Let’s face it: Reality is messy. Most of us exist in a haze of doubt and confusion, unsure of ourselves and our place in the world: Are we, at any given moment, doing the right thing? Are we living our most “authentic” life? 

It is entirely understandable that some people might respond to this uncertainty with the conviction that there must be a fundamental grounding principle that can make sense of the mess and murk of our existence. It has preoccupied religious thinkers and philosophers for millennia. Think, for instance, of René Descartes, locking himself away in a heated room, trying to doubt everything until he came up with his famous maxim: “I think, therefore I am.”

But the goal of absolute certainty is itself a very strange one. Descartes’ own certainty came at the price of severing the “I”—which he could be certain of—from the entire physical world—which he couldn’t be. There is indeed something about the very concept of certainty that seems so lacking, in the face of how dynamic everything actually is. One might think here of Kierkegaard’s joke about the madman who, having escaped from an asylum, tried to convince the world that he was sane by only uttering things he could be certain were true, greeting everyone by stating “The earth is round! The earth is round!” It wasn’t long before he was carted back to his cell.

Against this, it seems like it might be worth instead pursuing the intellectual virtue which John Keats called “negative capability”: the capacity for “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats particularly associated this virtue with Shakespeare who, he suggested, was able to convincingly inhabit the many characters he portrayed precisely because he was not attempting to communicate any specific, set, unified vision of the world through them.