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15 - Zen and the Art of Negative Capability
- Edited by Brian Rejack, Illinois State University, Michael Theune, Illinois Wesleyan University
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- Book:
- Keats's Negative Capability
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 08 July 2020
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2019, pp 232-244
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Summary
Zen has a similar style: contradictoriness, crazy wisdom, based on the fact that things both exist and don't exist at the same time—relative and absolute truths. You don't need to drill a hole in your head in order to get enlightened. You can hold several ideas in your mind that are contradictory without freaking out, Keats’s negative capability. Sure, you can reach out to ‘fact and reason’, as long as it isn't an aggressive insistence, irritability motivating the reaching for fact. That's my opinion.
What can't Negative Capability attach itself to? It turns out: not much.
This essay explores the uses of negative capability and other ‘Keatsian’ ideas in the discourse of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Buddhist modernism. The term ‘Buddhist modernism’ indicates, as David McMahan explains, ‘a modern hybrid tradition with roots in the European Enlightenment no less than the Buddha's enlightenment, in Romanticism and transcendentalism as much as the Pali canon, and in the clash of Asian cultures and colonial powers as much as in mindfulness and meditation’. Although a longstanding scholarly consensus holds that ‘Buddhism’ is a textual invention of Western imperialism that reached its height in the nineteenth century and that its canon was, in essence, created by Western scholars who translated and interpreted Asian texts in order to construct an ‘authentic’ or ‘classical’ Buddhism, usually in ways that minimized or rejected the experience of Buddhist practitioners in Asia, Buddhist modernism recognizes the ‘agency of Asian Buddhists as cocreators of modernist versions of their traditions’. Within this broad context of exchange and hybridity, I am specifically interested in the way that the ‘Romantic’ concept of negative capability functions in cross-cultural discussions of Zen principles, enabling the multi-directional dynamic of ‘surprising recognition’, a term I borrow from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The resonance between negative capability and Buddhist ideas such as emptiness and the dropping away of self makes sense on a kind of affective level, ‘[a]s if’—Sedgwick suggests—‘the template of truth is already there inside the listener, its own lineaments clarified by the encounter with a teaching that it can then apprehend as “true”’.
Reading the Red Bull Sublime
- ANNE C. McCARTHY
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- Journal:
- PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 132 / Issue 3 / May 2017
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 October 2020, pp. 543-557
- Print publication:
- May 2017
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The aesthetic of the sublime has long been associated with the language of elevation and height. Activities such as mountain climbing offer a physical correlative to this discourse. In these cases, the sublime is associated with a high point or summit, and the process of descent is minimized or erased. By contrast, what I call the Red Bull sublime—named for the energy drink company that claims to “give you wings”—uses technological innovation to draw attention to the aesthetic pleasures of falling. Taking Felix Baumgartner's 2012 space jump as its paradigmatic example, this essay elaborates the central features of the Red Bull sublime, connecting it with a Romantic tradition, represented here by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats, of peering over the edge of the abyss.
Contributors
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- By Isabella Aboderin, W. Andrew Achenbaum, Katherine R. Allen, Toni C. Antonucci, Sara Arber, Claudine Attias‐Donfut, Paul B. Baltes, Sandhi Maria Barreto, Vern L. Bengtson, Simon Biggs, Joanna Bornat, Julie B. Boron, Mike Boulton, Clive E. Bowman, Marjolein Broese van Groenou, Edna Brown, Robert N. Butler, Bill Bytheway, Neena L. Chappell, Neil Charness, Kaare Christensen, Peter G. Coleman, Ingrid Arnet Connidis, Neal E. Cutler, Sara J. Czaja, Svein Olav Daatland, Lia Susana Daichman, Adam Davey, Bleddyn Davies, Freya Dittmann‐Kohli, Glen H. Elder, Carroll L. Estes, Mike Featherstone, Amy Fiske, Alexandra Freund, Daphna Gans, Linda K. George, Roseann Giarrusso, Chris Gilleard, Jay Ginn, Edlira Gjonça, Elena L. Grigorenko, Jaber F. Gubrium, Sarah Harper, Jutta Heckhausen, Akiko Hashimoto, Jon Hendricks, Mike Hepworth, Charlotte Ikels, James S. Jackson, Yuri Jang, Bernard Jeune, Malcolm L. Johnson, Randi S. Jones, Alexandre Kalache, Robert L. Kane, Rosalie A. Kane, Ingrid Keller, Rose Anne Kenny, Thomas B. L. Kirkwood, Kees Knipscheer, Martin Kohli, Gisela Labouvie‐Vief, Kristina Larsson, Shu‐Chen Li, Charles F. Longino, Ariela Lowenstein, Erick McCarthy, Gerald E. McClearn, Brendan McCormack, Elizabeth MacKinlay, Alfons Marcoen, Michael Marmot, Tom Margrain, Victor W. Marshall, Elizabeth A. Maylor, Ruud ter Meulen, Harry R. Moody, Robert A. Neimeyer, Demi Patsios, Margaret J. Penning, Stephen A. Petrill, Chris Phillipson, Leonard W. Poon, Norella M. Putney, Jill Quadagno, Pat Rabbitt, Jennifer Reid Keene, Sandra G. Reynolds, Steven R. Sabat, Clive Seale, Merril Silverstein, Hannes B. Staehelin, Ursula M. Staudinger, Robert J. Sternberg, Debra Street, Philip Taylor, Fleur Thomése, Mats Thorslund, Jinzhou Tian, Theo van Tilburg, Fernando M. Torres‐Gil, Josy Ubachs‐Moust, Christina Victor, K. Warner Shaie, Anthony M. Warnes, James L. Werth, Sherry L. Willis, François‐Charles Wolff, Bob Woods
- Edited by Malcolm L. Johnson, University of Bristol
- Edited in association with Vern L. Bengtson, University of Southern California, Peter G. Coleman, University of Southampton, Thomas B. L. Kirkwood, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Handbook of Age and Ageing
- Published online:
- 05 June 2016
- Print publication:
- 01 December 2005, pp xii-xvi
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