234
PARTISAN REVIEW
preted only as a particular form in which the internally necessary
encompasses the accidental and external.
Occasionally, however, this whole relationship is comprehended
in a still more profound inner configuration. No matter how much
the adventure seems to rest on a differentiation within life, life as a
whole may be perceived as an adventure. For this, one need neither
be
an adventurer nor undergo many adventures. To have such a
remarkable attitude toward life, one must sense above its totality a
higher unity, a super-life, as it were, whose relation to life parallels
the relation of the immediate life-totality itself to those particular
experiences which we call adventures.
Perhaps we belong to a metaphysical order, perhaps our soul
lives a transcendent existence, such that our earthly, conscious life
is only an isolated fragment as compared to the unnamable context
of an existence running its course in it. The myth of the transmigra–
tion of souls may be a halting attempt to express such a segmental
character of every individual life. Whoever senses through all actual
life a secret, timeless existence of the soul, which is connected with
the realities of life only as from a distance,
will
perceive life in its
given and limited wholeness as an adventure when compared to that
transcendent and self-consistent fate. Certain religious moods seem
to bring about such a perception. When our earthly career strikes us
as a mere preliminary phase in the fulfillment of eternal destinies,
when we have no home but merely a temporary asylum on earth,
this is obviously only a particular variant of the general feeling that
life as a whole is an adventure. It merely expresses the running to–
gether, in life, of the symptoms of adventure. It stands outside that
proper meaning and steady course of existence to which it is yet
tied by a fate and a secret symbolism. A fragmentary incident, it
is
yet, like a work of art, enclosed by a beginning and an end. Like a
dream, it gathers all passions into itself and yet, again like a dream,
is destined to be forgotten; like gaming, it contrasts with seriousness,
yet like the
va banque
of the gambler, it involves the alternative
between the highest gain and destruction.
Thus the adventure is a particular form in which fundamental
categories of life are synthesized. Another synthesis it achieves is that
between the categories of activity and pa$ivity, between what we
