Bishop’s search for love

I’ve recently discovered for myself a body of writings on chess by a Scottish Grandmaster and philosopher Jonathan Rowson. He is an exceptionally deep thinker, and his books are less about making one a better chess player and more about the metaphors about human life that are contained in the game of chess. I am particularly enjoying the prose he uses and the colourful characteristics that he attributes to various chess pieces, positions and concepts.

Here is an example from “The Seven Deadly Chess Sins” that is so brilliantly funny that I cannot resist capturing it here as a note for myself. The idea is that a bishop pair (the light- and the dark-squared bishops) are more powerful together than their individual point values (~3.5 points per bishop, one point being equal to the material value of one pawn) added together. It is intuitive, of course, because the strength of the piece, and therefore its relative value, changes depending on the position on the board). Still, in the case of the bishop pair in particular, there is an inherent power of the two of them being able to control all the squares, while one of them is capable of only controlling the squares of one colour. To illustrate the point, Rowson evokes Plato’s book Symposium, which describes a banquet attended by Socrates, a philosopher, Alcibiades, the politician, and a comic playwright Aristophanes. In the book these characters give speeches in the praise of Eros, the god of love and desire (strange enough for a chess textbook yet?) I am pretty sure that this classic text would not be able to stand against the modern tides of political correctness and such, but in it Aristophanes argues that men and women were originally not separate beings but hermaphrodites – creatures joined back-to-back and having eight limbs. They perfectly complemented each other and were so powerful, that Zeus feared that they would challenge the gods. So he bisected them and thus created men and women. Since then, they have been searching for each other in order to re-unite, according to the legend. The chess-related metaphor is that the light- and the dark-squared bishops should also be thought of as originally being one exceptionally powerful piece. In this poetic sense, the bishops are in love for each other and need to find a way to be together.