Chess and the looking glass (concluded)

Did you ever wonder at the kind of chess Barry Manilow plays or George Walker Bush? Does it follow that great army Generals should play fantastic chess? Was Napoleon Bonaparte a great chess player? How about Julius Caesar, Mohammed Ali or even the godfather of them all, Don Corlone? I wouldn’t know but one would expect they should all be great chess players considering their enterprises involved strategic planning and calculated maneuvers. How about Einstein, Socrates and Plato?

I have often wondered at what really makes a good chess player and my feeling is that it really doesn’t matter what your endeavor is, when it comes to chess it is a whole different ball game. You play for the moment with all the attendant pressures to boot. Generals make for very impatient people, men used to giving orders and not given to taking them. It is also true of presidents and top ranking politicians. Physicists and mathematicians are wont to employ deductive reasoning in all they do; their inclination is towards an ordered process and sequences. They see patterns in everything they do and expect outcomes that flow from reducible equations. Philosophers are actually dreamers that build their intellectual homes on fantasy Islands, they are random thinkers and the very opposite of a scientific mind. Ordered arrangements entrap their reason and constrict their space and oxygen.

I have found, exploring chess, that whereas it may be a game it is also much more. It is free flowing and dwells on the individual’s ability to contain his freedoms and excesses. It demands it of you by testing your patience and urges optimally. It will either arrest these qualities completely or deny you the joy of winning the game. It will stretch your imagination, pressure your concentration and contain your desires for wishful thinking. It commands a presence that is total in true champions and will insist on a mental maturity that even the best of Generals would marvel at. Understanding a really good game of chess is to understand one’s self, it is a looking glass into the soul of the individuals that play the game.

Chess is all the processes of life reduced to a playing board; treachery, hate, temper, goodness, respect, joy, progress, satisfaction, contentment, despair, sorrow, discontent, failure and success all come alive within that 64-square board. For me, chess is like no other game and its make-believe world are true reflections of the realities that accompany the players in real life and their would-be responses to them in real time. It is the simulation of true life on a board, the prospects of a unique intellect brought forward and the reflections of an upbringing laid bare for all to see.

Chess is a game that is unusual as it is unforgiving and one that offers no apologies to class, gender or age. It recognizes them not and will only reward the individual it favors with the champion’s status because they belong to the best cream of humanity: the few that have overcome the excesses and temptations of life.

This is why chess is about the only game at which you would find a 12 year old unravelling a grand master, where egos take flight for one’s inner essence to explode. It is all I need to do, sometimes, and why chess would forever be my kind of game! It tells and it shows, so, who do you think would make a fantastic chess player, George Walker Bush, Einstein, Bonaparte or Socrates? Your guess can only be as good as mine. We simply love chess because it’s the life we lead seen through a looking glass.

Chess and the looking glass (part 1)

Chess and the looking glass (part 2)

Nope.

Actually, I can't verify the authenticity, but I did see "supposed" games from both Napolean and Einstein, and both of the games were played with very interesting and creative attacks.

 If the games were authentic (I can't even recall where I found them, I think the napolean game might have been published on chessbase, but I'm not sure) then I would have to say both men were advanced players.

 Nice post by the way!

 It is very clear that you are ignorant in the matter of philosophers and how they think.  If you ever meet a good philosopher, I am sure your opinions will change.

 Whoa! You haven't said a damn thing and it would appear you are indeed the ignoramus. Just some education here. Philosophy in modern discipline concerns itself with questions of what is and their basic nature, as well as that which isn't. Logic and the metaphysical. It is originally a greek word: φιλοσοφία (philosophía) that is the fusion of friendship and wisdom. It isn't grounded in scientific deductions or analysis but is merely a discipline of the Arts that formulates opinions from purely speculative reasoning. Put another way, it is a branch of the Arts that fantasizes about what ought to be, should be and may be... but never that which IS or WILL be. The best it strives to do is ask questions about what is and will be but NEVER ever does it exit a determination that is empirical or observable to the senses. It's origins and depth are glorified fiction, period. 

 Note that what I say is not based on feelling insulted as I am not a philosopher (we all are in a way, but you understand me) but a student of philosophy (I study philosophy, I am not "learning to become a philosopher").

 Whoa! You haven't said a damn thing and it would appear you are indeed the ignoramus.

 Wow, why start acting like a... now? ou don't like when people disagree with you? You'll have to learn to deal with it I think.

It is originally a greek word: φιλοσοφία (philosophía) that is the fusion of friendship and wisdom. Well there, you can't use semantics to define something, I'm sorry. And "friendship" would be more "friend" in the sense of "someone who loves wisdom", so I don't know what your point is there anyways?

It isn't grounded in scientific deductions or analysis but is merely a discipline of the Arts that formulates opinions from purely speculative reasoning.

 Today "creative" philosophy is mostly limited to ethics. It is reflection of "how should we act" based mostly on moral axioms, or at least moral grounds that people are ready to accept as right.

Philosophers are actually dreamers that build their intellectual homes on fantasy Islands, they are random thinkers and the very opposite of a scientific mind.

What exactly do you define as a "dreamer that build their intellectual homes on fantasy islands"? Is it because, in the past, some philosophers, when science was practically non-existent studied physics and came with (we know now) sometimes funky theories? You have to understand that from the point of view of their epoch, philosophers were the most scientific of their time.

And while the first part can be understandale from a somewhat "ignorant of philosophy" point of view (and a recurring thought in unintellectual people), the last part :
they are random thinkers and the very opposite of a scientific mind.

...is totally nonsense, as although scientifics use facts to start their reasoning and deductions, philosophers use the same processus but based mostly on hypothesis as facts aren't available. And science is a direct product of philosophy. Officially speaking, Descartes was the one who created the scientific thought or process. Science is a direct product, or I may even say continuation of philosophy.

"Put another way, it is a branch of the Arts that fantasizes about what ought to be, should be and may be... but never that which IS or WILL be."

Is morals "something"? Does that mean that they don't have practical uses? I mean come on, is mathematics something that IS?

And let me just point out that your whole dissertation was philosophy. 

"Chess is all the processes of life reduced to a playing board; treachery, hate, temper, goodness, respect, joy, progress, satisfaction, contentment, despair, sorrow, discontent, failure and success all come alive within that 64-square board. For me, chess is like no other game and its make-believe world are true reflections of the realities that accompany the players in real life and their would-be responses to them in real time. It is the simulation of true life on a board, the prospects of a unique intellect brought forward and the reflections of an upbringing laid bare for all to see."

Whoops... 

 Ettiene:

"Wow, why start acting like a... now? ou don't like when people disagree with you? You'll have to learn to deal with it I think."

An ignoramus, my dear Watson, is an ignorant person. You sink into your own 'moral' quicksand when you take offense at that which you call others.

Ettiene:

"Today "creative" philosophy is mostly limited to ethics. It is reflection of "how should we act" based mostly on moral axioms, or at least moral grounds that people are ready to accept as right."

Well, well Socrates... it IS philosophy to teach that one man's meat is another man's poison and to acknowledge that another's freedom ends where mine begins. Ethics, morals, axions are not stable social symbols but products of culture, tradition and upbringing. Your morals or ethics are not neccesarily mine and these indices are as diverse as the backgrounds from which we come.

Ettiene:

"... as although scientifics use facts to start their reasoning and deductions, philosophers use the same processus but based mostly on hypothesis as facts aren't available. And science is a direct product of philosophy. Officially speaking, Descartes was the one who created the scientific thought or process. Science is a direct product, or I may even say continuation of philosophy."

Hypothesis, my dear Mr Holmes, is the very definition of speculative reasoning. You simply admit to the fact that science is based on empirical proof whereas philosophy dwells on the abstract or nothing to arrive at conjectures, which may or may not flow to a logical conclusion. To therefore brand science a direct product of philosophy is either a huge joke or mass produced nonsense.

Ettiene:

"And let me just point out that your whole dissertation was philosophy."

... as much as yours was an exact science? You've got to be kidding, right?

"