From the pyramids to the selva forest: on the phenomenology of adventure

Abstract

Building on the material of Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Quixote, the author explores the turn made by philosophy in the 20th century, i.e. the turn from idealism and Cartesian geometric reason towards a new direction, which the Spanish philosopher discusses in terms of such problematic notions as a human life, the living and the historical reason, or ratiovitalism. From this perspective, the notion of adventure acquires one of central places. The prohibition of an adventure is a signature of Cartesian spirit. The study begins with an analysis of the relation of Ortega’s innovations (expressed by his thesis “I am I and my circumstance” (1914), which meant his rejection of the Cartesian focus on the cogito) and the corpus of ideas developed by Heidegger in his Sein und Zeit (1927). Even though Ortega y Gasset does not accuse Heidegger of plagiarism, he points out that he expressed the very ideas that had such a crucial impact on the philosophy of the 20th cen­tury before Heidegger. The paper presents the phenomenology of adventure as an extraor­dinary event in a fixed system of life of an ordinary man. Here, the author partly follows the Spanish philosopher in his reconstruction of the aesthetical specifics of the famous novel by Cervantes. The proposed sketch of the phenomenology of adventure becomes a tool with which the change of the cultural paradigm of the Western civilization is re­vealed. This change occurred at the turn of the pre-modern age to the modern era. Michel Foucault’s Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences, in general, and its conception of cultural epistemes, in particular, represent a methodological and a perspec­tival background of the current study.