not only to live with uncertainty and doubt, but to cherish and
hunger for the experience.
Just yesterday a friend of mine called to tell about having recently taken his 1year-old son into a building he’d never been in before at which time he immediately
and repeatedly began saying “choo-choo.” Finally my friend asked the receptionist if
there might be a train somewhere in the place. She said, “oh yes,” and directed him
to another part of the building altogether in which a model train had been set up to
go around the entire room. “How do you explain that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I smiled, “It just the way it is, especially with kids. You should
get used to it.” The incident had challenged my friend’s paradigm about the world
and he began “reaching for fact and reason” to find an explanation that could
reaffirm what he already thinks he knows about the world. “It can neither be denied
nor explained,” I told him, “It’s the great mystery. Live with it!”
In his now classic book, The Tao of Physics, physicist Fritjof Capra explains,
“The experience of Zen is thus the experience of satori, and since this experience,
ultimately, transcends all categories of thought, Zen is not interested in any
abstraction or conceptualization. It has no special doctrine or philosophy, no formal
creeds or dogmas, and it asserts that this freedom from all fixed beliefs makes it
truly spiritual.”6 All of this seems to coincide with what Keats meant by Negative
Capability, “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching
Seng-ts’an, Hsin-hsin Ming, as cited from Alan W. Watts’, The Way of Zen, Vintage Books,
Random House, New York, NY, 1957, p. 115.
5 Tao te Ching, #2, Stephen Mitchell, translator, Harper & Row, New York, NY, 1988.
6 Capra, Fritjof, The Tao of Physics, Shambhala, Boston, MA, 2000, p. 122.
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Negative Capability
after fact and reason.”
Whenever he wrote a poem, then, he attempted to become his subject by
abandoning his own beliefs and prejudices, his own limitations, his own limited
thoughts about himself—those fragments of truth and reality that if he identified too
closely with he might mistake as his whole self. In abandoning these obsessive
prejudices, however, his poetry was free to flow up from the depths of his soul, his
psyche, his unconscious, the unknown. The first few lines of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian
Urn is a good example:
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?7
Notice how he begins this poem with a series of questions about the images on
the urn, rather than with explanations of what they mean. Keats has abandoned
thought and allowed himself to enter into the urn’s mystery. Thus the urn itself
becomes the perfect example of Negative Capability, of the ability to enter into the
emptiness. For to understand the images outside of the urn Keats had to first enter
the mystery within it. Inside there is nothing but emptiness—no thought, no
division, no images, nothing. Interestingly, the very etymology of the word,
“capability,” from the Latin word capabilis, means “able to hold.” So the empty urn is
the very epitome of what it means to be “capable.” We may think it’s more about
doing something, given that its suffix is “ability,” but its root is also the root of words
like “capacity’ and “capacious.” Capability is the ability to hold space—more related
to words like spacious, or the Zen idea of wu wei, doing nothing, doing without
doing.
Negative Capability is also a lot like what Einstein must have meant when he
said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source
of all true art and all science. [One] to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no
longer pause to stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”8 Indeed, Einstein seemed to
step into his own version of the urn when, toward the end of his life he admitted,
“There is no place in this new kind of physics for both the field and matter, for the
field is the only reality."9 He sounds almost identical to that other great poet, Rumi,
Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1820
Einstein, Albert in Living Philosophies Simon and Schuster, New York 1931.
9 Ibid., p. 211.
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Negative Capability
who was surely referring to Negative Capability when he so eloquently sang, “Out
beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas,
language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn't make any sense.”
This seems to be precisely what Keats was getting at. As a poet, he realized he
had to let go of all his concepts about the Universe if he was going to know the
Universe, if he was going to release the particle to know the field, the particular to
know the whole. He had to empty himself of himself in order to become one with his
subject. He did this by entering into the void, “Heard melodies are sweet,” he sang;
…but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone,10
So it is tragic that Keats died before he could mature along with his very
mature notion of Negative Capability. Who knows what insights he could have
provided us had he the time to develop it further? Then again, such ill definition is
part of its very meaning, so, perhaps, it is best for us to simply probe its many
possibilities, remaining, “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In this way we remain free to
play with the notion and to apply it to other areas of our lives, beyond the realm of
poetry, if, in the end, there is anything beyond poetry.
Nevertheless, I’ll conclude with the example of, not a poet, but an inventor;
Thomas Edison, who tried 900 filaments before he found one that worked and
finally invented the light bulb. If he had 899 failures and only one success, however,
wasn’t Edison more of a failure than a success? The point is that if Edison couldn’t
have lived with failure, with not knowing for sure if his attempts would ever work,
he would have given up early on. It was his ability, his Negative Capability, his
mushin, to keep an open mind, that enabled him to keep trying. Failure was not only
the key to his success, it was a way of being.
So Negative Capability can be key to what we accomplish as individuals in the
world, and also to how we live together as one world. For if we can learn to
approach others with this sense of awe and humility, surrendering our certainties,
surrendering to mystery, then the world might become a more peaceful place,
rather than engaging in endless conflict and injustice because of unimportant
differences. As with Edison, Negative Capability actually enables us to learn from
our mistakes, to move on from them, rather than endlessly repeating them. Without
the need to be right, others don’t have to be wrong. Negative Capability is a call to
failure, a call to uncertainty, a call to question, to mystery, and to the peace of mind
and peace among others that naturally follows. Or, to give Keats the final word;
10
Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
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Negative Capability
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.11
11
Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
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