The Understanding Of Despair Through The Game Of Chess

The Understanding of Despair through the Game of Chess by Leon de Castela Many people enjoy playing games, but do they really understand the nature of games? Entertainment? Hobby? Social activity? Mental training? Of course, you may play games for all those reasons and you may play games for understanding life and yourself: self-critics, selfappreciation, self-understanding. Are all games cappable of making you attain a better understanding of life? Maybe, but there are some games which are more than just hobbies they offer a better understanding of life and there are two games which are more philosophical than any others: Chess and Go. Here, the focus will be on the game of chess. Chess has been played for a long time in history and its origins are still foggy, nevertheless it is believed to have been created in India and passed to the occident by the Moors through Iberian Peninsula, Portugal and Spain. Despite of its origins, it is a game of great popularity and with thousands of books published on strategy and history of the game, maybe, it is even more popular than Go. The game of chess is based on a set of pre-ordered rules, fixed rules which command the movements of the pieces on the board. Each piece has its own particular movement and some has more liberty than others. There is no randomicity on the game, which means there is no intervention of the hazard, chance or accident: no dices, coins or anything like that. The element of game is to understand the mind of the opponent based on the rules of the game. The independence of random events means that the game is more predictable in the beginning and in the end and it is more unpredictable in the middle. As the mind of man is limited to a level of predictability or it is not trained to predict more than a single level in a normal person, that is, to see in advance the possible outcomes of their actions on the actions of another person. The more someone plays chess, the more he or she is allowed to see more steps in advance. The great amount of unpredictability in the game makes someone has some idea of infinite. The infinite, in this case, is the impossibility to know all the outcomes of their actions in front of another person. In Kierkegaard's Sickness unto Death he discusses the despair in front of infinite. The self, he says, is a dialectical relation between the infinite and the finite, although it never incurrs on a synthesis as hegelian logic may propose. The self seems much more like a pendulum, or a fuzzy set on fuzzy logic, which allows some degree of infinity and finity at the same time. Every time someone loses his self on infinity it becomes more and more in despair, because he cannot solve all things at once, he cannot make all movements at once, so he will have to chose one: the best one, or at least what he thinks it is the best. It is the possibility, the disposition of pieces which limits his progress in the game, the game does not allow all possibilities and the despair is the inability to turn all things possible. None the less the game teaches the player to objeticfy his thoughts and proceed with the game. Some people in life cannot find a way to proceed. The second case of despair is the lack of infinity. It is the extreme opposite, that is, in the game, the incapacity of make predictions in the moves. It is pretty common to beginners in chess to make silly movements just because they don't know exactly what to do they are completely in the extreme of finity which mean they have only the pieces and the rules of the game, but they don't know how to use it. That is the second form of despair. The game teaches you to allow some level of prediction, infinite, to continue the match. Knowing the despair does not consist in its cure, it is like knowing you have fever but you don't know how to cure it. Playing chess may make you understand the ways of despair and what you

should do in your life, but in life it is not always easy to know the rules and the movements you should make and there is the contingency to consider too, however the game teaches you to find a balance between those two opposites: infinitude and finitude. Sometimes you should have an opinion of someone who is watching the game from outside. The extreme of infinitude is to become too much a player and the extreme of finitude is to become too much a mere pawn.