The Tale Of Icarus Is About Our Addiction To Extremes Today
Aristotle’s golden mean and practical wisdom can help us manage our flight
I get to see terrible things on a daily basis. The neighborhood where my business is located is one of the epicenters for illegal drugs in the East Coast of the United States. It’s staggering what these chemicals can do.
I regularly watch living human beings with their bodies contorted like zombie-like statues, dead to the world while they still breathe. The newest fad is an animal tranquilizer fittingly called “Tranq.” Besides turning the user nearly catatonic, it also rots sections of their skin away, yet it doesn’t stop them.
This is the truly dark side of addiction. But there are others.
On this same street are video poker machines, which are set up in every convenience store you walk into (some have banks of five or six of them.) I often see people gambling before seven in the morning. This is addiction too.
The crazy extremes listed above (nodding unconscious, rotting skin, and gambling before most eat their morning cereal) are obvious telltale signs of addiction and extreme behavior. But they’re just the easiest to see.
I think the time we’re living in is an age of addiction, although our drug of choice is extremes. Namely, it’s not enough to just watch a show, eat, or drink. We joyously put the extreme “binge” in front of it.
We binge watch.
We binge eat.
We binge drink.
Our language even reflects this love of extremes. Google’s Ngram Viewer lets you track the frequency of words used in Google Books and online documents. For kicks, I plugged in both “addiction” and “binge” occurrences in literature from 1800 to 2019 and got the following.
Beyond words, these extremes include our relationships with phones, screens, video games, and not to mention our bodies too. But we’re not in totally uncharted territory.
The ancient Greeks had their issues with extremes as well, and addressed it in different ways. Aristotle used philosophy, while others worked with story and mythology. In fact, the tale of Icarus is an ideal example.
A Story Of A Mean Between Extremes
“Let me warn you, Icarus, to take the middle way, in case the moisture weighs down your wings, if you fly too low, or if you go too high, the sun scorches them. Travel between the extremes.”
— Daedalus’ instructions to Icarus, Metamorphoses by Ovid
If you’ve never heard of the story of Icarus, I’ll give you a quick summary. A genius inventor named Daedalus is held captive by a tyrant. To escape, he fashions sets of wings made of feathers and wax.
He tries them out, figures a set of flight rules, and shows them to his son Icarus. However, the boy ignores the rules. In his excitement, he flies too high, and the sun melts the wax, which causes him to fall to his death.
Oscar Wilde and many others in modern times point out that at least Icarus flew, and the greatest tragedy isn’t trying. That’s nice, but has nothing to do with the story. It doesn’t end with the death of Icarus.
Daedalus uses the wings properly, “traveling between the extremes” and escapes after burying his son. In fact, in the Greek perspective, Daedalus is the focal point of the story, not Icarus.
Furthermore, the name Daedalus in Greek means “skillfully wrought.” There’s nothing wrong with the wings or their maker; they work and get the inventor to where he wants to go. Misuse and extremes are the problem.
Just apply that same nature to our technology, painkillers, entertainment, and our self-directed separation into social media echo chambers. The tools usually aren’t the problem, it’s us. We live in the extremes. Traveling between them is a foreign concept.
While Aristotle didn’t have a cell phone or video poker machines in convenience stores on his block, he did think a lot about extreme behavior, and created an idea to mediate it. He used the tool of philosophy.
Aristotle, A Golden Mean, And Practical Wisdom
Historian Will Durant in his book The Story of Philosophy says Aristotle spent about twenty years learning from Plato at his Academy. However, the student diverged dramatically from his teacher.
Plato was interested in “Forms,” or ideal personifications of things. Think of it as the idea of a circle, versus a circle you draw in the dirt. Where the former is perfect, the latter in the real world can wear and will never achieve perfection. Aristotle was more interested in practical things.
In the beginning, he focused narrowly on biology, mathematics, and engineering, like a proto-scientist. Aristotle physically sought out answers instead of thinking about the ideal “form” of something.
But as he aged, Durant mentions his interests changed. Aristotle started studying the best ways to live a virtuous life, applying his keen practical eye to solving this issue. Although life wasn’t like a math problem.
In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says virtue exists in the middle road between excess and deficiency, like Daedalus’ flight instructions. He calls it the “Golden Mean,” and here are some examples:
If you don’t exercise at all, it negatively affects your health. But if you exercise too much, it can wear down your body, which negatively affects your health too. A sensible person sticks between the two.
Courage is good, but too much can cause you to make rash actions, while too little results in cowardliness. The courageous person acts when necessary, while avoiding unnecessary battles.
The Golden Mean works as a good rule-of-thumb guide to help you choose a better middle path. However, there is wiggle room. Even extreme behavior like anger can be virtuous in those infrequent right situations. But only then.
Aristotle also doesn’t give an exact formula for choosing this mean, he leaves that to us. He explains a logical person can figure it out from life experience. The philosopher calls this lived experience “phronesis,” or practical wisdom.
So, inevitably, it’s our choice how to use our wings. Let’s keep this in mind as we travel back to our current age of extremes.
Finding Our Mean In The Age Of Binging
Ever since I was a kid, I was a gamer. It ate up countless hours of my day and stopped me from doing other things like reading or writing. In my mid-twenties I started counting the time invested battling video game aliens, and it was staggering.
Unfortunately, there was no mean for me with gaming. Whenever a controller was in my hands, it was a binge-fest, and hours floated away. So, I stopped. One weekend the Xbox got unplugged, and that was it. No more.
This is just a small version of what’s happening to us all in this age of extremes. We’re addicted to overdoing it in every sense possible. We’re modern versions of Icarus.
Obviously, there is no middle ground with truly dangerous things like Tranq, and other harmful drugs. But social media, cell phones, and snack foods can be managed. They’re like the inventor’s wings.
We just need to use our tools and amusements and not have them use us. That phronesis inside of us can recognize when we’re out of balance, and we must listen to it. If I listened to mine earlier, more time could have been invested in creating or learning.
So, our cure for our addictions to extremes today is searching out that golden mean between excess and deficiency. And if you find yourself putting the word “binge” in front of an activity, odds are you’re leaning towards an extreme.
-Originally posted on Medium 2/24/24