Lasker’s philosophical treatise on the limits of human understanding
What the Work Is
Die Philosophie des Unvollendbar — rendered in English as The Philosophy of the Unattainable — is a philosophical work by Emanuel Lasker, published in 1918. Lasker, best known as the second World Chess Champion who held the title from 1894 to 1921, was also a research mathematician and a writer on philosophy. This book belongs to the latter category of his output, appearing alongside two other works generally classified as philosophy: Kampf (Struggle, 1906) and Das Begreifen der Welt (Comprehending the World, 1913). The 1918 volume was written during or shortly after the First World War, a period when Lasker was living in Berlin and had invested his savings in German war bonds.
What the Book Is About
The title itself signals the book’s central preoccupation: the idea of the “unattainable” or “unfinishable.” The German unvollendbar suggests something that cannot be completed or brought to conclusion — a concept Lasker applies philosophically. The work belongs to Lasker’s broader intellectual project of examining fundamental questions about knowledge, struggle, and human comprehension, themes he had explored in his earlier philosophical writings. Where Kampf attempted a general theory of competitive activities and Das Begreifen der Welt addressed the nature of understanding the world, The Philosophy of the Unattainable turns to the limits of what can be achieved or known.
Key Ideas and Themes
The sources indicate that Lasker’s philosophical writings, including this work, received limited contemporary attention. The book develops the concept named in its title — the notion of the unattainable as a philosophical category. This connects to Lasker’s lifelong engagement with questions of struggle, competition, and the boundaries of human capability, themes that also informed his approach to chess and his mathematical work. His philosophical output represents an attempt to bring systematic thinking to bear on questions beyond the chessboard and the mathematical proof, though these writings did not achieve the recognition of his contributions to chess or algebra.
Significance and Influence
The Philosophy of the Unattainable is part of Lasker’s lesser-known legacy. While his chess career and mathematical contributions — particularly his work on primary decomposition of ideals in polynomial rings — are well documented, his philosophical writings, including this book, attracted only limited attention from contemporaries. The work stands as evidence of the breadth of Lasker’s intellectual interests, which extended well beyond the game for which he is most famous. It represents one facet of a multifaceted career that also included contributions to bridge, Go, and the invention of the game Lasca, as well as mathematical research of lasting importance.
The 1918 volume is listed among the works generally categorized as philosophy, alongside Kampf (1906) and Das Begreifen der Welt (1913). The source material gives the German title as Die Philosophie des Unvollendbar, with the parenthetical note “(sic)”. Lasker also co-authored a drama, Vom Menschen die Geschichte (“History of Mankind”), with his brother Berthold; it was accepted for performance at the Lessing theatre in Berlin, though the play was not a success. Both his philosophical writings and the co-authored drama received limited contemporary attention.
The Author’s Situation in 1918
Lasker was living in Berlin during this period; he had married Martha Cohn (née Bamberger) in July 1911, and they lived in Berlin. During World War I he invested all of his savings in German war bonds, which lost nearly their entire value with the wartime and post-war inflation. During the war he also wrote a pamphlet claiming that civilization would be in danger if Germany lost the war. In September–October 1918, shortly before the armistice, he won a quadrangular (four-player) tournament, half a point ahead of Rubinstein. Throughout World War I he played in only two serious chess events, the other being a non-title match against Tarrasch in 1916, which he won 5½−½.
The Author’s Background
Lasker was born on December 24, 1868, at Berlinchen in Neumark (now Barlinek in Poland), the son of a Jewish cantor. At the age of eleven he was sent to study mathematics in Berlin, where he lived with his brother Berthold, eight years his senior, who taught him how to play chess. He gained his abitur at Landsberg an der Warthe, then studied mathematics and philosophy at the universities in Berlin, Göttingen (where David Hilbert was one of his doctoral advisors) and Heidelberg. He was awarded a doctorate in mathematics in 1902, and his most significant mathematical article, published in 1905, established a theorem on primary decompositions of which Emmy Noether developed a more generalized form. He held short-term positions as a mathematics lecturer at Tulane University in New Orleans (1893) and Victoria University in Manchester (1901), but was unable to secure a longer-term position and pursued his scholarly interests independently.
The Author’s Later Life
Lasker and his wife Martha, both Jewish, were forced to leave Germany in 1933 after Adolf Hitler started a campaign of discrimination and intimidation against Jews. After a short stay in England, they were invited to live in the USSR in 1935 by Nikolai Krylenko, the Soviet Sports Minister; there Lasker renounced his German citizenship, received Soviet citizenship, took permanent residence in Moscow, and was given a post at Moscow’s Institute for Mathematics and a post of trainer of the USSR national team. In August 1937 the couple decided to leave the Soviet Union, moving via the Netherlands to the United States (first Chicago, next New York) in October 1937. In 1940 he published his last book, The Community of the Future, in which he proposed solutions for serious political problems, including anti-Semitism and unemployment. He died on January 11, 1941.
