The Flight of Icarus: A myth reimagined
It was a dark, frigid evening in Toronto in the winter of 2015, and I was in art history class. A blizzard raged outside, the wind beating against the windows and whisking snowflakes high into the air. They circled swiftly and gracefully in a variety of patterns, illuminated by the soft light of the street lamps.
That day, we had been analyzing Pieter Breugel the Elder’s painting Landscape of the Fall of Icarus, which only seemed to escalate the apparent gloominess of the situation. The painting depicts a pastoral seaside scene. Sailboats pass by, a plowman tills the earth, people go about their daily lives as usual. However, there’s a detail everyone is entirely oblivious to, almost as if their ignorance of it were deliberate—a man on wings up in the air, and two pallid legs sticking out of the sea. The man was the great Greek architect Daedalus, and the legs belonged to his son Icarus, who was drowning, moments after his wings had melted in the sun.
Almost everyone knows of this Greek myth. Daedalus had fashioned wings out of feathers and candle wax while he and his son were imprisoned in Crete, as a means for them to escape. He admonished Icarus not to fly too close to the sun so the wax doesn’t melt from the heat, and not to fly too close to the sea so the feathers don’t collapse from the humidity. Icarus, however, was so taken by the joys of flying that he forgot his father’s words. He rose higher and higher towards the sun, before perishing in the ocean below, leaving his helpless father heartbroken.
I remember being incredibly saddened by Breugel’s painting. What was, perhaps, a worse tragedy than Icarus’ failure and subsequent death, was the people’s categorical indifference. Something great had been achieved—a man and his son had flown and reached the skies on manmade wings. This was a major feat of engineering, which had gone thoroughly unnoticed by the rest of the population. Furthermore, if they did not notice Icarus drowning, it strongly implies that they did not notice Daedalus still flying in the air, either. What the scene serves to tell us, therefore, is that attempts at greatness are ultimately meaningless, for they will always be ignored at best and reviled at worst—regardless of whether these attempts succeed or fail. Breugel, known for the extreme nihilism in his subject matter, once again did not fail to deliver his usual amount of it.
Moving forward from all the negativity, though, would lead one to reexamine the entire meaning of the original myth—this time, from a more life-affirming perspective. For the most part, Icarus’ story has served as a tragic warning: stay within your limits, and you will be safe. Psychologists even use the term “Icarus complex” to define megalomaniacal and arrogant behavior that leads to disastrous consequences for oneself and others. But seen through a different lens, the story of Icarus conveys a radically different moral. Icarus, foolhardy as he may have been, dared to test the limits of how high those wax wings could carry him. He was, allegorically, a true maverick, who wanted to discover more about the world around him, and was fearless enough to put himself on the line. He may have gambled and lost in the myth, but what if he had won? He would’ve perhaps provided his father with valuable data to create new and improved wings that would’ve advanced the human race even more, à la the Wright brothers. It is a fact that greatness can’t be achieved without the willingness to take risks.
It is also worth further examining Daedalus’ warning to his son: not to fly too low or too high. The idea of finding a “middle way” has been prevalent throughout history, among many cultures. Though at first it appears logical and levelheaded to avoid extremes when going about one’s existence, humanity’s impulse to find a “middle ground” has been one of the greatest hindrances to progress and prosperity. By eschewing “blacks” and “whites” (in the case of Icarus, the sea and the sun), and opting instead for a “gray” (staying suspended between the two), not only would barriers never be broken, but imaginary, irrational ones may be constantly created, leading to widespread fear and stagnation.
This aspiration for “grayness” also removes the moral implications of “black” and “white”. When building an aircraft, for example, the ability to get off the ground, then go ever-higher, farther, and faster, could be considered the moral “good”, while the failure to achieve those things could be considered “bad”. This is not an arbitrary labeling, but an objective standard placed in order to achieve a particular goal. Furthermore, the real boundaries of nature need to be taken into consideration, in order to command and overcome them. Chuck Yeager, for instance, was aware of the existence of the sound barrier, and like a successful version of Icarus, transcended it. This was an objective achievement, which required him to eschew arbitrary limits while being aware of a very real one.
What many do not realize is that one can’t truly strive for grayness. One can only stop at it, because its “limits” are ever-changing and categorically undefined. A goal can only be reached if it can first be described in concrete terms. For instance, if someone has a goal to lose an amount of weight, that amount could (and should) be considered absolute, for the purpose of achieving that goal. If one wants to learn a new skill, such as playing an instrument, one must follow a personalized, structured plan of milestones—in the form of technical exercises, and music of increasing difficulty they wish to be able to play, perhaps—in order to internalize new information. While there’s no technical end to the moral “good”—which is the state of constant improvement—there are concrete steps one must take in a particular trajectory, to stay on the “good” path.
Furthermore, by whose standard should one stop striving, anyway? It is quite ridiculous to assume that anyone else has an authority on such a matter, except for the one doing the striving, in any particular case. Yet, we see it all too often today, when progress is curtailed due to incited fear of man’s potential. There is either a call for a complete removal of standards, or adherence to arbitrarily imposed ones, with no basis in reality. An apt example of this is the case of the late biotech entrepreneur Austen Heinz, who could be considered a modern-day Icarus. His vision for the future was one in which every single entity—plants, animals, even human beings—can be created and altered via genetic code on a computer. The goal of his startup, Cambrian Genomics, was to be able to eventually “bio-hack" the world—synthetically editing out disease, impairment, and other flaws from the genes of babies, food sources, and various other living things, with a simple click. “In general, most people want children that are healthier than they were—maybe better,” Heinz said about his project, “I think as a race, or as a species we have a goal of improving who we are.”
This venture was, however, met with intense pushback. Many warned of a future in which strange creatures and biologically-altered zombie plants run amok in the world, created and weaponized by terrorists. Others called for the need to find a “middle road”, and curb extensive research before knowledge in the field grew too vast to control. When this was not enough to deter Heinz and his co-founders, collectivists engineered a social controversy, claiming Cambrian Genomics was “misogynistic” due to a small part of the company’s experimentation that involved bio-hacking the vaginal microbiome.
Once this calculated smear campaign began, investors finally pulled out, not wanting to risk further public outrage. Research came to a halt, and most articles circulating in the mainstream media about Heinz and the company were about how sexist and evil the project was. Heinz tragically committed suicide in 2015, ending Cambrian Genomics for good—relegating both him and his achievements to the selfsame obscurity as Breugel’s Icarus.
When trying to find a “middle ground” between two absolutes (in Heinz’s case, scientific progress vs. primitivism), it’s always the undesirable absolute that wins.
One can either improve who we are, as Heinz said, or not. One can either fight for good, or succumb to evil. One can either fly, and keep wanting to fly higher, or stay on the ground. Perhaps Breugel’s painting, morbid as it may be, serves as a dire warning against the erasure of brilliance, and the myth of Icarus is not a mere bromide about ill-fated compromise, but an inspirational story of the fearless constitution of the human spirit, amid both failure and success.