DE Weekly: Icarus, Folly, & Radical Freedom
Below is an archived email originally sent on October 6, 2025.
Icarus, Folly, & Radical Freedom
“Man is condemned to be free;” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, “because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.” In an existence where we are “thrown,” left to our own devices to make use of our radical freedom, where do we go? What do we do? When do we stop?
The existentialists celebrated the radical freedom we are born into, hyper fixating on the fact that we may create a life of meaning through the choices we make.
But what happens when we take our freedom too far? Is there such a thing?
The story of Icarus may point us in the right direction. You might be familiar with this story…
In Greek mythology, there was a man named Daedalus, the same man who helped Theseus escape from the minotaur in the labyrinth, and whom King Minos was furious with for that action. Minos imprisoned Daedalus and his son Icarus in a tower as punishment.
Daedalus, a renowned inventor, eagerly sought a method of escaping their imprisonment. His adventurous son Icarus was no less eager.
Daedalus fashioned a pair of wings for him and Icarus, made of feathers and held together by wax, which would allow them to fly out of the tower and away from King Minos.
After teaching his son Icarus to fly, Daedalus warned him not to fly too low, as the seawater would wet his feathers, and not too high, as being so close to the sun would melt the wax.
Daedalus and Icarus escaped the tower and began flying toward freedom. However, Icarus began to fly higher and higher, enjoying his newfound freedom and ignoring the warnings from his father. He flew so high until the wax holding his wings together began to melt from the sun’s rays.
His wings dissolved, leaving him in a freefall toward the sea, and to his death.
What are we to take from this myth? Why has it survived thousands of years and continued to impact our psychology, even today?
An easy takeaway would be, “Don’t fly too close to the sun,” i.e., don’t be arrogant. Don’t let your hubris get the best of you, and most of all, don’t be disobedient.
But I wouldn’t be writing about it if that was all we could take away, right?
I started at the top with a quote from Sartre explaining our “thrownness” in the world, how we are radically free and responsible for everything we choose to do in our lives.
The implication from Sartre––indeed, from many of the existentialists––is there is no inherent meaning to life, and we must find or create our own.
There are many ways we could respond to this.
We could take the route proposed by Albert Camus––to revolt––and never to cease our search for meaning.
If we do take that route, however, we must reconcile with the tension between meaninglessness and recklessness. We cannot make choices at the expense of the Other or at the expense of our Self.
Icarus, I believe it appropriate to say, sacrificed his Self at the altar of his radical freedom: at the altar of meaning.
Therein lies the “Icarus Complex”: the fascination with the unknown coupled with unbridled ambition, even if it leads to your own destruction.
This was Icarus’s folly, the same folly illustrated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Faust.
In my reading of Icarus, his folly is a Faustian bargain: a deal with the Devil.
In Goethe’s Faust, his protagonist (named Faust) desires one thing in life: unlimited knowledge. The only way he can attain this unlimited knowledge is by making a deal with Mephistopheles, a servant of the Devil. He strikes the deal, and is given what he asked for.
The cost for this worldly knowledge, though, is the eternal damnation of his soul.
This bargain gained him what he thought he wanted, but stole from him what might have truly satisfied him.
In the same way, Icarus executed a Faustian bargain. He experienced what it was like to fly close to the sun, high above the world where no other human had been before. Like Faust, however, he paid with his life.
Both stories serve as examples of our radical freedom. So, too, do they serve as a warning against our own innate folly.
We can revolt, as Camus advised, but only to a point. There are limits of the human condition we cannot breach.
We can search for and find meaning, but not at the expense of the freedom of the Other to do the same.
We can experience the same ecstatic joy that Icarus felt as he soared above the sea… but it might come with a price.
“Whatever is the lot of humankind
I want to taste within my deepest self.
I want to seize the highest and the lowest,
to load its woe and bliss upon my breast,
and thus expand my single self titanically
and in the end go down with all the rest.”
–– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
The area of the sea where Icarus is supposed to have fallen in the myth is the namesake of the Icarian Sea today, while the Greek island Ikaria also borrows the name, as does its airport Icarus Airport. I love stuff like that.
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