SOME ANCIENT CHESS GAMES, 5000 A.D. FUTURE ARCHEOLOGY ON THE CRISIS AND SYMBOLIC (RE)CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY
MATS WERCHOHLAD
CHESS GAME DESIGNED BY JOSEF HARTWIG. IN: GROPIUS, WALTER, AND LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY, EDS. 1925. NEUE ARBEITEN DER BAUHAUS WERKSTÄTTEN. VOL. 7. BAUHAUSBÜCHER. MÜNCHEN: ALBERT LANGEN VERLAG.
“Our inquiry into the nature of things is subject to certain limitations which it is important to realise. The best comparison I can offer is with a future antiquarian investigation, which may be dated about the year 5000 A.D. An interesting find has been made relating to a vanished civilisation which flourished about the twentieth century, namely a volume containing a large number of games of chess, written out in the obscure symbolism usually adopted for that purpose. The antiquarians, to whom the game was hitherto unknown, manage to discover certain uniformities; and by long research they at last succeed in establishing beyond doubt the nature of the moves and rules of the game.”
The powerful, entangled techniques of ubiquity and the altered regimes of perception and orientation they produce, point to a central dynamic of cultural transformation: shifting relations between symbol and reality. A century ago, the upheavals of relativity and quantum mechanics triggered a paradigm-shifting reckoning, as science and philosophy grappled with the limits of knowledge, the fragility of perception, and the shifting foundations of the world as it was understood.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Einstein’s theory of special relativity profoundly disrupted established notions of space and time. Newtonian physics had conceived of space as an absolute container and time as a fixed sequence of events; relativity replaced this with the concept of spacetime—an interwoven, observer-dependent continuum. This shift was deepened by quantum mechanics, which challenged the relationship between observation, measurement, and reality. The deterministic worldview gave way to probabilities, uncertainties, and the notion of superposition, where systems can exist in multiple states simultaneously until observed. Together, these developments sparked a fundamental debate about the nature of reality.
An exemplary insight into the broader debate this provoked is offered by an article published in 1928 by the philosopher and diplomat Kurt Riezler in the journal Die Naturwissenschaften. Riezler proposed that reality is structured in three entities: a first reality of shifting sensory impressions; a second reality of symbolic and cultural order; and a third, absolute and “true” reality. The sciences, in this view, stand symbolically for a continuous human striving to approach this third reality through knowledge and symbolic representation — a striving whose underlying assumptions had been fundamentally unsettled by developments in modern physics.
Riezler illustrates the symbolic relation between science and reality by means of a parable which he borrows from Arthur Stanley Eddington’s popular science classic on Einstein’s theory, Time, Space and Gravitation: Eddington describes a thought experiment in which future archaeologists discover an old book containing notated chess games. Without any knowledge of the actual game, they are able — by recognising regularities and patterns in the somewhat cryptic notation of the documented games — to reconstruct the rules of play. Eddington had interpreted this analogy as follows:
„The recorded games are our physical experiments. The rules of the game, ascertained by study of them, are the laws of physics. The hypothetical chess-board of 64 squares is the space and time of some particular observer or player; whilst the more general relations of two-fold order, are the absolute relations of order in space-time which we have been studying. […] By no amount of study of the experiments can the absolute nature or appearance of these participants be deduced; nor is this knowledge relevant, for without it we may yet learn “the game” in all its intricacy. Our knowledge of the nature of things must be like the antiquarians’ knowledge of the nature of chessmen, viz. their nature as pawns and pieces in the game, not as carved shapes of wood.”
Apart from the limited knowledge on the “absolute nature” of the past chess games — such as the condition of the chessboard or the exact form and materiality of the pieces — Riezler emphasises another argument in his essay: the archaeologists might also come to suspect that the notations are partial observations of a higher, yet unexplored logic of a coherent order. Associated with this notion would be the futile or meaningless attempt to integrate the many moves and tactics of the various games into a single overarching, closed system. In addition to the materiality of the pieces and the board, the researchers would thus remain unaware of the actual meaning and purpose behind the symbolic notations — namely, that what they are dealing with is a game played by human beings, whose fascination and impact arise precisely from the mistakes, intuition, and unpredictability of its players. Riezler argues that this human dimension is neglected under what he takes to be the natural sciences’ claim to absoluteness — a claim that becomes the focal point of his polemic: „Now comes a fearless and shameless trickster and declares: can’t you see that these signs are far from belonging to a system of unequivocal order? “ Insofar as he questions whether the third, absolute reality can be articulated and represented within a coherent system at all, Riezler shifts his focus towards a kind of playful competition among the various symbolic systems trying to approach a higher reality. However: “true reality you are looking for is the meaning of the game and the effort of the players.” For Riezler, the search for the third reality thus constitutes both a central drive of cultural labour and a fundamentally unresolvable endeavour. In the figure of the trickster, which crystallises Riezler’s argument, one ultimately also recognises his own self-conception, wie he outlines as a “metaphysician of the newest natural sciences.” His position is an ambivalent, yet restlessly one, oscillating between the metaphysical longing for absolute reality and the insight that the world can ultimately only be grasped through symbolic mediation and cultural understanding. In doing so, Riezler argumentation meanders between two philosophical poles of the conflicted debate on the crisis of reality – a debate that would soon come to a head in the 1929 encounter between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer at the Davos Disputation. On the one side, the symbolically mediated construction of the world as developed in Cassirer’s Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, on the other, Heidegger’s ontological–existential grounding as presented in Sein und Zeit. While for Cassirer the crisis of reality had to be addressed precisely in and through the engagement with the new findings of physics and the natural sciences, Heidegger saw modern science itself as an expression of a more fundamental forgetting of Being — a mode of thinking that conceives of beings only in terms of their technical availability, thereby obstructing access to true Being. While the Davos disputation has retrospectively been stylised as the climax of this philosophical debate, the practical implications of this conflict have been perceived, discussed and integrated far beyond the domains of physics, philosophy and theory of science. With regard to the built environment, one of the earliest and most prominent responses can be found in the now-canonical Space, Time and Architecture by Swiss historian Sigfried Giedion. In allusion to Eddington’s title, Giedion pursued his central thesis that modern architecture is a (symbolically) constructed expression of a new conception of space, which he explicitly linked to the physical concept of spacetime. Following what Giedion described as “a period in which thinking and feeling were separated,” the Bauhaus building in Dessau appeared to him as an architectural expression of the attempt to reconcile these spheres. By not only addressing the approaches he considers commendable, but also the cultural climate and underlying tensions of his own time, Giedion concludes by questioning: “What is this reality?” As he had previously stated, Giedion too emphasised the culturally mediated nature of reality:
“I agree with Ernst Cassirer, the philosopher, who, in his last work, demands so fervently that history should be written only with an intimate knowledge of the human side.”
The relationship between Cassirer’s philosophy and design at the Bauhaus has been explored in greater detail by media theorist Birgit Leitner in an article published in 2011. Therein she not only traces the philosophical affinities between Cassirer and the functional aesthetics pursued at the Bauhaus, but also highlights concrete historical points of contact – such as the cultural networks surrounding the Cassirer gallery, or Gertrud Grunow, the only female Master at the early Bauhaus and later got into exchange with Cassirer trough her work at the Institute of Psychology at the Philosophical Institute at the University Hamburg.
With particular reference to Marianne Brandt’s tea and coffee set, she illustrates (among other examples), how geometrical clarity, material composition, and functional use combine to generate a relational aesthetic – one in which form becomes the visible structure of symbolic meaning. In this sense, Leitner argues that Brandt’s work reflects the very logic of symbolic mediation that Cassirer develops in his philosophical writings.
To further specify the relationship between symbolic mediation and reality discussed above, the chess analogy could be specifically revisited through an illustrative object: the Bauhaus chess set designed by Josef Hartwig. Its distinctive feature lies in the fact that each piece symbolises its movement on the board through its form. For instance, rook and pawn move orthogonally and are therefore shaped as cubes. The bishop moves diagonally, represented by a slanted cross. The knight jumps at a right angle, expressed by combining two angular forms. King and queen share a cube base; the queen is topped with a sphere to indicate her unrestricted mobility, while the king bears a diagonally placed cube to reflect his limited range.
The philosopher of science and Bauhaus researcher Peter Bernhard has emphasised that Josef Hartwig’s chess set represents a paradigmatic example for the approach of “Wesensforschung” (which may be hardy translated as “research on the essence”) pursued at the Bauhaus. Bernhard outlines how this object not only reveals a functionalist aesthetic, but also the attempt to translate the essence of the play – here: the specific mode of movement and the value of the chess pieces – directly into its form. Bernhard underlines that the aim is not merely an external reduction or geometric abstraction, but rather a meaningful, almost “natural” development of form out of function. In the term Wesensforschung itself, Bernhard further identifies Gropius’s strategic capacity to bridge esoteric, artistic, and scientific discourses of the time.
Even though neither Bernhard nor Hartwig explicitly hinted at this reference, the term Wesensforschung brings together those ambivalent interpretations that are also reflected in Riezler’s position. Taking on his standpoint, the early Bauhaus was as well influenced by diverse currents that sought to approach a higher reality through mystical, esoteric, or socio-utopian forms of life and art. Riezler’s reflections show striking affinities with the debates at the Bauhaus and may as well have resonated within the school as his brother Walter, editor of the Werkbund journal Die Form was a close interlocutor of many Bauhaus figures.
Through Riezler’s perspective, the Bauhaus chess set could be interpreted as a logical consequence of Eddington’s analogy. The form of the chess-figures would then symbolise the conclusions drawn from the limited information available to the future archaeologists in Eddington’s parable. In line with his argumentation, the true game reveals through a process of reflection on the fundamental procedures of the play — that is, of human-made chess rules.
Josef Hartwig’s Bauhaus chess set, however, invites for a further shift in perspective: In a direct response, Riezler’s classification of three realities was questioned by the microbiologist and epistemologist Ludwik Fleck. Drawing on the idea of certain styles of thought, which he would later elaborate on in respect to collectives, he argued that our perception is already shaped by cultural influences, habits, and reservoirs of knowledge that constitute a “specific tradition and education." In that sense, the strive for a higher reality on the other hand “[…] would be, like any insistence on ‘essences and things’, like any search for the ‘thing-in-itself’, not natural science, for there can be no democratic, universally valid, affect-free answer to it.” From that perspective, relating the Bauhaus chess to the discourse on reality may simply underline that, beyond its functionalist ambitions, it also serves as an expression of the very epistemic and cultural debates circulating in the intellectual environment of the historic design school. As Eddington had already pointed out, the form and materiality of the chess pieces is somewhat contingent depending on the context in which the game is played. The crisis of reality, however, gave rise to a search for new expressive and symbolic forms to animate an encounter with what takes form in and through the game.
Cassirer, Ernst. 1994. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen Teil 3. Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis. Darmstadt, Wiss. Buchges.
Eddington, A. S. 1920. Space Time And Gravitation. London: Cambridge University Press.
Fleck, Ludwik. 1929. ‘Zur Krise der “Wirklichkeit”’. Die Naturwissenschaften 17 (23): 425–30.
Giedion, Sigfried. 1941. Space Time & Architecture the Growth of a New Tradition. 3 [1954]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Leitner, Birgit. 2011. ‘Ernst Cassirer and The Bauhaus: The Question of Functional Aesthetics’. Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics 3:167–209.
Riezler, Kurt. 1928. ‘Die Krise Der ,,Wirklichkeit"’, Die Naturwissenschaften, 16. Jahrgang (Heft 37/38): 705–12.
Mats Werchohlad’s research focuses on spatial and transformational dynamics at the intersection of technology, education, and society. With an academic background in mechanical engineering and urban studies, he is a research associate at the Chair of Theory and Practice of Design at the Kunsthochschule Kassel.