The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life

1 Why Puzzles?

The great American author Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) once remarked that, for some enigmatic reason, human beings require that things be mysterious. Supporting Thoreau’s perceptive observation is the worldwide popularity of suspense thrillers, horror stories, and detective novels. But the penchant for mystery is not merely modern. Literary historians trace the origin of the horror narrative genre to The Castle of Otranto, written by Horace Walpole (1717–1797) in 1764, and of the detective story to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” written by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) in 1841. And long before Walpole and Poe, people satisfied their appetite for mystery in many other ways. The mystery plays of medieval times kept spectators in suspense by reenacting before their eyes the miracles performed by the saints. In the ancient world, the dramas of Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.), Sophocles (c. 496–406 B.C.), and Euripides (c. 480–406 B.C.) held Greek audiences spellbound, as they watched with apprehension the fateful actions of legendary heroes and heroines on stage. Scholars now believe that the drama genre itself may have developed from the rituals performed by the secret mystery cults of ancient Greece (Mishlove 1993: 40), in which Pythagoras (c. 582–c. 500 B.C.), Plato (c. 428–c. 347 B.C.), and other great thinkers are said to 1 WhyPuzzles? Man is a puzzle-solving animal. —Ronald A. Knox (1888–1957) have taken part. The central purpose of those rituals appears to have been to pose questions about the mystery of existence (Hall 1973). As far as can be determined, no other animal species displays a comparable need for mystery and suspense. So, it may be asked, what purpose does it serve in human life? Plato eventually came to believe that this peculiar need served no purpose whatsoever, arising simply out of superstitious traditions which, he asserted, put obstacles in the path of true science. After observing the method of philosophical inquiry used by the Athenian philosopher and teacher Socrates (c. 470–399 B.C.), whom he greatly admired, Plato proclaimed dialectic reasoning to be the only useful method of gaining knowledge, defining it as the Socratic practice of examining ideas logically by means of a sequence of questions and answers. But Plato apparently ignored the fact that the central practices of the “superstitious traditions” he denounced were themselves fundamentally dialectic in nature, since their aim was to probe the mystery of existence by posing questions about it. Puzzles emerged at about the same time as the mystery cults—right at the dawn of human history. As will become obvious in the course of this book, I do not believe this to be a mere coincidence. Puzzles and mysteries are intrinsically intertwined in human life. Suffice it to say at the outset that they appeal to people for the very same reason—they generate a feeling of suspense that calls out for relief. The word catharsis was used by Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) to describe the sense of emotional relief that results from watching a tragic drama on stage. Unraveling the solution to a mystery story or to a puzzle seems to produce a kind of “mental catharsis,” since people typically feel a sense of relief from suspense when they find the answer to the mystery or puzzle. For some truly mysterious reason, human beings seem to need this kind of catharsis on a regular basis—as the popularity of mysteries and puzzles across the world and across time attests. Why is this so? To the best of my knowledge, this question has rarely been formulated, let alone investigated. The goal of this book is, in fact, to investigate this and the many other fascinating questions that the existence of puzzles in human life raises. One of the greatest puzzlists of all time, Lewis Carroll (the pseudonym of Charles Dodgson, 1832–1898), saw puzzles as structures born of the imagination. In his two masterpieces of children’s literature, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, he portrayed the imagination as a region called Wonderland, inhabited by personified puzzle 2 ThePuzzleInstinct concepts such as Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Cheshire cat, and others. In tribute to Carroll, the modern-day puzzlist Raymond Smullyan coined the term “puzzle-land” in his entertaining and intriguing 1982 book Alice in Puzzle-Land to...