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think is by definition calculable. (For this reason, the philosopher
is
the adventurer of the spirit. He makes the hopeless, but not there–
fore meaningless, attempt to form into conceptual knowledge an
attitude of the soul, its mood toward itself, the world, God. He treats
this insoluble problem as if it were soluble.) When the outcome of
our activity is made doubtful by the intermingling of unrecognizable
elements of fate, we usually limit our commitment of force, hold open
lines of retreat, and take each step only as if testing the ground.
In the adventure, we proceed in the directly opposite fashion:
it is just on the hovering chance, on fate, on the more-or-Iess that
we risk all, bum our bridges, and step out into the fog, as
if
the road
would lead us on, no matter what. This is the typical fatalism of the
adventurer. The obscurities of fate are certainly no more transparent
to him than to others; but he proceeds as if they were. The charac–
teristic daring with which he continually leaves the solidities of life
underpins itself, as it were, for its own justification with a feeling
of security and "it-must-succeed," which normally belongs only to
the transparent character of calculable events. This is only a subjec–
tive aspect of the fatalist conviction that we certainly cannot escape
a fate which we do not know: the adventurer nevertheless believes
that, so far as he himself is concerned, he is certain of this unknown
and unknowable element in his life. For this reason, to the sober
person adventurous conduct often seems insanity; for, in order to
make sense,
it
appears to presuppose that the unknowable
is
known.
The prince of Ligne said of Casanova, "He believes in nothing, ex–
cept in what is least believable." Evidently, such belief
is
based on
that perverse or at least "adventurous" relation between the certain
and the uncertain, whose correlate, obviously, is the skepticism of the
adventurer-that he "believes in nothing": to
him
whom the un–
likely is likely, the likely easily becomes unlikely. The adventurer re–
lies to some extent on his own strength, but above all, on his own
luck; more properly, on a peculiarly undifferentiated unity of the
two. Strength, of which he is certain, and luck, of which he is uncer–
tain, subjectively combine into a sense of certainty.
It is the nature of genius to possess an immediate relation to
these secret unities which in experience and rational analysis fall
apart into completely separate phenomena. The adventurer of genius
lives, as if by mystic instinct, at the point where the course of the
