In December 1817, the poet John Keats wrote a letter to his two brothers. Much of the letter is passing trifles, including the description of his recent dinner companions. Near the end, however, he casually brings up a concept he calls “Negative Capability.” He describes it as: “[B]eing in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” ¹

At first glance, this notion flies in the face of everything we hold dear in the 21st-century West: knowledge, certitude, information (the correct kind, of course), enlightenment, and progress. Without fact and reason, where would we be? There is one homely little word in Keats’s description that makes all the difference: irritable. 

Reaching for truth isn’t the problem. The problem, Keats seems to suggest, is when we demand to know the answers and explanations for everything, coming up with our own if necessary. “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious,” declared Einstein, whose name has become synonymous with scientific enlightenment. “It is the source of all true art and science.” ²

The mysterious is an inseparable part of existence. Too often we view reality, including science, in terms of the Newtonian – things we can measure and know – and not enough at the quantum level, where things not only fail to make sense but contradict our previously held beliefs. ³And science is only one facet of existence; human life and interactions and relationships are impossibly messy. This is true at a personal level and a global one. Being willing to sit in the mess and live to yourself, rather than file into a political, religious, or ideological worldview that provides all the answers to the most vexing questions, goes against our natures.

Like rain showers and surprise dinner guests, uncertainty can be either exciting or offputting; in either case, the ability to embrace it may be one of the most vital skills we can have for a sane and meaningful existence. Especially when life takes a melancholy turn, as it inevitably does. 

Life Is “A Mansion of Many Apartments”

Keats was a melancholy person and he had a gift for metaphors; he was a poet, after all. In another letter (this one to fellow poet J.H. Reynolds) he delves into an idea very similar to Negative Capability, using the analogy of a large mansion:

“I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me—The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think.”

The second room Keats calls “the Chamber of Maiden-Thought;” it represents the human mind as it transitions from innocence and positivity to anxiety and darkness. At first, it’s filled with light and “pleasant wonders” but eventually it leads to “sharpening one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man—of convincing one’s nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness, and oppression—whereby This Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darken’d and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open—but all dark—all leading to dark passages—We see not the balance of good and evil. We are in a Mist—We are now in that state—We feel the ‘burden of the Mystery.’” ⁴

You may relate to this idea of a melancholy and many-doored mansion that Keats is describing. You may even be stumbling around in the mist right now. The dark, opened doorways in his metaphor suggest there are different paths we can take but not before knowing what answers (if any) lie at the end of them. And certainly, no one clear path stands out from all the others, with our name embossed in glimmering gold letters above it.

There are two choices we can make at this point: we can either despair from being in the darkness with no assurance of which door will lead where, or we can look at it as the adventure of a lifetime.

Live and Love the Questions

Almost 80 years after Keats’s achingly premature death at age of 25, another poet took up his pen to address the challenge of living with unsolvable mysteries. In a letter to his young friend Mr. Kappus, Rainer Maria Rilke urged:

“I would like to beg you…to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer.” ⁵

At first blush, Rilke’s advice might strike you as similar to what you’ve heard well-meaning parents, friends, and mentors tell you: Don’t worry about it. Looking closely, however, Rilke is saying the very opposite: it’s not that we shouldn’t think about our questions, but that we should be brave enough to take action, to go and live and flounder and make choices while we think about them. Most of life is a sweaty expedition, not an air-conditioned waystation where we can sit in comfort until a solution appears to us in a vision or on the pages of a book.

Nor is Rilke’s advice just for coping with personal challenges; it’s the very heart of philosophy itself. In his book The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell notes:

“Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves.” ⁶

Here arises another paradox: what’s the point of studying a question that you can never find the answer to? A hint, I believe, is in the word “definite.” I may never know my life’s purpose with the same certainty that I love raspberries and hate persimmons but I can grasp and reach and get closer to knowing, and so can you. The act of reaching and getting closer, without the possibility for an exhaustive answer, is the sweet spot for maintaining curiosity and wonder throughout one’s entire life. If we could have definite answers on the things that matter most I fear we wouldn’t appreciate them.

Children are first-rate philosophers because they never grow tired of asking questions, including about the most serious things in life. As we grow out of childhood and realize that the answers aren’t forthcoming we stop asking. But maybe the point of life is to keep asking. It’s only by asking and by wondering that we have any hope, one day, of living our way into the answer.

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Read Next: Braving the Wilderness: How to Live to Yourself →

1. Keats, J. (1899). The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats (Cambridge Edition). Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
2. From Living Philosophies, 1931. Read here.
3. Heisenberg’s discovery about the limitations in measuring quantum particles, for example, has come to be known as the Uncertainty Principle.
4. Keats, J. (1899). The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats (Cambridge Edition). Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
5. Rilke, R. M. (2017). Letters to a young poet: Translated, with an introduction and commentary by Reginald Snell. Vigeo Press.  
6. Russell, B. (2013). The problems of philosophy. Martino Fine Books. (Original work published 1912)