256. Rest and restlessness
This is the last item
in a series on time, duration, inspired by the work of Henri Bergson.
Is
restlessness good, or not? Without restlessness there is no development and no
creation. But according to the philosopher Schopenhauer we are driven by a restless
will to satisfaction that is never achieved, and if we think we have achieved
it, we experience insufferable boredom. We may be relieved from that race of
craving, but only temporarily, by an aesthetic experience, a piece of Bach,
say. For Schopenhauer a genius is able to escape from personality with its frenzied
will, literally in ecstasy, stepping out of the self. So what is creation:
restlessness or rest?
Ignaas
Devisch[i] defines
restlessness as an impassioned striving for what one considers meaningful. Here
the positive is built into the definition. It implies voluntariness, not being
dragged along in what one sees as senseless. That would not be restlessness but
unrest. It yields negative stress. But passion also means suffering (as in the
passion of Christ). The passion of creation can be painful. It gives stress,
but in a positive sense. It can also be a surrender to a ‘flow’, an effortless
transport, as if arising out of itself.
In
the famous film Amadeus, about Mozart, there is a scene where Salieri, rival of
Mozart, choking with envy, reads through a manuscript by Mozart in which there
is no a single correction or strikeout, ‘as if God himself whispered it in his
ear’.
Serendipity
is the apparently unprepared and effortless reception of an illumination, as a
strike of lightning, out of nothing. That is only apparent. It presents itself
only to the prepared mind. The impression that it is as if there was no
preceding thought or effort arises from the fact that much of our mental
activity is subconscious, in ‘tacit’ knowledge. Much learning, doing and
thinking breeds mental structures without one’s knowing about it, and those
provide the capacity for sense making and receipt of an illumination.
But
learning also requires rest and contemplation, a settling of the dust,
relaxation of impulse. Uninterrupted change, without that, derails in neurosis,
a directionless bounding from one hunch to another. I think in letting go also
lies the importance of sleep: the mental digestion, sifting, and association
of impulses in the brain produced by the
action of the day, to settle into stabilized circuits in the brain. Rest,
release of control, surrender to that process, is also needed to allow for
chance that generates the illumination. That is how dreams somehow yield
nonsensical sense.
This
is part, I think, of the more general principle, discussed also elsewhere in
this blog, that development and invention require an alternation of stability
and change, rest and restlessness, of assimilation and accommodation.
In
his early work on aesthetics of Nietzsche offered an opposition and combination
of Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo is harmony, equilibrium, rest. Dionysus is orgy,
the unrestrained, the destruction of equilibrium, creative destruction,
restlessness. Nietzsche was inclined to the Dionysian, but recognized the need
for the Apollonian.
People
usually have more aptitude for the one or the other, and then the combination
of the two requires collaboration or taking turns. In organizations we see
that, for example, in the separation of a department of R&D and one of
production. In development, exploration, less is fixed, there is more room for
surprise, a wider scope, more faces in different directions. In production the
perspective is tighter, more oriented to efficiency and fine-tuning, in
exploitation of existing knowledge, skills and means.
Here
one sees that combination or alternation of the two is needed also for economic
reasons, but I think that applies also in the mental and bodily economy of
personal development. Without stability there is no functioning for short term
survival. Without change and development there arise stagnation and falling
back. Another reason is epistemic: one needs to apply what exists in order to learn
about its limitations and to gather elements for renewal, and gain inspiration
for possible directions for it.
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