Meaning of negative capability | Babel Free

Definitions

The 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.

countable, uncountable

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).”

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

“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.”

CEFR level