ethics and metaphorics in professional chess

duty, mundophagia, imagination

I've reached a stage in my life where I should make some decision about how to use my time and effort. Without wishing to self-dramatise, like many others I feel the mild tension between self-fulfilment and my responsibility to others, a tension which varies in intensity in different moods. Of course, this is because I am privileged enough to be able to choose. However, there is no denying that if I did not feel any responsibility to others I would probably do more academic degrees (funding permitting), write a few terrible novels, and pretend to be a jazz trumpeter.

The way I have formulated my choice is secular, in the sense that I shall not be taking into account the pursuit of any transcendent artistic or spiritual imperative. I do not feel any absolute demand to structure my life in a certain way aside from the those demands which can be articulated in terms of self- or other-benefit. I have no 'calling', in the grandest sense of the word.

Although I am not considering it as a career (I would first need to be good at chess), the world of professional chess frames these issues particularly starkly. As a professional chess player, you are not really helping 'others', however ecumenically defined. You are enriching yourself while playing a game with a vanishingly small fan-base. Unlike many more popular team sports, it doesn't foster any sense of local community, encourage physical fitness, or promote other more or less intangible values like teamwork, determination, and fair-play. You are pursuing it because it is something you are good at.

One could argue that chess players are pursuing the self-fulfilment side of the equation, in the sense that they are pursuing riches, fame, or pleasure. However, I'm not sure how convincing this is. It seems a bit of a stretch to suggest that chess careers are about money. Although a successful professional chess player can earn a decent amount of money by winning tournaments, at the moment at which you choose to become a chess player that possibility is very far away. Only when you achieve a certain status (an FIDE rating of 2600+) and can get invited to prestigious invitationals does it resemble a stable job. Fabiano Caruana, the second-best player in the world, was coached from the age of 10 to be a professional chess player. His parents moved to Spain and home-schooled him just so he could become successful. If they only cared about making their child financially stable, they would have been better off paying for academic tuition and pushing him into a well-connected Ivy League college. As far as fame goes, the niche and uncool world of professional chess can't provide much except for in a small number of extreme exceptions. (Although there is a nascent chess boom.) There is presumably some truth in the idea that chess players are pursuing self-fulfilment in that they enjoy playing chess. Yet, aside from the obvious fact that the surest way to kill your love for a hobby is to make it into a job, it must surely be true that there are more people who love chess who are not professionals than who are.

There does seem to be more to the world of professional chess than the merely secular demands I stated above. My hunch is that even when you add up all the different motivations - the pleasure of winning, the financial rewards, the modicum of fame, the chance to play a game for a job - most chess players wouldn't recognise these as sufficient for explaining why they do what they do. We need that extra factor, the sense of an absolute demand felt by chess players to pursue the game.

I am usually very wary of the theological tendencies of certain types of critical thought especially present in the literary humanities. So far, I have been looking at the structure behind the professional chess world in a pretty Anglo-Saxon way, totting up all costs and benefits and ignoring what chess might mean in itself, what charge or significance it might carry as a form which can inspire, motivate, trouble and seduce regardless of its wider effects. But maybe we need to view chess in this way to understand chess players. What is this theological demand felt by chess players? What intrinsic value (I use this phrase cautiously) is there in chess?

Chess as a game often projects an image of intellectual purity. Especially in other cultural forms, chess is often understood as an arena in which the Platonic forms of skill and beauty can be pursued. For example, in Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know (2014) (an interesting but flawed novel, drowning in cliché and cod-philosophy), chess is used as an image of contained and refined intellect. It is not 'about the pieces', those symbols of war, but 'about the board', about movement, geometry, and connection. Chess, it seems, has all the right symbols to be the sort of thing which would be a 'calling' for some people. Instead of being articulated in terms of helping yourself or others, it imagines absolute demands in the realm of absolute achievement.

When chess is used as a metaphor to describe other games such as football, it is to emphasise these detached cerebral qualities. When a football match is called 'a game of chess', the match is stripped of its messy physicality. Speed or strength don't count, and somehow the 22 people on the pitch who kick and maim one another are subsumed into two distant and competing intellects. Perhaps it is fitting then that the greatest chess player of all time, Magnus Carlsen, is also one of the world's most successful fantasy football players, finishing second in this season's international competition. He takes both activities seriously: the other week he had to beat world number 3 Ding Liren in super quick time at the Legends of Chess invitational so he could go and watch the final matches of the Premier League later that day . Carlsen specialises in a form of non-physical football reduced to numbers, and the cliché about football as a game of chess comes full circle and eats its own tail.

However, we can't articulate the theological calling felt by chess players simply as an intellectual demand, as a celebration of the human mind. What's interesting about contemporary professional chess is that it openly does not operate in the world of pure thought any longer. Grandmasters spend hours each day working with computer analysis and memorising patterns. American GM Hikaru Nakamura has pointed out that players' use of analysis engines is the single most important factor in modern chess, making the top grandmasters better than ever before and far superior to the mid-ranked players. Chess is not about the beauty of human intelligence. The days of Morphy are long gone. Games such as the 'Opera Game' of daring but questionable sacrifices and dazzling intuition are now seen as quaint. Carlsen, seen as a brilliant player for his chess 'intuition', plays in a way to disrupt players who use lots of computer analysis by using a variety of strange openings. Yet this is a strategy only possible, or even intelligible, in a world in which analysis is king.

Professional chess players are not pursuing the cultivation of human intelligence. They are not trying to make the human mind as beautiful and dazzling as possible. Rather, professional chess is about logical competition, with no other aesthetic or moral priorities. Chess players feel the magnetism of an aesthetic of pure competition, detached from the luck and fragility of the human body. To be sure, chess players love the feeling of dominating other players. They love winning. But fundamentally they love the thrill of beating someone at chess, where chess is an arbitrary set of rules designed so that someone can be triumphant without contingencies. Chess is not like a team sport, for example, in which individual brilliance and collective endeavour can be reconciled. It is not a Hellenic ritual for the worship of the human form. Chess is unlike anything else in being about individual logical superiority only.

Chess forms a world structured by exclusively by logical excellence. But it is not a logic connected to a metaphysical mathematical order; chess prowess does not produce discoveries in number theory, astrophysics, or semantics. Steven Connor has argued that while sport is 'world-forming', in that 'makes a world apart, a field of actions and operations that are organised according to a set of rules peculiar to itself', the worlds of sport are not

are not content to remain merely adjacent or isomorphic to the real world. Sport seems to have built in to it the desire to become identical with the world as such. It seems to have worldness implicit in it, such that the question and horizon of the world are always at issue.

If the logic by which chess players live is not the logic of the real world, then in what sense does chess desire to become 'identical to the world as such'?

Connor is onto something here, but the case of chess gives a different emphasis to his comments. The logical structure of the world of chess does not seek to change until it becomes 'isomorphic to the real world'. Instead, chess seeks to make the real world in line with itself. This is clear in that chess use metaphors from the real world which have more content in the world of chess than they do outside of it. In football, when military metaphors are used, the military connotations are predominant. If a football player is called a 'warrior', they are brave and violent like a 'warrior'. This is not the case with the metaphorics of chess. The movement of a 'bishop' in chess has no connection to a real world 'bishop'. Chess metaphors are stronger: when we are told to imagine the movement of a bishop, we are more likely to think about a diagonal movement on a chessboard than we are to picture a real bishop moving around some ecclesiastical convocation.

Rather than chess leaning towards the world of real war, chess gives meaning to military metaphors by giving them a logical form in the game-play. Chess is mundophagic, it eats the world and excretes it in 8 x 8, black and white. This was never more clear than in the most famous chess game of all time, Fischer-Spassky in 1972, in which the American Bobby Fischer ended Soviet dominance in chess at the height of the Cold War. Americans hoped that the military situation of the chess board would eat the military situation of the real world at that moment.

Professional chess players therefore participate in a collective dream for a world structured by logical rules which have no other end. The pure, religious demand of chess is the allure of this dream of a game which eats up the non-logical world in which co-operation is a possibility (although not always a probability). I'm sure if a chess player read any of this they would be mildly bemused and shading towards offended, but then I would ask them to describe better than I have done what the absolute demand for chess feels like to them. I will publish the responses when I get them.

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I'm not sure how I feel about justifying my efforts with reference the type of world which a practise implies or invokes. I would rather do something for myself and for some other people which they can recognise as having been done rather than crossing my fingers and hoping that the dreams I have will somehow manifest a corresponding reality. I think this is a classic problem for the justification of art, of 'imagining' other/new worlds. Some artists, no matter how few people see their work, no matter how exclusive, class-affirming, and wasteful their work may be, justify their efforts by reference to an absolute demand to imagine a world through their work. They believe they will be vindicated in the utopia-ever-to-come. Perhaps the saving grace of professional chess players is that they probably are not pretentious enough ever to say that their playing chess is a political act of imagining a chess-like world, even though it seems like it is (according to my above interpretation).

Even though I won't become a professional chess player, I am glad they exist, and I am glad that they dream their lives as they do.   

If you want to play me at chess, my chess.com username is ‘chriswoakes’.