Chess, freedom . . . and God

“Freedom just around the corner for you,
But with Truth so far off, what good could it do?”
Bob Dylan – Jokerman

In a paper called Constitutive Rules, the philosopher John Searle draws a distinction between rules which regulate as against rules which constitute. The traffic laws regulate which side of the road to drive on. All very necessary, but those laws do not define what it is to drive.

Searle points out the other, more interesting, kind: the systems of stipulated constraint which actually define — or constitute — the thing they also regulate. The example he uses is: chess.

Chess is a game whose essence is defined by the rules of chess. You cannot turn up at your chess club and start to move your Queen as if it is a Knight. When you start doing that you cease to be playing chess. Chess is an activity, if you like, which requires a rule-based context in which it can exist in the first place. And the conceptual space defined by the context just is the game of chess.

And yet there are ways of playing the game of chess which make it clear that within that system of rules certain forms of freedom are made possible. Garry Kasparov played an attacking game against the hyper-defensive Anatoly Karpov. The paradigmatically eccentric (and late) Tony Miles famously replied to a standard opening (by Karpov) by pushing his rook pawn one square forward: an eccentricity made possible only by the rules of chess, and which confirmed that his personal foibles had been transferred to the board.

I think Miles won that game, by the way.

There is an assumption that has gripped our post-Enlightenment culture that in order to be free you have to be able to do what you want. The assumption itself does not survive examination. The Enlightenment legacy is the peculiar idea that the individual person can self-create, an obnoxiousness that culminated in the (brilliant) writings of Sartre, who argued that existence logically precedes essence. You are what you are, he suggested, because you have chosen to be what you are.

But who does the choosing? On what basis? Cradled by which comforting institutions? And according to which requirements of intellectual evaluation?

The chess example shows this: that there is no necessary tension between being free and being rule-governed and that it might, actually, be the case that freedom is structured by specific institutions of constraint.

The Belgian theologian Servais Pinckaers drew a distinction between two accounts of what it means to be free: freedom from indifference versus freedom for excellence. The former assumes that we are free when, and only when, having been confronted with a set of options, we can pick any of them. The latter is subtler, and richer: real freedom will involve picking what is best for us and embracing the fact that, in order to get there, we must realise that certain rules will have to be celebrated.

This can only be a sort of shorthand for competing solutions to the free will versus determinism debate. But given that this debate operates at a level of incomprehensible, and possibly insoluble, metaphysics it could be that the shorthand is all we can work with. There is, isn’t there, something at least intuitively plausible about the Pinckaers distinction? Something that resonates?

Bobby Fischer played chess freely because he had internalised the rules of chess; the fluent French speaker is free to navigate the language because she has mastered the grammar and semantics of the language; Mozart and Wittgenstein, in their specific ways, were creative by pushing against real sets of musical and linguistic constraints, while developing mechanisms of subversion from within those constraints. Genius is always rule-governed — that’s how you know how to smash the rules.

And so it is with faith: God lays out sets of rules and we find our happiness in the absorption of those rules and in living according to them. To be constrained by the requirements of God is to be at the same time liberated by those same constraints. We can go against that, we can break the rules, but in so doing we are opting for indifference over excellence. That God tells us how to live is not an impediment to our freedom; it is a necessary condition of any freedom worth having.

And as Bob Dylan suggests: freedom without truth is not really worth the candle.

Incidentally, there is a magnificent example of this to be found in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, in which the eponymous anti-hero plays a game of chess with Endon, a long-term patient in a mental institution. Endon plays absolutely within the rules but in ever-unpredictable and bewildering ways — his own assertion of freedom.

You can find their game, with Beckett’s annotations, here.