“Adventure and Disorientation” – Jenny Chan

Pexels. Adventure Landscape. 2016.

In the seminar, “Science as an adventure”, Simon Gusman explored how adventure serves as a powerful trope that frames various aspects of human experience. Adventure is everywhere—found in advertisements, games, recruitment materials, and even the way we narrate our personal lives. This idea intrigued me, particularly in relation to the metaphor of the cave discussed by philosopher Bruno Latour. According to Latour, in the allegory of the Cave, the Scientist needs to “free themselves of the tyranny of the social dimension, public life, politics, subjective feelings, popular agitation — in short, from the dark Cave — if they want to accede to truth” (2004, 10). The Scientist needs to distance themselves from their social world and the implicatedness thereof to bring order to the social world.

When I was younger, I wanted a similar adventure in the way Gusman defines it. I wanted to step into the social world, observe political discourse, and immerse myself in new experiences to understand society better. At that time, my ultimate goal was to write about the social world. As Gusman illustrated, by imagining life as an adventure, we expect our lives to be structured and ordered, and assume every experience occurs to contribute to our personal growth. Perhaps I expected there to be a story arc in my adventure — with rising and falling action, and finally a satisfying resolution. However, if adventure is a powerful narrative framework, so is life itself. While the conception of an adventure often implies order, life refuses to be ordered. If imagining our lives as adventures provides a way to impose order, life counters it with continuous disorientation. In my experience, the reality of engaging with the world—whether through political activism, personal relationships, or career aspirations—is far messier than the structured arc I imagined.

During the seminar, Gusman demonstrated with the Switch game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild that an adventure often begins with the protagonist emerging from the Cave. It was an endearing moment for me as I had a lot of fond memories of playing the game. But my recollection of the adventure I had in the game is very different from how Gusman formulated an adventure. As Breath of the Wild was the first video game I ever played, I (or my Link, the protagonist) was not a capable hero. I spent weeks trying to climb up a slippery cliff, and fell and reborn countless times. This example shows that framing an experience as an adventure does not dictate how the events unfold or what one’s actual experience is. As demonstrated by Latour, it is a long-standing human desire to order chaos, but disorientation is also implicated in happenings and events. Thus, both the desire to order and inevitability of chaos are natural to our implicatedness in the world.

References

Gusman, Simon. 2023. “The Phenomenology of Adventure: Simmel, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Jankélévitch.” Comparative and Continental Philosophy, March, 1–18. doi:10.1080/17570638.2023.2183371.

Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.