To be comfortable with uncertainties requires a lot of training or, these days, maybe, un-training.
We are constantly pushed toward the comfort of absolutes and certainties. The majority of people, today, are even considering science as the ‘new’ absolute. That is wrong. There would be no advancement if that were the case.
Negative Capability: The Genius of Keats and Einstein
The poet John Keats famously identified a concept which allowed him to define and isolate his own unique quality of “genius.” It was a quality which he saw a great deal of in Shakespeare. Keats called this quality “Negative Capability”:
“at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and 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 and reason[…]”
The reader should be cautioned: Keats’ phrasing of “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” is not the expression of some Modernist or Post-Modernist view; it does not imply that Keats was not concerned about the question of facts and reason in respect to art, as many modern literary critics imagine—quite the contrary. Keats correspondences and poetic works attest to his deep conviction about the nature of the poetic imagination’s ability to capture Truth. Keats believed that the best way to arrive at facts and reasons was to stop looking for them per se, and allow the mind to explore things on its own, to let the imagination play among phenomena and let the facts and reasons find it, perhaps in the same way we might imagine a poet being found by the muses.