Criticism
Stanley Fish has expressed strong reservations about the attempt to apply the concept of negative capability to social contexts. He has written in critique of Unger's early work as being unable to chart a route for the idea to pass into reality, which leaves history closed and the individual holding onto the concept while kicking against air. Fish finds the capability Unger invokes in his early works unimaginable and unmanufacturable that can only be expressed outright in blatant speech, or obliquely in concept. More generally, Fish finds the idea of radical culture as an oppositional ideal in which context is continuously refined or rejected impracticable at best, and impossible at worst. Unger has addressed these criticisms by developing a full theory of historical process in which negative capability is employed.
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