Passionate Balance: For Tanya

Monday, September 20, 2010

For Tanya

Your fingers
Deftly slicing week-old plums
In a pool of light next to mine
Sorting veggies into tubs
Before our dawn commute

Aging alongside me
Every imperfect moment
Choosing to spend it
Together

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Because Blogger's Backups beat my own

This is my scrapbook of facts, studies, observations, poems, flotsam, jetsam and excess carbs. Topics include philosophy, writing, media design, and anything to do with human subjectivity, plus a bunch of sciencey stuff, and culture too. It's a backup of cool ideas, in case my house burns down and I lose my digital and paper files. I also operate on the assumption that what I find cool will be found cool by at least a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the English-reading web world.

The "Passionate Balance" refers to what I consider to be the king of cool ideas: the notion of negative capability - the ability to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity. John Keats introduced the concept in a letter:

...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 man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Passions may be stirred, but balance remains. That's what passionate balance is, and I believe the world needs this balance, with a passion. I think it's an important virtue. The concept has been used by others since Keats, of course.

British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion used negative capability to describe the role of the analyst in a session. As the session unfolds, anxiety is released that the analysand does not have the negative capability to contain. By 'standing alongside' them calmly, the analyst supplies the negative capability needed for the work to proceed.

Robert French has been applying this concept to the study of managerial effectiveness, focusing on change management. Negative capability is a key element of executive success, he argues.

If the virtue of negative capability was widely recognized and valued, I think it would improve the governance of our collectivities. If leaders had to at least emulate this virtue to appear 'leaderly' it would still result in better decisions. Freedom exists in the moment between action and reaction. I dedicate this blog to that moment.

- Neil LaChapelle