Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall: From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Batman: What Did Bobby Fischer See?

The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a now famous paper in 1974: ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ His concern was the nature of consciousness. For him “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism- something it is like for the organism.” What he concluded is that no amount of description - of the organism itself, of its environment, of its history or upbringing - is sufficient to either derive or explain the subjective experience of such an organism, except to a sufficiently similar organism.

It is clear from Frank Brady’s biography that Bobby Fischer is so unlike any other human organism, that his experience - what he saw, how he judged what he saw, and why he acted in response to what he saw - is entirely impenetrable. This has to do in part with his 180 IQ score, perhaps with his marginally autistic personality, certainly with his profound talent for the game of chess. But ultimately the problem of ‘interpreting’ Bobby Fischer is much more general. As Thomas Aquinas insisted, each individual human being is his or her own species, and therefore fundamentally unknowable in Nagel’s terms.

In this light Bobby Fischer is Everyman. The difference between him and others is that his fame and his eccentricity provoke the questions that we don’t typically ask about people we know about. We prefer to project ourselves into their situations and provide them motivations, responses, and rationalisations that are entirely our own. But with Fischer, his talent is so enormous, his behaviour is so strange, that it’s just not possible to judge him to be pursuing any purpose but his own, a purpose that even he may have never been aware of.

Brady can therefore only speculate about Fischer’s mental processes:

“It seemed that his strength grew not just from tournament to tournament and match to match, but from day to day. Each game that he played, or analyzed, whether his or others’, established a processional of insight. He was always working on the game, his game, refining it, seeking answers, asking questions, pulling out his threadbare pocket set while in the subway, walking in the street, watching television, or eating in a restaurant, his fingers moving as if they had a mind of their own.”

Indeed: “a mind of their own.” Fischer’s consciousness was devoted to one thing: chess. He had other interests - swimming, baseball, ice hockey - but these were obviously engaged in to further his pursuit of the game. With his intelligence and determination, he could have pursued any number of professional careers. Why chess grabbed him so totally at an early age and then dominated his life to the extent of eliminating any apparent self-reflection (and often logic) is the specific mystery of Bobby Fischer - the mind revealed only in his fingers.

It’s impossible to tell whether Fischer’s life is psychotic or cannily purposeful in a way that the rest of us just can’t comprehend. Was chess simply another symptom - along with his bizarre anti-Semitism, his quondam religious fundamentalism, his disdain for modern medicine and dentistry, his suicidal feud with the US government, and a general unprovoked nastiness - of a complex but deranged mind? Or were these consistent and rational responses to an understanding of the world that could only be achieved through Fischer’s unique position within it? Walking a mile in his shoes was never an option for anyone else.

I suppose that this mystery is what makes biography interesting. Biography can only articulate the mystery; but that appears to be all we need to find it worthwhile. A reminder perhaps that none of us really understands anyone else, and very likely not even ourselves. Whatever Bobby Fischer saw, no one else ever did, or ever will.

Postscript: Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story is a remarkable literary analysis of Fischer’s personality written a half century before events: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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