What Is Negative Capability
In today’s post I will talk about Negative Capability. In particular, I’ll try to answer the question, What is negative capability? There’s a reason I’ve used bold font. There’s also a reason I said that I’ll try to answer the question. Honestly, few things in a literary context have troubled me more than negative capability. […]
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Ironically enough, this might indeed be the very point: that aesthetic beauty cannot be defined objectively (the eye of the beholder that you mentioned), but that doesn't make it any less affective or real. In my doctoral dissertation—where, among other topics, I analyze ambiguity and the sublime—I deployed the term omnijectivity (originally coined by the late researcher and science-fiction author Michael Talbot), to describe a state between subjectivity and objectivity. These concepts (the sublime, aesthetic beauty, ontological ambiguity) are not interchangeable, but they are overlapping to various extents.
Ultimately, the big question is—as you aptly pointed out—how (and perhaps why) aesthetic beauty "works" and can contribute to human happiness. This goes far beyond the scope of a blog post (not to mention this comment), but laconically putting it, I think the key is to be found in the dialectical pull between the fruits of aesthetic beauty and what you referred to as "our technological civilization our lives depend on".
It is beyond the shadow of a doubt that without the "philosophical truth" we would still live in the caves, hunting for deer (or… mammoths). The crux of the matter though is, to which extent philosophical truth alone can resonate with the deeper meanings of being human.
There is this harrowing scene in Shelley's Frankenstein (arguably the most eminent example of a discourse related to philosophical truth versus aesthetic beauty), where the creature says: “Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was”.
Once again, I might not be the most qualified person to talk about meaning and the human experience—I'm a nihilist, after all!