Keats, Kierkegaard, and (negative) capability

Or what happens with art-media that satisfies a high appetite... Plus, an unexpected endorsement of Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania (kinda) and my uncalled-for opinion on the Asbury Revival

Kierkegaard, Cassie, and Keats. I promise this will make sense later.

In my last post, I talked about our desperate need for higher appetites when it comes to the art-media we consume. But what does that look like? What’s the result of consuming art that satisfies a high appetite?

The short answer to this question is in a letter from the great Romantic poet John Keats. And the long answer is illuminated magnificently by philosopher-theologian extraordinaire, Søren Kierkegaard, who was born seven years before Keats’ death.

negative capability

A few months back, while wrapping up edits for my essay on His Dark Materials, I looked into Dr. Mary Malone’s passing reference to Keats during one of her conversations with Lyra. The nun-turned-physicist tells the girl that “negative capability” means holding one’s mind “in a state of expectation, without impatience…”

The term—negative capability—comes to us via one of Keats’ letters, in which he is writing to his brothers about a conversation he had with a couple of friends:

…several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & 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 & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.

Keats wrote this letter near the end of the Enlightenment era—the “Age of Reason” when ordinary men and philosophers alike thought they could, well, reason their way around existence—explaining the world’s mysteries and eliminating their doubts. Mind over myth and matter, they believed.

In contrast to this thinking, Keats believed that great artistic minds, like that of Shakespeare (his hero), did not follow ordered reason to find answers to life’s existentialisms. In fact, such great minds not only embraced uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, but lived contentedly within those uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. Keats thought his contemporary, the poet Samuel Coleridge, would do well if he ceased trying to extract whatever looked like truth or reality (“verisimilitude”) from the ever-shifting sanctum of mystery. In fact, for Keats, being “content with half knowledge” is a virtue.

John Keats thought Shakespeare was a ‘man of achievement’

Obviously, I think Keats’ rule applies not just to Shakespeare, Coleridge, and ‘men of achievement,’ but to everyone. Bodleian curator Stephen Hebron writes:

[Keats] is using the word ‘negative’…to convey the idea that a person’s potential can be defined by what he or she does not possess—in this case, a need to be clever, a determination to work everything out. Essential to literary achievement, Keats argues, is a certain passivity, a willingness to let what is mysterious or doubtful remain just that.

Keats never expounds on negative capability—he’d have broken his own rule if he had!—so we’re stuck with the enigma. Fortunately for us, another “man of achievement in literature” and near contemporary of Keats has much to say that invites us further into this mystery.

what saith Kierkegaard?

I’ll go out on a sturdy limb and say Søren Kierkegaard never saw Keats’ letter, so it’s entirely by chance (or providence) that the vivacious Danish writer provides us with a more concrete concept of what negative capability means. Kierkegaard is also our link from Keats to the current dilemma of why we have apocalyptically bad taste in art-media and what fixing that looks like.

It all comes down to capability.

The idea of capability recurs in Kierkegaard’s writings. He developed the concept in the context of misguided Danish “Christendom.” Almost everyone in Kierkegaard’s country claimed to be Christian because, well, they were born in Denmark and attended the organized church. However, the existentialist philosopher argued that most people lived comfortably and as they pleased—if they suddenly ceased calling themselves Christian, their lives wouldn’t change much. “We produce Christians by the millions and are proud of it—yet have no inkling that we are doing just exactly the opposite of what we intend to do,” he wrote in Provocations.

To Kierkegaard, the problem lay in how Christianity was being communicated to his countrymen. He argued that the clergy were delivering a message of knowledge without any communication of capability.

As with Keats’ “negative capability,” it’s hard to crack down on a finite definition of Kierkegaard’s “capability.”¹ In his writings on communication, he dialogues expansively about what it looks like without defining it in precise terms. But I will attempt to do so here.

Capability is a state of potentiality—potential being and potential action. This state is explicated by who a person becomes and what a person does (essentially, how one exists). A person who possesses capability in a matter has the understanding that enables her to act in accordance with what she knows. It doesn’t matter if she can articulate how she knows or what she knows—or if she even knows how she knows what she knows, only that she can act according to her subjective understanding of that knowledge.

Capability is existence within truth—not a way of knowing (or even understanding) truth. Because to exist within something is the truest way of knowing and understanding it. For example, Kierkegaard was concerned about people becoming ethical and virtuous individuals. He firmly believed this did not happen by mere transfer of knowledge.

Virtue cannot be taught; that is, it is not a doctrine, it is a being-able, an exercising, an existing, an existential transformation, and therefore it is slow to learn, not at all as simple and easy as the rote-learning of one more language or one more system. No, in respect to virtue there is always particular emphasis on the internal, the inward, “the single individual.”²

We may be splitting hairs, but a person can be ethical and virtuous without explicating how he knows what is right. Teaching virtues or ethics or truth (or merely reading about them) does not convey capability. Capability “is akin to being an artist. It is something one does, not something one knows. It favors process over product.”³

art that conveys capability

A current favorite pastime of the critic class is to obsess over what some new art-media supposedly advocates for (or against) socially, politically, or morally. Reviewers solemnly rate media on spectrums of queerness, diversity, sex positivity, and girl power. Some tally up swear words, sex scenes, and bloodshed.⁴ Others cry in a corner (read: on Twitter) if a movie seems critical of Republicans or comes off as pro-socialism or less than patriotic.

We’ve begun seeing art through the incredibly narrow lens of whether the art aligns with the ideas we already assent to and thinking that’s what determines its valuable. But if that’s all we’re seeing in the art-media we consume, it might not be art at all. It might just be propaganda. (And it’s likely proof of low appetite in one’s media consumption.)

Good art—art that lives on the cold content x high involvement end of the spectrum—confounds these narrow matrixes. And high appetite consumers expect nothing less.

Tár on the Underground

Art that satisfies a high appetite does not always affirm our assumptions and beliefs—in fact, it seldom does. Instead, such art-media conveys capability by creating space for self-reflection within the individual. It bypasses certainties and invites the audience to practice negative capability—to warm the soul by the fires of “uncertainties, mysteries, [and] doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Perhaps a more useful question than “does this art-media satisfy a high appetite?” is “does this art-media provide capability?”

According to communication researcher and professor Dr. Benson P. Fraser, good art-media “is potentially transformative in that it points beyond the temporal to the transcendent, and in so doing, conveys capability…art or story can transport us into a confrontation with ourselves.”⁵

This is why all real art, though at first it may seem to be a most welcome escape from reality, will inevitably lead one into a face-to-face encounter with reality—but always with reality in a different light from which it was first seen.⁶

Capability “can only be set in motion by the act of self-discovery…”⁷ Art-media that cause us to question elements of our own existence (or our existence itself) awaken us and bequeath to us capability. And capability pushes us into a state of potentiality in which we can enact new ways of being and behavior. We gain the being-ableness that Kierkegaard spoke of.

Art-media that satisfies a high appetite communicates “an enriched capacity for self-examination, leading to increased moral sensitivity and intensified spirituality… [It’s] a potential gift, the acceptance of which requires participation.” Such art “is not like an easily recognized object that is handed to someone to use, but like a gift that one first needs to open and then has to figure out what to do with it.”⁸

I experienced this art-questioning-me⁹ while watching Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania last weekend.¹⁰ I was getting annoyed with Scott Lang’s daughter Cassie and her pollyannaish insistence that we must save everyone and do all the good things even when it’s entirely impractical to do so. I agreed with her father who had the very sensible position that you can’t save everyone and sometimes you just gotta cut your losses and carry on. But with Cassie and Scott surrounded by an army of deliciously CGI’d quantum realm dwellers eager to see them dead, I started to think: Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Am I jaded? Why is Cassie’s over-enthusiasm to save literally everyone, even if it means risking her own life, so irritating? Isn’t this what we need more of in the world—people who care even when it’s not in their interest to do so? Should I be more like Cassie?

Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton) wants to save everyone.

Quantumania slipped past my foundations and held up a mirror within me. It brought me into a face-to-face encounter with reality in a different light. It satisfied, at least for a few moments, an appetite of a higher order. It bequeathed to me capability.

Good art shakes us, sometimes shatters us, worms into our insides and allows us to look candidly at ourselves. We don’t question the art; the art questions us. To paraphrase from Kierkegaard: “The basic flaw of this age is art which leaves a person’s inwardness completely secure.”

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asides and signal boosts

By now, you’ve likely heard about the Asbury Revival, the two-week-long gathering of prayer, testimony, and singing at a university chapel in Kentucky. It’s been covered almost everywhere, from Christianity Today to The New York Times to The Atlantic. It’s also been the subject of the usual rancorous internet discourse, attack memes, celebrity-types trying to center themselves, and debate over if it’s a real revival.

I think it’s important to remember that God doesn’t work communally. He works within individuals who make up communities. I think folks who went, sincerely, to find God (including ones who travelled from overseas!) found him in some way—and that way looks different for each person. All I’m saying is: if a buddy texts me bro, God is literally in this building rn, I’m getting there if I can because, like the tumblr quote says, “I dream too much and I don’t write enough and I’m trying to find god everywhere.”

I listened to the Honestly podcast’s episode about the revival and I appreciate Bari’s attempt to center this event within the larger socio-cultural context of young adult anxieties, because nothing happens in a vacuum. Lend it your ears!

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CHVRCHES’ new single “Over” is out! It’s gorgeous in its simplicity and I’ve been playing it over and over and over. The song dates back to 2017, but heralds my favorite band embarking on a fresh path with new record deals, etc. Give it a listen, and if you haven’t read my post on my favorite song of theirs you can do that here.

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Lecrae just dropped the extended edition of his fourth Church Clothes mixtape, Church Clothes 4: Dry Clean Only, so naturally I listened to the whole thing from start to finish including all the songs from last year’s late release. This time around, “Journey,” “Deconstruction,” “Price Up,” and “They Ain’t Know” really jumped out. But I gotta say, some of Lecrae’s coldest lines might be on “Misconceptions 4”:

They don’t even make a category for my allegory
Raised all of your kids, now I’m comin’ for all my alimony
Married to the streets, but they don’t recognize the matrimony
Missionary since the honeymoon, you know it’s mandatory

116 on my flesh—I bleed different
My kids raised on CHH—I breed different
It’s Vincent Bantu on my shelf—I read different
I drink the blood, then eat the flesh—my greed different

1. “Negative capability” and “capability” are not opposites. Rather, negative capability is a posture which holds the door open for capability to take place.

2. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 7 Volumes (1833-1855), published 1967-1978

3. Andrew F. Herrmann, “Kierkegaard and Dialogue: The Communication of Capability,” Communication Theory, Vol. 18, Issue 1, https://academic.oup.com/ct/article-abstract/18/1/71/4098762

4. These tallies are useful in certain contexts, like if you’re trying to decide what to let the kids watch or if certain content is triggering. But the critic class loves to say this makes the art-media itself bad, which is not the same thing.

5. Benson P. Fraser, Hide and Seek: The Sacred Art of Indirect Communication

6. Robert L. Short, The Gospel According to Peanuts

7. Thomas C. Oden, Parables of Kierkegaard

8. Appropriating Oden’s words in this paragraph. He applied them to Kierkegaard’s own stories; I’m applying them to good art-media in general. And here’s more from his introduction to Parables of Kierkegaard (not appropriated): Kierkegaard wanted his stories to “draw or entice, even seduce in some instances, the individual into more profound extensions of self-awareness, and into a more fundamental affirmation of oneself as an unresolvable tension between possibility and necessity, finitude and infinitude, body and spirit.” 💙💙💙

9. “It is art that questions us, not we who question the art.” (from Fraser)

10. Yes, I know, not the highest of appetites over here.