THE ADVENTURE
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conquer and what is given to us. To be sure, their synthesis in the
fonn of adventure makes their contrast perceptible to an extreme
degree. In the adventure, on the one hand, we forcibly pull the world
into ourselves. This becomes clear when we compare the adventure
with the manner in which we wrest gifts from the world through la–
bor. Labor, so to speak, has an organic relation to the world. In a con–
scious fashion it develops the world's forces and materials toward their
culmination in the human purpose, whereas in adventure we have
a non-organic relation to the world. Adventure has the gesture of the
conqueror, the quick seizure of opportunity, regardless of whether
the portion we carve out is in hannony with us, the world, or the
relation between us and the world. On the other hand, in the adven–
ture we abandon ourselves to the world with fewer defenses and re–
serves than in any other relation; for other relations are connected
with the general run of our worldly life by more bridges designed
to defend us against shocks and dangers. In the adventure, the inter–
weaving of activity and passivity which characterizes our life tightens
these elements into a coexistence of conquest, which owes everything
only to its own strength and presence of mind, and complete self–
abandonment to the powers and accidents of the world, which can
delight us, but in the same breath can also destroy us. Surely, it
is
among adventure's most wonderful and enticing channs that the unity
toward which at every moment, by the very process of living, we
bring together our activity and our passivity-the unity which even
in a certain sense
is
life itself- accentuates its disparate elements most
sharply, and precisely in
this
way makes itself the more deeply felt,
as if they were only the two aspects of one and the same, mysteriously
seamless life.
If
the adventure, furthennore, strikes us as combining the ele–
ments of certainty and uncertainty in life, this is more than the view
of the same fundamental relationship from a different angle. The
certainty with which-justifiably or in error-we know the outcome
gives our activity one of its distinct qualities.
If,
on the contrary, we
are uncertain whether we will arrive at the point for which we have
set out,
if
we know our ignorance of the outcome, then this means
not only reduced certainty but a practical conduct of an inward and
outward uniqueness. The adventurer, in a word, treats the incalcu–
lable element in life in the way we ordinarily treat only what we
