LOGIC AND LAWN TENNIS
G.K. Chesterton
WHEN we say that we doubt the intellectual improvement produced by Protestantism and Rationalism and the modern world, there generally arises a very confused controversy, which is a sort of tangle of terminology. But, broadly speaking, the difference between us and our critics is this. They mean by growth an increase of the tangle; whereas we mean by thought a disentangling of the tangle. Even a short and simple length of straight and untangled wire is worth more to us than whole forests of mere entanglement. That there are more topics talked about, or more terms used, or more people using them, or more books and other authorities cited—all this is nothing to us if people misuse the terms, misunderstand the topics, invoke the authorities at random and without the use of reason; and finally bring out a false result. A peasant who merely says, “I have five pigs; if I kill one I shall have four pigs,” is thinking in an extremely simple and elementary way; but he is thinking as clearly and correctly as Aristotle or Euclid. But suppose he reads or half-reads newspapers and books of popular science. Suppose he starts to call one pig the Land and another pig Capital and a third pig Exports, and finally brings out the result that the more pigs he kills the more he possesses; or that every sow that litters decreases the number of pigs in the world. He has learnt economic terminology, merely as a means of becoming entangled in economic fallacy. It is a fallacy he could never have fallen into while he was grounded in the divine dogma that Pigs is Pigs. Now for that sort of intellectual instruction and advancement we have no use at all; and in that sense only it is true that we prefer the ignorant peasant to the instructed pedant. But that is not because we think ignorance better than instruction or barbarism better than culture. It is merely that we think a short length of the untangled logical chain is better than an interminable length of it that is interminably tangled. It is merely that we prefer a man to do a sum of simple addition right than a sum in long division wrong.
Now what we observe about the whole current culture of journalism and general discussion is that people do not know how to begin to think. Not only is their thinking at third and fourth hand, but it always starts about three quarters of the way through the process. Men do not know where their own thoughts came from. They do not know what their own words imply. They come in at the end of every controversy and know nothing of where it began or what it is all about. They are constantly assuming certain absolutes, which, if correctly defined, would strike even themselves as being not absolutes but absurdities. To think thus is to be in a tangle; to go on thinking is to be in more and more of a tangle. And at the back of all there is always something understood which is really something misunderstood.
For instance, I read an article by the admirable Mr. Tilden, the great tennis-player, who was debating what is wrong with English Tennis. “Nothing can save English Tennis!” he said, except certain reforms of a fundamental sort, which he proceeded to explain. The English, it appears, have a weird and unnatural way of regarding tennis as a game, or thing to be enjoyed. He admitted that this has been part of a sort of amateur spirit in everything which is (as he very truly noted) also a part of the national character. But all this stands in the way of what he called saving English Tennis. He meant what some would call making it perfect, and others would call making it professional. Now, I take that as a very typical passage, taken from the papers at random, and containing the views of a keen and acute person on a subject that he thoroughly understands. But what he does not understand is the thing which he supposes to be understood. He thoroughly knows his subject and yet he does not know what he is talking about; because he does not know what he is taking for granted. He does not realise the relation of means and ends, or axioms and inferences, in his own philosophy. And nobody would probably be more surprised and even legitimately indignant than he, if I were to say that the first principles of his philosophy appear to be as follows: (1) There is in the nature of things a certain absolute and divine Being, whose name is Mr. Lawn Tennis. (2) All men exist for the good and glory of this Mr. Tennis and are bound to approximate to his perfections and fulfil his will. (3) To this higher duty they are bound to surrender their natural desire for enjoyment in this life. (4) They are bound to put this loyalty first; and to love it more passionately than patriotic tradition, the presentation of their own national type and national culture; not to mention even their national virtues. That is the creed or scheme of doctrine that is here developed without being defined. The only way for us to save the game of Lawn Tennis is to prevent it from being a game. The only way to save English Tennis is to prevent it from being English. It does not occur to such thinkers that some people may possibly like it because it is English and enjoy it because it is enjoyable. There is some abstract divine standard in the thing, to which it is everybody’s duty to rise, at any sacrifice of pleasure or affection. When Christians say this of the sacrifices made for Christ, it sounds rather a hard saying. But when tennis-players say it about the sacrifices demanded by tennis, it sounds quite ordinary and casual in the confusion of current thought and expression. And nobody notices that a sort of human sacrifice is being offered to a sort of new and nameless god.
In the good old days of Victorian rationalism it used to be the conventional habit to scoff at St. Thomas Aquinas and the mediaeval theologians; and especially to repeat perpetually a well-worn joke about the man who discussed how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. The comfortable and commercial Victorians, with their money and merchandise, might well have felt a sharper end of the same needle, even if it was the other end of it. It would have been good for their souls to have looked for that needle, not in the haystack of mediaeval metaphysics, but in the neat needle-case of their own favourite pocket Bible. It would have been better for them to meditate, not on how many angels could go on the point of a needle, but on how many camels could go through the eye of it. But there is another comment on this curious joke or catchword, which is more relevant to our purpose here. If the mediaeval mystic ever did argue about angels standing on a needle, at least he did not argue as if the object of angels was to stand on a needle; as if God had created all the Angels and Archangels, all the Thrones, Virtues, Powers and Principalities, solely in order that there might be something to clothe and decorate the unseemly nakedness of the point of a needle. But that is the way that modern rationalists reason. The mediaeval mystic would not even have said that a needle exists to be a standing-ground for angels. The mediaeval mystic would have been the first to say that a needle exists to make clothes for men. For mediaeval mystics, in their dim transcendental way, were much interested in the real reasons for things and the distinction between the means and the end. They wanted to know what a thing was really for and what was the dependence of one idea on another. And they might even have suggested, what so many journalists seem to forget, the paradoxical possibility that Tennis was made for Man and not Man for Tennis.
The Modernists were peculiarly unfortunate when they said that the modern world must not be expected to tolerate the old syllogistic methods of the Schoolmen. They were proposing to scrap the one mediaeval instrument which the modern world will most immediately require. There would have been a far better case for saying that the revival of Gothic architecture has been sentimental and futile; that the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art was only an eccentric episode; that the fashionable use of the word “build” for every possible sort of social institution was affected and artificial; that the feudalism of Young England was very different from that of Old England. But this method of clean-cut deduction, with the definition of the postulates and the actual answering of the question, is something of which the whole of our newspaper-flattered society is in sharp and instant need; as the poisoned are in need of medicine. I have here taken only one example which happened to catch my eye out of a hundred thousand that flash past every hour. And as Tennis, like every other good game, has to be played with the head as well as the hand, I think it highly desirable that it should be occasionally discussed at least as intelligently as it is played.
(An essay reprinted in “The Thing”)
LOGIC AND LAWN TENNIS
G.K. Chesterton
WHEN we say that we doubt the intellectual improvement produced by Protestantism and Rationalism and the modern world, there generally arises a very confused controversy, which is a sort of tangle of terminology. But, broadly speaking, the difference between us and our critics is this. They mean by growth an increase of the tangle; whereas we mean by thought a disentangling of the tangle. Even a short and simple length of straight and untangled wire is worth more to us than whole forests of mere entanglement. That there are more topics talked about, or more terms used, or more people using them, or more books and other authorities cited—all this is nothing to us if people misuse the terms, misunderstand the topics, invoke the authorities at random and without the use of reason; and finally bring out a false result. A peasant who merely says, “I have five pigs; if I kill one I shall have four pigs,” is thinking in an extremely simple and elementary way; but he is thinking as clearly and correctly as Aristotle or Euclid. But suppose he reads or half-reads newspapers and books of popular science. Suppose he starts to call one pig the Land and another pig Capital and a third pig Exports, and finally brings out the result that the more pigs he kills the more he possesses; or that every sow that litters decreases the number of pigs in the world. He has learnt economic terminology, merely as a means of becoming entangled in economic fallacy. It is a fallacy he could never have fallen into while he was grounded in the divine dogma that Pigs is Pigs. Now for that sort of intellectual instruction and advancement we have no use at all; and in that sense only it is true that we prefer the ignorant peasant to the instructed pedant. But that is not because we think ignorance better than instruction or barbarism better than culture. It is merely that we think a short length of the untangled logical chain is better than an interminable length of it that is interminably tangled. It is merely that we prefer a man to do a sum of simple addition right than a sum in long division wrong.
Now what we observe about the whole current culture of journalism and general discussion is that people do not know how to begin to think. Not only is their thinking at third and fourth hand, but it always starts about three quarters of the way through the process. Men do not know where their own thoughts came from. They do not know what their own words imply. They come in at the end of every controversy and know nothing of where it began or what it is all about. They are constantly assuming certain absolutes, which, if correctly defined, would strike even themselves as being not absolutes but absurdities. To think thus is to be in a tangle; to go on thinking is to be in more and more of a tangle. And at the back of all there is always something understood which is really something misunderstood.
For instance, I read an article by the admirable Mr. Tilden, the great tennis-player, who was debating what is wrong with English Tennis. “Nothing can save English Tennis!” he said, except certain reforms of a fundamental sort, which he proceeded to explain. The English, it appears, have a weird and unnatural way of regarding tennis as a game, or thing to be enjoyed. He admitted that this has been part of a sort of amateur spirit in everything which is (as he very truly noted) also a part of the national character. But all this stands in the way of what he called saving English Tennis. He meant what some would call making it perfect, and others would call making it professional. Now, I take that as a very typical passage, taken from the papers at random, and containing the views of a keen and acute person on a subject that he thoroughly understands. But what he does not understand is the thing which he supposes to be understood. He thoroughly knows his subject and yet he does not know what he is talking about; because he does not know what he is taking for granted. He does not realise the relation of means and ends, or axioms and inferences, in his own philosophy. And nobody would probably be more surprised and even legitimately indignant than he, if I were to say that the first principles of his philosophy appear to be as follows: (1) There is in the nature of things a certain absolute and divine Being, whose name is Mr. Lawn Tennis. (2) All men exist for the good and glory of this Mr. Tennis and are bound to approximate to his perfections and fulfil his will. (3) To this higher duty they are bound to surrender their natural desire for enjoyment in this life. (4) They are bound to put this loyalty first; and to love it more passionately than patriotic tradition, the presentation of their own national type and national culture; not to mention even their national virtues. That is the creed or scheme of doctrine that is here developed without being defined. The only way for us to save the game of Lawn Tennis is to prevent it from being a game. The only way to save English Tennis is to prevent it from being English. It does not occur to such thinkers that some people may possibly like it because it is English and enjoy it because it is enjoyable. There is some abstract divine standard in the thing, to which it is everybody’s duty to rise, at any sacrifice of pleasure or affection. When Christians say this of the sacrifices made for Christ, it sounds rather a hard saying. But when tennis-players say it about the sacrifices demanded by tennis, it sounds quite ordinary and casual in the confusion of current thought and expression. And nobody notices that a sort of human sacrifice is being offered to a sort of new and nameless god.
LA LOGICA E IL LAWN TENNIS
G.K. Chesterton
QUANDO diciamo di dubitare del miglioramento intellettuale prodotto dal protestantesimo, dal razionalismo e dal mondo moderno, sorge in genere una controversia assai confusa, che è una specie di groviglio di terminologia. Ma, a grandi linee, la differenza tra noi e i nostri critici è questa. Essi intendono per crescita un aumento del groviglio; mentre noi intendiamo per pensiero un districare del groviglio. Anche un breve e semplice tratto di filo dritto e sbrogliato vale per noi più di intere foreste di puro intrico. Che vi siano più argomenti di cui si parla, o più termini adoperati, o più persone che li adoperano, o più libri e altre autorità citate — tutto ciò non è nulla per noi, se le persone abusano dei termini, fraintendono gli argomenti, invocano le autorità a caso e senza l’uso della ragione; e alla fine ne cavano un risultato falso. Un contadino che dice semplicemente: «Ho cinque maiali; se ne uccido uno, ne avrò quattro», sta pensando in modo estremamente semplice ed elementare; ma sta pensando con la stessa chiarezza e correttezza di Aristotele o di Euclide. Ma supponiamo che egli legga o mezzo legga giornali e libri di scienza divulgativa. Supponiamo che cominci a chiamare un maiale la Terra e un altro maiale il Capitale e un terzo maiale le Esportazioni, e alla fine ne cavi il risultato che più maiali uccide, più ne possiede; ovvero che ogni scrofa che figlia diminuisce il numero dei maiali nel mondo. Egli ha imparato la terminologia economica soltanto come mezzo per impigliarsi nella fallacia economica. È una fallacia in cui non sarebbe mai potuto cadere finché era saldamente radicato nel dogma divino che Maiale è Maiale. Ora, di quella sorta di istruzione e di avanzamento intellettuale non sappiamo che farcene affatto; e in quel senso soltanto è vero che preferiamo il contadino ignorante al pedante istruito. Ma ciò non avviene perché riteniamo l’ignoranza migliore dell’istruzione o la barbarie migliore della cultura. È soltanto che riteniamo un breve tratto della catena logica sbrogliata migliore di una lunghezza interminabile di essa interminabilmente aggrovigliata. È soltanto che preferiamo un uomo che faccia bene una somma di semplice addizione a uno che faccia male una divisione lunga.
Ora, ciò che osserviamo intorno all’intera cultura corrente del giornalismo e della discussione generale è che la gente non sa come cominciare a pensare. Non solo il loro pensiero è di terza e di quarta mano, ma parte sempre a circa tre quarti del percorso. Gli uomini non sanno da dove sono venuti i loro stessi pensieri. Non sanno che cosa implichino le loro stesse parole. Arrivano alla fine di ogni controversia e non sanno nulla di dove essa sia cominciata o di che cosa mai tratti. Assumono di continuo certi assoluti che, se definiti correttamente, colpirebbero persino loro stessi come non assoluti bensì assurdità. Pensare così è essere in un groviglio; continuare a pensare è essere in un groviglio sempre più fitto. E sul fondo di tutto vi è sempre qualcosa di sottinteso che è in realtà qualcosa di frainteso.
Per esempio, ho letto un articolo dell’ammirevole signor Tilden, il grande tennista, che discuteva di che cosa non vada nel tennis inglese. «Nulla può salvare il tennis inglese!», egli diceva, tranne certe riforme di natura fondamentale, che passava poi a spiegare. Gli inglesi, a quanto pare, hanno un modo bizzarro e innaturale di considerare il tennis come un gioco, ossia come qualcosa da godersi. Egli ammetteva che questo faceva parte di una specie di spirito dilettantesco in ogni cosa, il quale è (come notava assai giustamente) anche parte del carattere nazionale. Ma tutto ciò si frappone a quello che egli chiamava salvare il tennis inglese. Egli intendeva ciò che alcuni chiamerebbero renderlo perfetto, e altri chiamerebbero renderlo professionistico. Ora, prendo questo come un passo assai tipico, tratto a caso dai giornali, e contenente le opinioni di una persona acuta e perspicace su un argomento che essa comprende a fondo. Ma ciò che egli non comprende è la cosa che egli suppone compresa. Conosce a fondo il suo argomento, eppure non sa di che cosa stia parlando; perché non sa che cosa dia per scontato. Non si rende conto del rapporto tra mezzi e fini, o tra assiomi e inferenze, nella sua stessa filosofia. E nessuno sarebbe probabilmente più sorpreso e persino legittimamente indignato di lui, se io dicessi che i primi princìpi della sua filosofia appaiono essere i seguenti: (1) Vi è, nella natura delle cose, un certo Essere assoluto e divino, il cui nome è il Signor Lawn Tennis. (2) Tutti gli uomini esistono per il bene e la gloria di questo Signor Tennis e sono tenuti ad approssimarsi alle sue perfezioni e ad adempiere la sua volontà. (3) A questo dovere superiore essi sono tenuti a sacrificare il loro naturale desiderio di godimento in questa vita. (4) Sono tenuti a mettere questa fedeltà al primo posto; e ad amarla più appassionatamente della tradizione patriottica, della rappresentazione del proprio tipo nazionale e della propria cultura nazionale; per non parlare persino delle proprie virtù nazionali. È questo il credo, ovvero lo schema di dottrina, che qui viene sviluppato senza essere definito. L’unico modo per noi di salvare il gioco del Lawn Tennis è impedire che sia un gioco. L’unico modo di salvare il tennis inglese è impedire che sia inglese. A tali pensatori non viene in mente che ad alcuni esso possa forse piacere perché è inglese e che possano goderne perché è godibile. Vi è in quella cosa un qualche astratto e divino modello, al quale è dovere di tutti innalzarsi, a qualunque sacrificio di piacere o di affetto. Quando i cristiani dicono questo dei sacrifici compiuti per Cristo, suona piuttosto come un detto duro. Ma quando i tennisti lo dicono a proposito dei sacrifici richiesti dal tennis, suona del tutto ordinario e casuale, nella confusione del pensiero e dell’espressione correnti. E nessuno si accorge che una specie di sacrificio umano viene offerto a una specie di dio nuovo e senza nome.
In the good old days of Victorian rationalism it used to be the conventional habit to scoff at St. Thomas Aquinas and the mediaeval theologians; and especially to repeat perpetually a well-worn joke about the man who discussed how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. The comfortable and commercial Victorians, with their money and merchandise, might well have felt a sharper end of the same needle, even if it was the other end of it. It would have been good for their souls to have looked for that needle, not in the haystack of mediaeval metaphysics, but in the neat needle-case of their own favourite pocket Bible. It would have been better for them to meditate, not on how many angels could go on the point of a needle, but on how many camels could go through the eye of it. But there is another comment on this curious joke or catchword, which is more relevant to our purpose here. If the mediaeval mystic ever did argue about angels standing on a needle, at least he did not argue as if the object of angels was to stand on a needle; as if God had created all the Angels and Archangels, all the Thrones, Virtues, Powers and Principalities, solely in order that there might be something to clothe and decorate the unseemly nakedness of the point of a needle. But that is the way that modern rationalists reason. The mediaeval mystic would not even have said that a needle exists to be a standing-ground for angels. The mediaeval mystic would have been the first to say that a needle exists to make clothes for men. For mediaeval mystics, in their dim transcendental way, were much interested in the real reasons for things and the distinction between the means and the end. They wanted to know what a thing was really for and what was the dependence of one idea on another. And they might even have suggested, what so many journalists seem to forget, the paradoxical possibility that Tennis was made for Man and not Man for Tennis.
The Modernists were peculiarly unfortunate when they said that the modern world must not be expected to tolerate the old syllogistic methods of the Schoolmen. They were proposing to scrap the one mediaeval instrument which the modern world will most immediately require. There would have been a far better case for saying that the revival of Gothic architecture has been sentimental and futile; that the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art was only an eccentric episode; that the fashionable use of the word “build” for every possible sort of social institution was affected and artificial; that the feudalism of Young England was very different from that of Old England. But this method of clean-cut deduction, with the definition of the postulates and the actual answering of the question, is something of which the whole of our newspaper-flattered society is in sharp and instant need; as the poisoned are in need of medicine. I have here taken only one example which happened to catch my eye out of a hundred thousand that flash past every hour. And as Tennis, like every other good game, has to be played with the head as well as the hand, I think it highly desirable that it should be occasionally discussed at least as intelligently as it is played.
(An essay reprinted in “The Thing”)
Nei buoni vecchi tempi del razionalismo vittoriano era abitudine convenzionale schernire San Tommaso d’Aquino e i teologi medievali; e specialmente ripetere all’infinito una ben logora facezia sull’uomo che discuteva quanti angeli potessero danzare sulla punta di un ago. I comodi e mercantili vittoriani, col loro danaro e le loro mercanzie, avrebbero ben potuto sentire un’estremità più aguzza del medesimo ago, anche se fosse stata l’altra estremità. Sarebbe stato bene per le loro anime cercare quell’ago, non nel pagliaio della metafisica medievale, ma nell’ordinato astuccio da aghi della loro prediletta Bibbia tascabile. Sarebbe stato meglio per loro meditare, non su quanti angeli potessero stare sulla punta di un ago, ma su quanti cammelli potessero passare per la cruna di esso. Ma vi è un altro commento su questa curiosa facezia o motto, più pertinente al nostro scopo qui. Se il mistico medievale mai discusse davvero di angeli in piedi su un ago, almeno non discusse come se il fine degli angeli fosse stare su un ago; come se Dio avesse creato tutti gli Angeli e gli Arcangeli, tutti i Troni, le Virtù, le Potestà e i Principati, unicamente affinché vi fosse qualcosa con cui vestire e ornare la sconveniente nudità della punta di un ago. Ma è così che ragionano i razionalisti moderni. Il mistico medievale non avrebbe nemmeno detto che un ago esiste per essere un piedistallo per gli angeli. Il mistico medievale sarebbe stato il primo a dire che un ago esiste per far vestiti agli uomini. Poiché i mistici medievali, nella loro fosca via trascendentale, erano molto interessati alle vere ragioni delle cose e alla distinzione tra i mezzi e il fine. Volevano sapere a che cosa una cosa servisse davvero e quale fosse la dipendenza di un’idea da un’altra. E avrebbero persino potuto suggerire, ciò che tanti giornalisti sembrano dimenticare, la paradossale possibilità che il Tennis fosse fatto per l’Uomo e non l’Uomo per il Tennis.
I Modernisti furono singolarmente sventurati quando dissero che dal mondo moderno non ci si deve attendere che tolleri gli antichi metodi sillogistici degli Scolastici. Proponevano di rottamare l’unico strumento medievale di cui il mondo moderno avrà più immediatamente bisogno. Vi sarebbe stato un caso assai migliore nel dire che il revival dell’architettura gotica è stato sentimentale e futile; che il movimento preraffaellita nell’arte fu solo un episodio eccentrico; che l’uso alla moda della parola “costruire” per ogni possibile sorta di istituzione sociale era affettato e artificiale; che il feudalesimo della Giovane Inghilterra era assai diverso da quello della Vecchia Inghilterra. Ma questo metodo di deduzione netta e precisa, con la definizione dei postulati e l’effettiva risposta alla domanda, è qualcosa di cui l’intera nostra società, adulata dai giornali, ha acuto e istantaneo bisogno; come gli avvelenati hanno bisogno di medicina. Ho preso qui un solo esempio, capitatomi sott’occhio tra centomila che sfrecciano ogni ora. E poiché il Tennis, come ogni altro buon gioco, va giocato con la testa oltre che con la mano, ritengo altamente auspicabile che venga occasionalmente discusso almeno con la stessa intelligenza con cui è giocato.
(Un saggio ristampato in “The Thing”)