the Artificial problem

From The New Yorker:

"If the “best” move is simply the result of multiple calculations, why isn’t the best chess player the one whose brain is most like a computer? Why isn’t rooting for a chess player like rooting for a microchip? Commentators talk about a player’s daring or originality; but a daring or original move is worthless if it’s not also, from a strictly computational point of view, the optimal move—in which case, a computer could have made it. Since there is so little to look at otherwise, the players’ styles and personalities come to seem important to describe. But what does style or personality have to do with it, really?"

Bobby Fischer dies at age 64

From the 1957 archives of The New Yorker:

"Most of this [Bobby's] intelligence we gleaned from Robert’s mother, Mrs. Regina Fischer, when we talked with her one evening recently. We also gathered that Mrs. Fischer, though proud of her son’s triumphs, is by no means convinced that his devotion to chess is a good thing. “For four years, I tried everything I knew to discourage him,” she said, with a sigh, “but it was hopeless.” She told us that almost any evening during the summer vacation her son was to be found at the Manhattan Chess Club, on West Sixty-fourth Street—a venerable institution, with an imposing number of champions and chess masters in its membership. “That’s Bobby’s favorite hangout,” Mrs. Fischer said. “Sometimes I have to go over there at midnight to haul him out of the place.” Robert’s mother and father have been divorced for some years."

Was his genius "good" in the broader sense. Yes, he is considered by some to be one of the most talented chess players. But considering his tortured life, probably self-imposed, it was most likely not really a choice, of course, for him to pursue his talent, but should career-success usurp personal mental health in importance. ...

On a separate note, there should be more "hang-outs" like the Manhattan Chess Club.

when dealing with people

"Live with your century, but do not be its creature; render to your contemporaries what they need, not what they praise. Without sharing their guilt, share with noble resignation their penalties, and bow with freedom beneath the yoke which they can as ill dispense with as they can bear it. By the steadfast courage with which you disdain their good fortune, you will prove to them that it is not your cowardice that submits to their sufferings. Think of them as they ought to be when you have to influence them, but think of them as they are when you are tempted to act on their behalf. Seek their approbation through their dignity, but impute their good fortune to their unworthiness; thus on the one hand, your own nobility will awaken theirs, and on the other, their unworthiness will not defeat your purpose. The gravity of your principles will scare them from you, but in play they will continue to tolerate them; their taste is purer than their heart, and it is here that you must lay hold of the timorous fugitive. In vain you will assail their maxims, in vain condemn their deeds; but you can try your fashioning hand upon their idleness. Drive away lawlessness, frivolity and coarseness from their pleasure, and you will imperceptibly banish them from their actions, and finally from their dispositions. Wherever you find them, surround them with noble, great and ingenious forms, enclose them all around with the symbols of excellence, until actuality is overpowered by appearance and Nature by Art."

Schiller had his friend Goethe in mind when writing this, or so I am told. Clearly, the ideal and most noble of friends.

From On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Macbeth

"Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Truth and Art

"But how does the artist secure himself against the corruptions of his time, which everywhere encircle him? By disdaining its opinion. Let him look upwards to his own dignity and to Law, not downwards to fortune and to everyday needs. Free alike from the futile activity which would gladly set its mark upon the fleeting moment and from the impatient spirit of extravagance which applies the measure of the Absolute to the sorry production of Time, let him resign the sphere of the actual to the intellect, whose home it is; but let him strive, through the union of the possible with the necessary, to produce the Ideal.

Let him stamp it on illusion and truth, coin it in the play of his imagination and in the gravity of his actions, in every sensuous and spiritual form, and quietly launch it into infinite Time."


From the Ninth Letter of On the Aesthetic Education of Man

This excerpt is a good example of why I hold Schiller in great regard. His poetic and philosophical tendencies live simultaneously in his phrases. This harmony is exactly what he espouses in this classic work; that is, the reconciliation and unification of the sensuous and intellectual through Art, through Beauty.

Since it is so relevant to what I do, I'll be quoting from it in the next few posts.

why we need to train the sensibility

Again from Schiller:

"The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error. Content if they themselves escape the hard labour of thought, men gladly resign to others the guardianship of their ideas, and if it happens that higher needs are stirred in them, they embrace with eager faith the formulas which State and priesthood hold in readiness for such an occasion. If these unhappy people earn out sympathy, we should be rightly contemptuous of those others whom a better lot has freed from the yoke of necessity, but their own choice continues to stoop beneach it."

And now,

"These men prefer the twilight of obscure conceptions, where feeling is livelier and fancy fashions comfortable images at its own pleasure, to the beams of truth which dispel the fond delusion of their dreams. On the very deceptions which the hostile light of knowledge should dissipate, they have based the whole structure of their happiness, and are they to purchase so dearly a truth which begins by depriving them of everything they value? They would need to be already wise, in order to love wisdom...."

"It is, therefore, not enough to say that all intellectual enlightenment deserves our respect only insofar as it reacts upon the character; to a certain extent it proceeds from the character, since the way to the head must lie through the heart. Training of the sensibility is then the more pressing need of our age, not merely because it will be a means of making the improved understanding effective for living, but for the very reason that it awakens this improvement."

On the Aesthetic Education of Man

"...culture itself inflicted this wound upon modern humanity..."

"It was culture itself that inflicted this wound upon modern humanity. As soon as enlarged experience and more precise speculation made necessary a sharper division of the sciences on the one hand, and on the other, the more intricate machinery of States made necessary a more rigorous dissociation of ranks and occupations, the essential bond of human nature was torn apart, and a ruinous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance. The intuitive and the speculative understanding took up hostile attitudes upon their respective fields, whose boundaries they now began to guard with jealousy and distrust, and by confining our activity to a single sphere we have handed ourselves over to a master who is not infrequently inclined to end up by suppressing the rest of our capacities. While in one place a luxuriant imagination ravages the hard-earned fruits of the intellect, in another the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which the heart might have warmed itself and the fancy been enkindled.
....enjoyment was separated from labour, means from ends, effort from reward. Eternally chained to only one single little fragment of the whole, Man himself grew to be only a fragment; with the monotonous noise of the wheel he drives everlastingly in his ears, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of imprinting humanity upon his nature he becomes merely the imprint of his occupation, of his science." !!!!

"But even the meagre fragmentary association which still links the individual members to the while, does not depend on forms which present themselves spontaneously (for how could such an artificial and clandestine piece of mechanism be entrusted to their freedom?), but is assigned to them with scrupulous exactness by a formula in which their free intelligence is restricted."

and now with emphasis:
"The lifeless letter takes the place of the living understanding, and a practised memory is a surer guide than genius and feeling."

- from Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man translated by Snell