Vol. 12: Neither Can Do Without the Other: Why Opposites Can't Be Pulled Apart and Balance Can't Be Held, from "On Contradiction"

There's something that has happened to me more than once, and every time it still feels off.

Taking a break from training. A week at the shortest, two weeks at times, and once, more than half a month without setting foot in the gym. As I understood it, strength is use it or lose it. Stop that long and you're bound to drop back some. So every time I walked back into the gym, I expected to have slipped. I'd even planned to drop the weight a notch first and find my feel again.

What happened? Several times, the exact opposite. After warming up, the bar went up more smoothly than before the break. A weight I'd been stuck on for ages just went up, and it didn't even feel like a strain.

I sat on the bench thinking, this doesn't make sense. Isn't getting stronger supposed to happen while you train? I didn't do a single set for half a month. How did my strength go up instead of down?

Let's set that aside for now, because it's really the same question I left at the end of the last post.

In Vol. 11 we said that the side of a contradiction with the upper hand decides the nature of a thing, and the lead can switch sides. At the end I asked: the two opposing sides are clearly straining against each other, so how can you become me and I become you? Besides opposition, is there also a relationship between them where neither can do without the other?

In "On Contradiction," Mao calls this relationship the identity of contradiction.

Two Sides Fighting Each Other Are Tied Together

By this section, "On Contradiction" has covered most of its ground. Universality says contradiction is everywhere. Particularity says every contradiction has its own temper. The principal contradiction and the principal aspect are about telling principal from secondary, within a pile of contradictions and within one pair. That leaves just the most fundamental question: inside one contradiction, what is the relationship between the two opposing sides?

Mao's answer comes in two layers:

First, the existence of each of the two aspects of a contradiction in the process of the development of a thing presupposes the existence of the other aspect, and both aspects coexist in a single entity; second, in given conditions, each of the two contradictory aspects transforms itself into its opposite.

The second layer is the transformation we covered last time: Xiang Yu's courage flipping from what made him to what undid him. I won't go into it again.

What's really new is the first layer: each of the two opposing sides presupposes the other for its own existence. Not "although opposed, they can just about coexist," but "only by leaning on the other can it exist at all." In case anyone doesn't get it, Mao spells it out:

Without life, there would be no death; without death, there would be no life. Without "above," there would be no "below"; without "below," there would be no "above." Without misfortune, there would be no good fortune; without good fortune, there would be no misfortune.

Life and death, above and below, misfortune and good fortune: all sworn enemies. But take "death" out of the world, and "life" instantly loses its meaning. Take away "below," and "above" collapses with it. Enemy and enemy define each other and hold each other up.

	Our instinct	Mao's view
How the two opposing sides relate	Hostile; each would love to be rid of the other	Opposed, yet each the condition for the other's existence
Facing the side you dislike	Wipe it out and life will be peaceful	Wipe it out and the side you want goes with it
When the two sides are at peace	The contradiction is gone; you can rest easy	They're only even for now; the struggle never stops for a moment

But identity is only half of it. Mao adds the other half right away, and gives it even more weight:

The conditional, relative identity of opposites combined with the unconditional, absolute struggle of opposites constitutes the movement of opposites in all things.

Notice these two pairs of qualifiers. Identity is "conditional, relative": the two opposing sides can come together into a state of "union" only under particular conditions. While the conditions hold, the union holds. When the conditions change, the union falls apart. Struggle is "unconditional, absolute": the pulling between the two sides needs no conditions at all. From beginning to end, it never stops for a moment.

Not Getting Rid of the Other Side, but Leaning on It

The side that fights you is often the very side holding you up. And a peaceful state of affairs is just two forces pulling even for the moment. Pulling even is temporary. The pulling is forever.

The first half of this sentence overturns our instinct about "enemies." When we run into something that makes us miserable, our first reaction is to get rid of it fast, as if once it's pulled out, everything left will be good days.

The second half overturns our instinct about "peace." Once things settle down, we assume it's the normal state, the finish line, and that life can go on like this forever.

I happen to have just tripped over each of these instincts once. Let me take them one at a time.

What Built My Strength Was the Half Month I Didn't Train

Back to the training break from the start.

I've always said that rest is part of training. I think this should be common sense, but nowadays a lot of people who are just getting into fitness think of it like this: training is income, rest is spending. Train a day, get a little stronger. Rest a day, leak a little. To them a training break feels like the strength they've saved up is leaking out of them day by day.

By that accounting, half a month off should cost a chunk of strength. But my experience says that during those days that others would see as leaks, the balance actually went up.

Muscle doesn't grow while you train. In that hour or so of training, what you're really doing is damage: tearing muscle fibers, draining the body's reserves.

The moment you walk out of the gym after a workout, you're weaker than when you walked in, not stronger.

The real growth happens after that: in what you eat, the hours you sleep, the days you don't train. During that time the body patches up the torn places bit by bit, and to guard against your next visit, it patches them a little thicker than before.

Training places the order. Rest is the delivery.

Training and rest point in completely opposite directions, one consuming, one recovering. They're a solid pair of contradictory sides.

Yet neither can do without the other. Train without resting, and the more orders you place, the more goods you owe, and you just wear yourself down. Rest without training, and your body never even gets an order. What would it deliver?

Getting stronger has never been the work of training alone. It's done jointly by those two sworn enemies, training and rest.

Once I saw this, an old saying came to mind:

One taut, one slack: that was the way of Kings Wen and Wu.

It comes from the Book of Rites, where it was originally about governing a state.

I used to take it as a polite way of telling people not to wear themselves out. Reading it now, it's actually very hard-edged. Keep a bow drawn all the time and it'll be ruined before long. Keep it slack all the time and it isn't a bow, it's a stick. Taut and slack are two forces working against each other, but a bow is a bow precisely because both forces strain in it at once. Remove either one and the bow no longer exists.

The side you most want to get rid of is often holding the other half of what you want. Fatigue to training, constraint to freedom, rivals to skill: they all have this structure.

My Daily Posting Ended with One Night of Drinking

The second experience is much more recent. It happened over the past month or so.

When it comes to writing, I'd been posting daily. I kept that rhythm for a long time, so long that I took it as my normal state. Write every day, post every day, as steady as clocking in at work.

The way it broke was not very dignified. A while ago a friend came to visit Chengdu. That night we drank a lot, and the streak just broke. At the time I didn't think anything of it. It's only one day, two at most. Once I recover I'll pick it back up.

It's now been more than a month since that day, and I've never gone back to daily posting. I've settled at twice a week.

By rights, when a habit I'd kept that long broke, I should have been annoyed and fought to get it back. But to my own surprise, I felt almost nothing. If anything, I thought: good, this is a chance to reset.

I spent a long time chewing on this. Not how to get back to daily posting, but what that "stability" really was.

During the daily stretch, on the surface it was a very steady balance: every day I could write something, every day I could post. But looking back now, there were two forces pulled tight beneath that balance the whole time. One was output: picking topics, writing, publishing, constantly pulling things out of myself. The other was recovery: the body needs rest, the mind needs new input, life needs some slack. Daily posting held because conditions at the time happened to be right. The output side was holding the recovery side down a little, the two pulled even, and things looked stable.

But pulling even doesn't mean the pulling stopped. The force that wanted rest was there the whole time, held down, and also building up. That night of drinking was just the fuse.

What really broke the streak wasn't the alcohol. It was the force that had been held down for so long, rising up through that opening.

That's the egg and the stone from Vol. 7: external causes become operative through internal causes.

The same night of drinking, at a time when I was full of energy, would have meant one day off and then getting up the next morning to post as usual. At a time when the need for recovery was already stretched to its limit, it became the last straw that broke the old balance.

There's a passage in "On Contradiction" that, rereading it this time, seemed more and more to be about exactly this:

The unity, solidarity, combination, harmony, balance, stalemate, deadlock, rest, constancy, equilibrium, solidity, attraction, etc., which we see in daily life, are all the appearances of things in the state of quantitative change.

Look at the string of words he lists: harmony, balance, equilibrium. We usually treat these as a finished state, something that, once reached, should stay that way. But Mao lumps them all together and calls them "appearances." Balance isn't the end of struggle. It's a face the struggle shows for the time being. If either of the two forces underneath changes, that face changes in an instant.

So my daily posting wasn't destroyed by one night of drinking. It was always a temporary state that could only be kept up under particular conditions. When the conditions changed, it gave way to the next state. I don't think the current twice a week is the finish line either. It's just as much the result of two forces pulling even, and when conditions change again, it'll change again.

Once I saw this, my "not feeling anything in particular" finally made sense. It's not that I'm heartless. It's that this simply wasn't worth being annoyed about. An old balance breaking isn't a defeat. It's the struggle showing you the word "temporary."

Union Is Temporary, Struggle Is Forever

Put the two experiences together and they're exactly the two halves of the same relationship.

Training and rest show that the two opposing sides can't be pulled apart: try to kick "rest" out of getting stronger, and "stronger" goes out with it. Daily posting and breaking the streak show that the union of two opposing sides can't be held: however stable two forces pulling even may look, it's only a temporary shape, and it has to change when conditions change.

One half is identity: opposites depend on each other and coexist in one entity. The other half is struggle: identity is conditional and relative, struggle is unconditional and absolute. Together they make the most important line in this section: the conditional, relative identity of opposites combined with the unconditional, absolute struggle of opposites constitutes the movement of opposites in all things.

Put this into everyday life and both ends are useful.

When you run into something fighting you, don't rush to get rid of it. Ask: is it the other half of what I want? If it is, think it through before you tear it out. Are you willing to tear out your own half along with it?

When things settle down, don't relax too soon either. Stability is worth enjoying, but not worth counting on. What's truly reliable has never been holding on to one balance. It's knowing that balance will break, and having the ability, once it does, to pull even again under new conditions.

Balances break one after another, and you can find your footing again one time after another.

But having written this far, the word "struggle" still leaves half a question hanging.

I said struggle is absolute and never stops from beginning to end. But look back at the struggles in this post. Training and rest struggled, and produced strength. Output and recovery struggled, and produced a new rhythm. Neither side tried to beat the other to death. That seems different from how we usually understand struggle. Say "struggle," and what comes to mind is life or death, irreconcilable enemies.

So does the struggle of contradiction always have to go that far? Besides fighting to the death, do the two opposing sides have other ways to struggle?

That question will wait for the next post. It will also be the last in the "On Contradiction" series.