In Praise of Failure

Squarely challenging a culture obsessed with success, an acclaimed philosopher argues that failure is vital to a life well lived, curing us of arrogance and self-deception and engendering humility instead.Our obsession with success is hard to overlook. Everywhere we compete, rank, and measure. Yet this relentless drive to be the best blinds us to something vitally important: the need to be humble in the face of life’s challenges. Costica Bradatan mounts his case for failure through the stories of four historical figures who led lives of impact and meaning—and assiduously courted failure. Their struggles show that engaging with our limitations can be not just therapeutic but transformative.In Praise of Failure explores several arenas of failure, from the social and political to the spiritual and biological. It begins by examining the defiant choices of the French mystic Simone Weil, who, in sympathy with exploited workers, took up factory jobs that her frail body could not sustain. From there we turn to Mahatma Gandhi, whose punishing quest for purity drove him to ever more extreme acts of self-abnegation. Next we meet the self-styled loser E. M. Cioran, who deliberately turned his back on social acceptability, and Yukio Mishima, who reveled in a distinctly Japanese preoccupation with the noble failure, before looking to Seneca to tease out the ingredients of a good life.Gleefully breaching the boundaries between argument and storytelling, scholarship and spiritual quest, Bradatan concludes that while success can make us shallow, our failures can lead us to humbler, more attentive, and better lived lives. We can do without success, but we are much poorer without the gifts of failure.

Bradatan, a philosopher, writes with elegance and wit, his every thought and sentence slipping smoothly into the next…I was absorbed by Bradatan’s book even—or especially—when I felt uncomfortable with its implications., Bradatan wears his erudition lightly. He is a pleasure to read, and his prose conveys a happy resilience in the face of life’s inevitable contradictions. His lessons in humility remind us that the pursuit of success is often motivated by the dread of failure—and that our attempts to create things are often driven by an avoidance of our mortality., Gleefully breaching the boundaries between argument and storytelling, scholarship and spiritual quest, Bradatan concludes that while success can make us shallow, our failures can lead us to humbler, more attentive, and better lived lives., What [Bradatan] offers is a normative argument for why we should be humbled by failure rather than, like Hitler and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, see failure as a mere ‘stepping-stone to success’…Humans in Bradatan’s eyes are not featherless bipeds or rational animals but the only creatures who can recognize failure. It is this failure-detecting faculty, rather than, say, Aristotle’s nous, that makes us fully human…Thought-provoking., Bradatan argues that we should not run from failure, but face it, clear eyed, because facing our failures makes us humble, and, by becoming humble, we can live better lives…This book is about the art of living a good life, and Bradatan’s voice is like a steady and charming guide through a moonless night.

Costica Bradatan is author of Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers and coeditor of The God Beat. A contributor to the New York Times, Aeon, Commonweal, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Statesman and Religion/Philosophy Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, he is Professor of Humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University and Honorary Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland in Australia. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.