In Praise Of Failure

 “Human beings are so made,” writes Simone Weil, that “the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening.”2 Pessimistic as this may sound, there is hardly a higher form of human knowledge than the one that allows us to understand what is happening—to see things as they are, as opposed to how we would like them to be. Besides, an uncompromising pessimism is superbly feasible. Given the first commandment of the pessimist (“Whenever in doubt, assume the worst!”), you will never be taken by surprise. Whatever happens on the way, however bad, will not put you off balance. For this reason, those who approach their next-to-nothingness with open eyes manage to live lives of composure and equanimity, and rarely complain. The worst thing that could befall them is exactly what they have expected.

Above all, the eyes-wide-open approach allows us to extricate ourselves, with some dignity, from the entanglement that is human existence. Life is a chronic, addictive sickness, and we are in bad need of a cure.

The failure-based therapy that I offer in this book may seem surprising. After so much worshipping of success, failure’s reputation is in tatters. There seems to be nothing worse in our world than to fail—illness, misfortune, even congenital stupidity are nothing by comparison. But failure deserves better. There is, in fact, much to praise about it.

Failing is essential to what we are as human beings. How we relate to failure defines us, while success is auxiliary and fleeting and does not reveal much. We can live without success, but we would live for nothing if we didn’t come to terms with our imperfection, precariousness, and mortality, which are all epiphanies of failure.

When it occurs, failure puts a distance between us and the world, and between ourselves and others. That distance gives us the distinct feeling that we don’t fit in, that we are out of sync with the world and others, and that there is something amiss. All of this makes us seriously question our place under the sun. And that may be the best thing to happen to us: this existential awakening is exactly what we need if we are to realize who we are. No healing will come unless preceded by it.

Should you experience failure and be visited by such feelings of inadequacy and out-of-placeness, don’t resist them—follow them. They will tell you that you are on the right track. We may be in this world, but we are not of this world. This understanding is the beginning of awakening, and it places failure, humble though it may be, at the heart of an important spiritual quest.

Can failure, then, save my life? you might ask. Yes, it can. Provided that you use it well. How failure can be put to good use is the story this book seeks to tell. As you will find out in due course, far from being the unmitigated disaster its maligners make it out to be, failure can work wonders of self-realization, healing, and enlightenment. It will not be easy, though, for failing is a complicated affair.

Failure is like original sin in the biblical narrative: everyone has it. Regardless of class, caste, race, or gender, we are all born to fail. We practice failure for as long as we live, and we pass it on to others. Just like sin, failure can be disgraceful, shameful, and embarrassing to admit. And did I mention “ugly”? Failure is also ugly—ugly as sin, as they say. Failure can be as brutal and nasty and devastating as life itself.

For all its universality, however, failure is generally understudied, neglected, or dismissed. Or worse: it is turned into something trendy by self-help gurus, marketing wizards, and retired CEOs with too much time on their hands. They all make a mockery of failure by trying—without any irony—to rebrand it and sell it as nothing less than a stepping-stone to success.

The failure-as-success peddlers have managed, among other things, to ruin a profound, appropriately dark saying by Samuel Beckett—you probably know the one. What they invariably fail to mention is that, in his next sentence, right after the phrase they quote ad nauseam, Beckett proposes something even better than “failing better”—failing worse: “Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good.”3

Beckett was not Cioran’s friend for nothing. He wrote him once, “Dans vos ruines je me sens à l’aise” (Amidst your ruins I feel at home).4 To be “sick for good,” to “throw up for good”—there is hardly a better way to describe our existential predicament. To the extent that, for Beckett, failure leads to self-realization, and to a healing of the fundamental sickness that comes with our next-to-nothingness, In Praise of Failure is a Beckettian book.

And how, you may ask, are we to tell real failure from fake failure, of the kind peddled by self-help gurus? It is simple: failure always humbles. If it doesn’t, it’s not real failure, it’s just “a stepping-stone to success”—self-deception by another name. And that does not lead to healing but to even more sickness.

In Praise of Failure is not about failure for its own sake, then, but about the humility that failure engenders, and the healing process that it triggers. Only humility, a “selfless respect for reality,” as Iris Murdoch defines it, will allow us to grasp what is happening. When we achieve humility, we will know that we are on the way to recovery, for we will have started extricating ourselves from the entanglement of existence.

So, if you are after success sans humility, you can safely ignore this book. It will not help you—it will only lead you astray.

As a rule, we fail to take failure seriously. Even the idea of examining failure more closely makes us uncomfortable; we do not want to touch it for fear of contagion. Which is itself touching, considering that we come into the world already infected by it.

All of this makes the study of failure ideal for a contortionist’s job: we have to look for failure in the external world, but also within ourselves, in the darkest corners of our mind and heart. We will find it in individuals, but also in society as a whole; in nature as in culture. We have to track its presence in religion, politics, business, and pretty much everywhere else. Besides, the study of failure cannot but be undermined by its object: we look at failure with failing eyes, ponder it with an error-prone mind, and convey whatever we find in a language that is anything but perfect. Any study of failure is a study in failure.

And yet, there is something remarkable about our situation. For even as we find ourselves entangled in a failed world and are seriously flawed ourselves, we can recognize failure. Whenever we remark, “But this is not right,” “This is not how it should be,” we show that we know failure when we see it. We may be fallible, utterly imperfect creatures, but not enough so to ignore what failure is. Not only do we recognize failure—with some luck, we can domesticate it and make it our guide. Which is precisely my task in this book.In a beautiful Gnostic poem, “The Hymn of the Pearl” (from Acts of Thomas), a young prince is asked by his father, “the king of kings,” to go down to Egypt and retrieve a special object: “the one pearl, which is in the middle of the sea surrounded by the hissing serpent.”5 The prince obliges and takes to the road. Once he reaches his destination, we are told, while waiting on the shore for the opportune moment to snatch the pearl from the serpent, he is seduced by the Egyptians: “They mingled their deceit with me, and they made me eat their food.” Under “the burden of their exhortations,” the prince falls into “a deep sleep” and forgets everything: where he has come from, who sent him there, and for what purpose.

Eventually, the king—his father—takes mercy on the prince and sends him word: “Remember the pearl, on account of which you were sent to Egypt.” That’s enough to wake him. The prince recalls everything: who he is, where he has come from, and why. He retrieves the pearl and returns home with it in full glory, healed of all confusion and alienation.

The poem depicts the predicament of the Gnostic believer in the world. This is also our predicament, even though we may have to wake up and remember all by ourselves. The king has forgotten to send us word—if he hasn’t died already. We have to grope our way back, guided by nothing but failure.

From: IN PRAISE OF FAILURE

Four Lessons in Humility

COSTICA BRADATAN