A simple Google search of the term “adventure” shows pictures of “standing on the top of the mountain,” “scuba diving,” etc. These images denote the activities that fall outside the everyday-ness of life. The prevailing conception of adventure relates to the dangerous or risky act. The term “adventure” is derived from the Latin word “adventus,” which means “arrival.” Anything that is already within our zone of life cannot be said to have arrived, but should be termed settled. Arrival is always about something that is unexpected, something that cannot be translated through the power of ego. Its effect is powerlessness, requiring a new form of semantics, even a new mode of being – the real adventure.
Our life is sustained by the “familiar world”, settled in us. It is the constitution of images, culture, imitations, and linguistic expressions that makes us live effortlessly. This “familiar world” gives us the comfort. However, without our invitation, an unexpected event ruptures our well-constructed familiar world. It puts us in ambiguity and calls for a different mode of expression. O. Henry’s Green Door – the short story points this out well:
“Suppose you should be walking down Broadway after dinner, with ten minutes allotted to the consummation of your cigar while you are choosing between a diverting tragedy and something serious in the way of vaudeville. Suddenly a hand is laid upon your arm. You turn to look into the thrilling eyes of a beautiful woman, wonderful in diamonds and Russian sables. She thrusts hurriedly into your hand an extremely hot buttered roll, flashes out a tiny pair of scissors, snips off the second button of your overcoat, meaningly ejaculates the one word, “parallelogram!” and swiftly flies down a cross street, looking back fearfully over her shoulder.”
A nonsensical event like this does not have the proper meaning in the dictionary of the familiar world. This is the arrival of an unfamiliar place – a call for an adventure. It demands a completely different kind of language, actions, and even a being in order to venture. But we pull ourselves back into our familiar world.
“Would you accept it? Not you. You would flush with embarrassment; you would sheepishly drop the roll and continue down Broadway, fumbling feebly for the missing button. This you would do unless you are one of the blessed few in whom the pure spirit of adventure is not dead.”
“Fumbling feebly for the missing button” is nothing but, we seek the missing parts of our familiar world that are damaged by the rupture and put them back into a place to sustain the comfortable-ness. This is the consequence of degeneration of the spirit of adventure. The human longing towards novelty is extinguished by the sonorous comfortability. If the spirit of adventure is alive in an individual, he would turn the rupture into an inspiration and move towards the unknown. To put it precisely, it means the ability to step into the unknown or the ability to step out of the familiar world. While the arrival of unexpected event enters into your zone of life, you have two options: either you pull yourself into your familiar world or you take your shot of it and make an departure. All new thoughts, inventions or revolutions are created by one who departs.
Alain Badiou’s idea of “fidelity to the event” mirrors the option of departure. In the documentary on Alain Badiou, he talks about the event and fidelity:
“We have to come back to the event. We said that the Event is the moment when something begins that cannot be deduce from what already exists. The best example is love. What happens at the very moment that you meet someone whom you find attractive? What happens is the creation of possibility. Will you pursue this possibility or not? You have a choice. You can approach the young woman or the young man and, well, try to discover, “What is this possibility?”. And then choose to commit to that possibility. What I call “fidelity to the Event” (the fidelity is to the Event itself – not to the person, but to the encounter). Fidelity to the Event is the fact of committing oneself, truly to the opening to the possibility and to assume all the consequences”
The following passage from the Green Door short story also points to fidelity to the event:
“.. instead of at our familiar curb, a cab-driver deposits us before a strange door, which one, with a smile, opens for us and bids us enter; a slip of paper, written upon, flutters down to our feet from the high lattices of Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous hate, affection and fear with hurrying strangers in the passing crowds; a sudden douse of rain–and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter of the Full Moon and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow them”
Holding and following the clues of adventure will definitely disrupt our world of sonorous comfortability. But, being comfortable is not being happy. Alain Badiou gives us the definition of happiness: “Happiness is what happens when you discover that you are capable of something that you did not know that you were capable of.” In this way, happiness is correlated with the spirit of adventure. In order to be comfortable, we should kill the adventurous spirt in us and reject the sense of exploring and exploiting the hidden potentials in us. Our potentialities are repressed with the membrane of comfortable-ness, developing a mutated happiness.
In Tamil, there is an expression, “தலையெழுத்து (thalaiezhuthu).” It means fate is written on the forehead. It can symbolically refer to the solid psychic structure, in other words, a familiar world. Following the sense we developed in this essay, the spirit of adventure disrupts fate. In his story, O. Henry defines one of the characteristics of Rudolf Steiner as “willingness to tempt fate” that “led him into strange paths.” Those strange paths actualize the hidden potential in us. And, once again, happiness springs when you discover the hidden potential in you.
Nietzsche’s Last Man is the one who has lost his spirit of adventure:
“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ thus asks the last man, and blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink”.
“We have invented happiness” means we have structured a comfortable world. He prefers comfort over adventure. As we understood, adventure cannot be reduced to mere physicality, but it’s induced by metaphysical force. Thus, the Last Man, devoid of all metaphysical aspects, is left with the body. His only job is to be healthy and maximize the pleasures through food and sex. The fulfilled life is measured by quantity of pleasures, rather than felt by the depth. Longing, love, or creation does not exist in the realm of the person who is obsessed with his health; they do not lie in the region of calculability. The end of the spirit of adventure is the beginning of the Last man.
And, the Last man cannot lead a meaningful life since, for him, everything is closed, dictated, all the possibilities are exhausted and nothing is there to be done except following what is already there. Alfred North Whitehead, in his Dialogues, said, “the meaning of life is adventure.” The sense of adventure allows us to rise beyond the prevailing status quo and bring something new that prevents the world from becoming rigid and makes the life meaningful. And more importantly, be-ing itself is in the continuous tense; the ‘be’ must remain lively in order to be, for if it is enclosed within the familiar world without space to breathe, it is already dead.