Heraclitus Part 2: Lyres, Bows, Effort and Rest

I started reading Simone Kotva’s book Effort and Grace after listening to an interview with her on the Hermetix podcast. In that book and in that interview, she talks about so many things that I seemed to have arrived at independently in my own reading over the last 2 years: the importance of attention as central to philosophy as a spiritual practice, effort as opposed to free will, Stoicism, and Bergsonism. But she crucially has opened up for me the importance of passivity (grace) in my spiritual practice. I have to admit that I read Stoicism in the same way that she does (through Simone Weil) as encompassing the paradox of both effort and passivity in its spiritual exercises. What this interview and book is doing for me is allowing me to foreground the paradox, which I think I was trying to do, however incoherently, when I was delving into early the Christian texts of Augustine and Evagrius. Both of them place a great deal of emphasis on the will and how we direct our attention to managing what we desire. That is their philosophical inheritance. At the same time, philosophy as spiritual exercise is not enough because salvation is not up to us. Salvation requires the will of God to bring the penitent Christian across the finish line through grace. At best, one can prepare oneself for receiving grace but that preparatory effort alone is not sufficient. Preparation creates the disposition to wish for grace and to try and live in accordance with the Christian moral law. In short, effort creates a disposition to recognize grace when it occurs, but it does not control grace:

This is a paradoxical relationship. What is good is the involuntary movement; at the same time, only the will habituated to the good will be able to recognize what it loves…. The paradox of the spiritual life challenges any sense in which the performance of exercise might be thought to guarantee its result, as it also resists the pessimistic conclusion that effort is useless in relation to repose. It would be absurd to imagine rest without effort, but it would be absurd, likewise, to imagine effort without rest. (20, emphasis added)

Treating this paradox as a hard contradiction (or dualism) between opposites short-circuits the self-transformative power of the spiritual exercise. Seeing dualism and opposition — effort opposed to rest — maps to the divide between “strength and weakness, independence and dependence, Stoicism and Christianity” (vii). Her purpose is to restore the paradoxical connectedness of effort and passivity such that we can see them in productive tension with each other. This, incidentally, is the proper reading of Stoicism, and I absolutely agree with her on this as should be clear from previous meditations.

I added some emphasis in Kotva’s text I just cited because this passage for me illuminates how spiritual exercises are closely aligned with making oneself “able to recognize” a truth when it shows up (through the passivity of grace), but also how close this form of attention is to nihilism as defeat (i.e., “the pessimistic conclusion that effort is useless”) and the “absurd.” When we undertake the creation of a self that is estranged from reality and has to go to work on itself — its perceptions, attention, habits, emotions, intellect, soul, psyche, animus, et cetera — to restore that relationship, the possibility of failure of effort is ever-present. Failure can be experienced as the perceived uselessness of spiritual exercises in which case humanity is seen as incapable of recognizing truth, or it can take the form of denying that reality is stable enough to be knowable. A nihilistic defeatism can come from either direction: the subject can be found wanting in its ability to know, or the object can be seen as not having a stable enough reality to be knowable.

Though I don’t think she means it this way, her use of “absurd” twice in this important passage signals for me how closely aligned dualist thinking and nihilism are to “Absurdism.” I don’t think that this is an unreasonable reading of her passage. In fact, Camus’ Absurdist anthem, The Myth of Sisyphus, is encoded in the passage itself as the oscillation between effort and rest. Sisyphus must push the rock up the hill, but he must also rest as he makes his way back down to start over again. The Myth of Sisyphus makes sense only if both effort and rest operate together and reinforce each other over and over again. We must see effort and rest within the Myth as a unity made possible by the eternal oscillation between them.

Some instruction from Heraclitus may be helpful here to understand unity as the connectedness of opposing states. Let me take the lyre and bow fragment as a provocative example. Neither the bow nor the lyre work unless they are understood as oscillations between effort and rest. To use T.M. Robinson’s phrase, “the ‘connectedness’ of polar points or states makes for the unity of the substance in question, for the bow and the lyre the conjunctive agent being the taut string(s), for the world a planned (‘measured’), balanced, predictable, and unending process of change” (“Heraclitus: A Tentative Summary of his Beliefs” in Fragments, 184). Let's read closely his translation of Fragment 51:

They do not understand how, while differing from (or: being at variance), [it] is in agreement with itself. [There is] a back-turning connection, like that of a bow or lyre.

As I covered in Part 1, this is clearly a provocation with an antecedent — who is the “they” who doesn’t understand? And what exactly do they not understand? “They” seem to have made some statement that needs to be rethought as paradox rather than, presumably, as a clear statement about an identity or unity. For Heraclitus, the bow and the lyre aren’t functional unless this tension exists — the pulling back that is also a need to contract in order to do the work of firing an arrow or playing music.

What is missing from this fragment, however, is the explicit statement of connectedness to other forces. The lyre cannot play itself; the bow cannot create its own tension. It must be connected to another entity that is activating the bow or the lyre with its own effort. The bow and the lyre do their work when the connectedness of the two entities — the human pulling and releasing the bow and plucking the strings of the lyre — creates and releases the tension so that the arrow can fly and the vibrations can create sound. Creating the tension and then relaxing it is where the work of each is activated. Contrast this to Aristotle for whom the work of each instrument is determined by the natural and ideal function of each. His focus is on the skill of the craftsman to create a more or less perfect version of the instrument. This is not Heraclitus’ approach. He doesn’t take the inward essential turn that Aristotle takes several generations later. For Heraclitus, it is the cycle of intensification and relaxation that we must recognize and pay attention to in understanding the bow and the lyre. This means avoiding the propensity to resolve these forces into static concepts like Aristotle’s essential functions or Plato’s Forms. Heraclitus challenges us to see the unity of the world as a connectedness of systems of tension and release. Even with the barley-drink of Fragment 125 (“Even the barley-drink separates if it is not stirred”), the motion that makes it cohere must be released in order for it to be consumed — you can’t keep stirring it while you drink it. To be the barley-drink, it must be in motion. But to be consumed as nutrients, it must be relaxed and absorbed into the digestive system.

Effort here must be seen as both work and passivity at the same time. The release of tension in the bow activates its power and becomes the movement that does its work. To be crystal clear: at that moment of activation, neither tension nor looseness does work. The work occurs as the one becomes the other — as the tension moves toward looseness with sufficient force to propel the arrow toward its target. Same with the lyre. To make music, the cycle of tension and release must be reactivated over and over again by the musician to make a song.

Now to return to Sisyphus and his effort: it is all too easy to see the oscillation between effort and rest as having clearly defined boundaries. It is clear when Sisyphus is exerting effort to get the rock up the hill, just as it is equally clear when the rock rolls down that his rest takes place. Understood at first glance, effort clearly gives way to rest, and they do not mix. However, when he turns to go back down, a kind of self-reflective effort takes place. Sisyphus recommits to his own happiness in the renewal of the physical effort to come. Rest, in other words, contains a kind of effort within it — the effort exerted on the will to choose to be happy in the task. This effort within Sisyphus’ resting period passes on to the physical effort a kind of peacefulness and happy commitment to the task at hand that makes it seem easier. We find rest and peace within the effort that no longer seems a burden because Sisyphus has chosen to be happy in the work. Therefore, when Camus encourages us to “imagine Sisyphus happy,” he is complicating the relationship between effort and rest as contradictory states. The boundaries are fluid, and we are not dealing with a contradiction or even with a dialectical unity of opposites. We are dealing with a temporal process of forces colliding, colluding, mixing, imitating, intensifying, resisting, absorbing and interacting with each other in often unpredictable yet highly determined ways.

These forces cannot and should not be reduced to expressions of something else. To repeat a phrase of Nietzsche’s that I’ve grown fond of, “A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect — more, it is nothing other than this driving, willing, effecting…” There is no subject behind the scenes as the puppet master pulling the strings. Driving, willing, effecting are original conditions. They are the starting points that are neither start lines nor points. When we really come to terms with this, we stop looking for the real puppet master hidden from the scene yet orchestrating everything above the stage and out of sight. We can see ourselves as participants in the driving, willing, effecting. In subsequent meditations, I need to take up the consequences of seeing oneself within this Nietzschean framework. It seems to me that this line of thinking has led to a renewed atomization and focus on the individual self as something to be attained through effort. “Art of Living” and a renewed embrace of “creativity” when it comes to imagining the possibilities for the self are the typical rubrics we see.

This all feels a bit too individualistic to me. I think that Simone Kotva’s work opens different avenues to think about the relationality that is made possible when we see effort-and-rest as a Heraclitean unity within the flow of forces. Rest, passivity, grace and all the other terms we can use for being open to the forces acting upon us — while retaining the responsive effort that allows us to maintain agency — can be a promising move beyond the bias toward individualism that occurs when we privilege effort as the basis for our spiritual exercises and “technologies of the self.”