Moderation vs. Excess

Posted by Robert Sharp Feb 3, 2007

The Golden Mean has an intuitive simplicity to it. Moderation sounds like a great way to live life. Excess implies waste and danger. Moderation implies temperance and safety. But I am always left wondering which is better. Believe it or not, I have a Romantic streak...I don't mean romance/love. I mean the Romantics, the poets and philosophers who believed in passion over reason. At the same time, I have an analytic streak. I see myself largely as an analytic philosopher, but this creates the problem.

On the one hand, there are days when I think Romanticism, Existentialism, Post-Modernism and all similar movements are a bit flaky. They often contain too much passion and not enough evidence or argument. They are often obtuse, needlessly so. But on the other hand, part of (a very strong part) wants to follow them, to live a life of pure passion, to say "Screw the establishment! Screw discipline and tradition!"

This is not the rambling of youth, though I fear sometimes that as I get older this passionate part of me is fading. I think there will always remain a Romantic inside of me screaming that moderation is for fools who play it safe and never really live. To avoid confusion, that voice is not calling on me to get drunk and have orgies. Instead, it pushes me to be Ahab from Moby Dick, to feel the roar of a beautiful obsession, to drown in an attempt to fulfill a desire that literally consumes my life. Without that, I sometimes wonder what the point is supposed to be.

We can contribute to the path of mankind in various ways. We can be steady, dependable, even great in our ability to realize the ethical and pass it on to others. Or we can explode and leave a mark on history that may never be understood by anyone. I honestly don't know which path is better, and that's what bothers me.