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"For all their wealth of content, for all the sum of history and social institution vested in them, music, mathematics, and chess are resplendently useless (applied mathematics is just higher plumbing, a kind of music for the police band). They are metaphysically trivial, irresponsible. They refuse to relate outward, to take reality for arbiter. This is the source of their witchery."
— George Steiner on chess in “A Death of Kings,” |
Steiner says that mathematics refuses "to relate outward,
to take reality for arbiter."
Related reading . . .
"The bond with reality is cut."
— Hans Freudenthal, 1962
