dangerous idea

I had no idea my favorite game was so dangerous.

For the purpose of a paternity investigation. I suppose they won't be lending his brain out the lab to study what makes someone a chess genius.

This looks interesting. But I'm going to wait for Dennis Monokroussos to review it before I decide whether to buy it or not.

It's Steinitz who allegedly walked around barefoot challenging God and offering Him pawn and move, but I recall reading that the story may be apocryphal.

I suspect it may be. There are plenty of chessmasters who have done things to build the repuation of our royal game as a bastion of mental illness, but it is important not to multiply such stories beyond necessity.

The parallel with Dawkins, however, holds nicely.

A really depressing story, to be honest. I'm a chess child of the late 60s and early 70s. Perhaps someday America will produce a top chess talent who is mentally balanced. Perhaps hell will freeze over, or Dawkins will join the Catholic Church.

Bobby Fischer's passing marks the end of an era for chessplayers of my generation. As a player in high school and college in the early 1970s I followed Fischer's rise to the world title very closely. The final match with Spassky was, no doubt, the chess event of the century, filled with drama from beginning to end. I am linking to Dennis's blog for more information.

Dennis's chess story about Fischer reminds me of my own big Fischer story. I was playing in the American Open in 1972 in the last round. I had just declined a draw offer from my unrated opponent, hoping to squeeze the point out of a slightly better position. Then I heard a huge ruckus as hundreds of people started milling across the playing room towards the top board. The reason eventually became clear: Bobby Fischer, the newly crowned World Champion, had walked in the room, and wanted to see Larry Remlinger's top board game. So I did the only sensible thing; I took my draw and joined the throng. He headed out the building into one of about six cabs to escape detection. I heard someone say as he left, "I've just seen God."

Call It's Your Turn. I got on to play a couplle of games fellow philospher/Lewis scholar Steve Lovell. But if you want to challenge me, just join and look up my name. It's internet chess without the frantic pace (and sometimes bad manners) of ICC.

This is an interesting passage from Chesterton's Orthodoxy. I suppose chessplaying philosophers are double-duty candidates for the asylum. Dennis? Bill V? Help me out here. You must admit that the two American players who ascended to the pinnacle of chess (Morphy and Fischer) do now speak well of the salutory effects of the Royal Game for one's mental stability.


GKC: Let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey. Now, if we are to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake. There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it. Facts and history utterly contradict this view. Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like; and if Shakespeare ever really held horses, it was because he was much the safest man to hold them. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into