Interesting concept: Negative capability

One of my favorite Science Fiction authors is Jon Courtenay Grimwood. Reading his Arabesk triology, I’ve stumbled upon a new concept, called negative capability. As always, the ultimate storage of all knowledge, has more to say about this:

[..] I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Keats believed that great people (especially poets) have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved. Keats was a Romantic and believed that the truths found in the imagination access holy authority. Such authority cannot otherwise be understood, and thus he writes of “uncertainties.” This “being in uncertaint[y]” is a place between the mundane, ready reality and the multiple potentials of a more fully understood existence.

h2g2 continues:

What Keats is advocating is a removal of the intellectual self while writing (or reading) poetry [..]

What does have this to do with all the webby and social things on this blog? My interpretation of this would be that we can also remove out intellectual self while working on our everyday things like write specifications or drawing different wireframes. After all, after a productive brainstorming session, there comes a time of labor where we have to generate a set of new outputs in order to later advance to a higher level.

The other way to look at it is to use it as a random seed generator for today’s brainstorming’s.