Keats' Negative Capability: Embracing Uncertainty on the Romantic Journey of Soul-Making

There is no better introduction to the spirit of Romanticism than Winstanley’s assertion of "the “light” which "discovers all darknesse”. For the vale of tears does not fade away in the vale of soul-making. Indeed, it persists all the more as the antithesis of the Romantic spirit, as that which must be opposed. The first essay of Trilling’s (1955), The Opposing Self, is devoted to Keats and has the title “The Poet as Hero”. The heroism of the poet consists in opposing both the light and the darkness "as separate entities” in order to find a third way which both embraces and transcends them. The tragic, for Keats, exists among the "circumstances” of life, and it is against these circumstances that the poet can hope to win through to a steady light. There may well be those moments of sudden illumination, Wordsworth’s "spots of experience”, but they are elaborated through a poetic sensibility to the particular circumstances in which they arise. Trilling writes:

Keats never deceives himself into believing that the power of the imagination is sovereign, that it can make the power of circumstances of no account. His sense of the stubborn actuality of the material world is as stalwart as Wordsworth’s. It is, indeed, of the very nature of his whole intellectual and moral activity that he should hold in balance the reality of self and the reality of circumstance. In another letter to Bailey he makes the two realities confront one another in a very telling way. He is speaking of the malignity of society towards generous enthusiasm and, as he goes on, his thought moves from the life of society to touch upon the cosmos, whose cruelty, as he thinks of it, impels him to reject the life in poetry and the reward of fame he so dearly wants. “Were it my choice”, he says, "I would reject a petrarchal coronation - on account of my dying day and because women have cancers”. But then in the next sentence but one: “And yet I am not old enough or magnanimous enough to annihilate self...”. He has brought his two knowledges face to face, the knowledge of the world of circumstance, of death and cancer, and the knowledge of the world of self, of spirit and creation, and the delight in them. Each seems a whole knowledge considered alone; each is but a half-knowledge when taken with the other; both together constitute a truth. (1955, pp. 41-42)

Here we perceive the central dynamic of the Romantic frame of mind. To retreat into the enclosure of the good and the beautiful is to forsake the task impressed upon us by the realities of our social and material existence; to live in those alone, indeed, to prioritise one or the other, makes us less than human. How can we arrive at a way of life in which these two realties are not at war? Only, Keats argued, by charting a course through life in which the self has the strength ‘not’ to strive always for certainty. In contrast to his friend, Dilke, who is "a man who cannot feel that he has a personal identity unless he has made up his mind about everything”, Keats called Negative Capability that of a self having the strength not only to live in the uncertainties of circumstance but to welcome those experiences that reveal the energy of lives at work;

This is what makes the Amusement of Life - to a speculative Mind. I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a field mouse peeping out of the withered grass - the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it. I go among the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along - to what? the creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it. (Trilling, 1955, p. 43)

The vale of soul-making is the vale of circumstance. In witnessing and participating in the vitality of life around us, we experience an energising Positive Capability in which we have the sense (to borrow from Merleau-Ponty) of being carried forward by acts that transform contingency into necessity. We make ourselves in these acts of carrying forward. Our identity is always that of a journeying self and it is not coincidental that a walk in nature provides the scene in which both despair and joy are played out in the poet’s mind - Wordsworth, for example, in the Swiss Alps and Schiller in his poem, ‘The Walk’ or Wordsworth again who, we may recall, was "surprised by joy” only to be overcome by grief at the death of his four-year old son.

The Romantic journey, as most other journeys, arises as much from a sense of lack or absence, a division within the self of what is and what might be, as from an experience of fulfilment. In this division an absence may figure as a real presence. The "I” of the self has a "not-I” within itself. Of course, as Praz (i960) has argued, there is a sense of a Romantic agony as soon as we become aware of the disjunction between desire and reality. But a Keats or Holderlin could no longer rely upon the presence of a Beatrice who could lead the way from Inferno to Paradiso. In Holderlin’s (2019) Hyperion, Diotima, who is the embodiment of the good and of the ultimate whole, can only exist beyond the realm of the contingent: she exists in her own complete world which is destroyed in its contact with the storm and stress of the real (Rilke’s “Angels” of the Duino Elegies are similarly disinterested in human affairs).

The poet’s journey lies within the vale of circumstance. It is to chart a course through the contradictions confronting the journeying self, life’s glories, life’s defeats. The aesthetic is a journey to find something that begins with a "we are not yet”. To find this self is to affirm something other than the self which can be its measure, a measure which gives us a sense of an exemplary wholeness that informs our perspective on reality and our actions within it. Corngold (1994) has argued that the lack which drives this search does not manifest itself solely in the Romantic era, but also occurs in those writers for whom this experienced defect is a challenge to “the self that must give itself value in surpassing the effect of the given” (1994, p. 10). Thus, alongside Holderlin, he identifies Kafka, Mann, Freud, Marx and Heidegger:

Each of these authors lives as a conscious subject aiming through poetic activity to produce the self which it means to be. Each intends this self even as he knows that the self thus realised is different from the self that he is, and so must fall back again into the realm of an adversary facticity. Yet the project continues, sustained by a certain remote intimacy with a third term, a projected totality which the synthesis aims to approximate. The third term supports the possibility of the transcendence of the adversary other. (1994, pp. 10-11)

The third term refers to the work of the imagination. We know that the aesthetic imagination does not conclude with a synthesis which unites its particulars under a category. We would not, surely, attempt such a synthesis as an account of the outlook upon life of Kafka or Thomas Mann. What is intriguing, though, is the suggestion that the conclusions of the two sciences of Freud’s Psychology and Marx’s Sociology may also be read as poetic: not, ultimately, logical conclusions following the evidence of facts, but calls for change of mind and action in a philosophy, like Heidegger’s, which culminates in the poetic. Poetry does not afford the mind closure through the parade of a category or synthesis that unites the opposites. I shall continue to explore this issue in further chapters. For the moment let us say that the third term must relate to the nature of the journey; it must be a kind of harmony about a destination, or, better, the way towards a destination which forever remains remote, so that any harmony that retains its grip upon the self is never to be treated as final, for it is always in the making.

But how then is it possible to experience an intensity that is remote? Only, I believe, if we understand this remoteness as an absence that is a force for an intensity. The Welsh poet, Thomas (1993) writes:

It is this great absence that is like a presence, that compels me to address it without hope of a reply. It is a room I enter from which someone has just gone, the vestibule for the arrival of one who has not yet come.

Here, the absence, the remoteness, is an emptiness hoping to find itself in the completeness of intensity, a completeness, a fullness, that can only manifest itself as an answer to absence. It is Wallace Stevens’s "intensest rendezvous”. But, far from being some special or peculiar movement of consciousness, this movement of the mind from emptiness to a completion is the most fundamental aspect of consciousness itself, identified in the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty as the intentionality of consciousness, its direct- edness towards the world which makes that world a vital concern. In illnesses such as depression the "intentional arc” connecting self and world "goes limp”, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, loses its vitality, so that self and world must be made to connect at second-hand and the world constructed piece-by-piece. We can see that the poetic is essentially an elaboration and intensification of our intentional "hold” on reality. It employs the poetic logic of metaphor: "a great absence” is like "a presence”, someone (God) "has just gone” and "has yet to come”. For the poet there exists no contradiction in these assertions since they function as metaphor: we say, x is like y as though making an observation. But the idea of an absence becoming a real presence is not an observation: it is a call to a life, an impetus to a life that must be lived between the two presences which retain their identity as the negative and positive poles which frame the journey.

It is a journey that would seem to require the openness of being of negative capability, of making oneself available to the other through an abeyance of the self, that leads to a purposeful incorporation of the other in a renewed self. This is the middle way of the third term that Corngold calls a "saving grace”, which, he argues, fulfils its task neither through the absolute negation or abandonment of the self nor the enclosure of a wholesale identification with the other but as “the tension sustaining the right ratio of both elements” (Corngold, 1994, p. 33) in an experience which contains both a revealed nearness and an absent presence. This is surely the full meaning of the negative capability of Keats (it is a capable negation) or of Heidegger’s ‘Gelassenheit’, translated as a ‘letting be’, or Marcel’s ‘disponibilite’, translated usually as ‘availability’. All these assume the capacity of a temporary suspension of the self in its greeting a self-changing event, a unity of making and receiving which is the work of the imagination.

However, we should not lose sight of the fact that the journey is undertaken in the vale of circumstance, the realm of contingency that Holderlin named “the accidental”. The self is, therefore, always provisional, its narrative, insofar as it continues to relate itself to itself, always interrupted by the tragic, always unfinished. But is it not this sense of incompleteness or absence which underlies our persistent openness to the world in which we assert the value of life, our own and others? And does not the sense of our own fragility, the recognition of our own provisionality within a possible wholeness, suggest the possibility of a form of thought accompanied by a way of life which not only can accommodate uncertainty but can form itself around it aesthetically and ethically in a poetic world-view with its own implications and harmonies quite distinct from the methods and "conclusions” of traditional deductive or inductive logic: a wisdom of the imagination?