The Demythologisation of Ontology and the Deontologisation of Mythology
In essence, the difference between classical and modern mountaineering is not qualitative but quantitative. The same components remain in play here, but are used with different intensity and in different densities. It is worth recalling Rejowska-Pasek’s statement that both the classical mythology of mountaineering and the contemporary “demythologisation” of it are based on a foundation of the same oppositions. However, if you look at the history of mountaineering you will find that “classical mythology” as well as “disenchantment” do not simply follow one another, but intertwine and sometimes even coexist.
On the one hand, it is possible to speak of a kind of “demythologisation of the ontology” of mountains, as a result of which mountaineering, around the mid-19th century, became increasingly independent of the traditional symbolism and metaphorics (based on the sacred and the sublime) that were supposed to “tame” the peaks. The ontology of the climbing route, that is, “[…] both a part of nature and a ‘cultural text’” (Matuszyk 1998: 134), becomes the basis for a “fundamental ontology” of mountaineering based on the subject’s experience of the distinct boundaries of nature and culture, as a result of which mountaineering “eludes […] from the immediacy of cognitive matrices and conventionalised patterns of behaviour, increasingly emphasising the individual’s climbing style” (Pacukiewicz 2012: 55), and therefore, the “climbing style” has become increasingly independent of the “style of the epoch (Kolbuszewski 1991: 37–42), and mountaineering is developing its own ethos. At the same time, this ontologised ethos based on the direct experience of being draws on the “classical” archetypes and potential for meaning surrounding the categories of summit, road, boundary, while at the same time actualising them, in each individual experience. Paradoxically, then, “classical mountaineering” not so much disenchants the mountains as it subordinates them to new narratives that also belong to the mythological order, not only in terms of their content (the Mountain–Man relationship) but also formally (climbing as mediation).
Today, two trends have a strong influence on the shape of mountaineering: the widespread discussion (especially in Poland) of its ethos in the context of successive tragic events (Broad Peak, Nanga Parbat) and successes (K2), and the concomitant proliferation of symbolism defined by its ethos. In the first case, mountaineering is stripped of its “romanticism,” the biographies of individual climbers and subsequent accidents become the basis for “baring” a situation in which the “classical” ethos does not correspond to “real” mountaineering; as we saw with Kurtyka, what constitutes the axis here is the process of “unmasking” particular persons. In the second case, however, mountaineering and the mountaineer have long since become part of the reservoir of the modern imagination.