Failure (The Art of Living)
Failure
THE ART OF LIVING SERIES
Series Editor: Mark Vernon
From Plato to Bertrand Russell philosophers have engaged wide audiences on matters of life and death. The Art of Living series aims to open up philosophy’s riches to a wider public once again. Taking its lead from the concerns of the ancient Greek philosophers, the series asks the question “How should we live?”. Authors draw on their own personal reflections to write philosophy that seeks to enrich, stimulate and challenge the reader’s thoughts about their own life.
Clothes John Harvey
Commitment Piers Benn
Death Todd May
Deception Ziyad Marar
Distraction Damon Young
Failure Colin Feltham
Faith Theo Hobson
Fame Mark Rowlands
Forgiveness Eve Garrard and David McNaughton
Hope Stan van Hooft
Hunger Raymond Tallis
Illness Havi Carel
Love Tony Milligan
Me Mel Thompson
Middle Age Christopher Hamilton
Money Eric Lonergan
Pets Erica Fudge
Science Steve Fuller
Sport Colin McGinn
Wellbeing Mark Vernon
Work Lars Svendsen
Failure
Colin Feltham
First published 2012 by Acumen
Published 2014 by Routledge
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© Colin Feltham, 2012
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission.
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Notices
Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.
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ISBN 13: 978-1-84465-523-6 (pbk)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in Warnock Pro.
For Michelle, der aldrig svigter mig
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1.
Origins, meanings and nuances of failure
2.
Failure across the lifespan
3.
Collective human folly, sin and error
4.
The tragic arts
5.
Being a failure
6.
Learning from failure
Postscript
Further reading
References
Index
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the series editor Mark Vernon for responding warmly to my initial proposal and for helping to shape it, and to Steven Gerrard at Acumen for his constructive suggestions.
Friends who have through conversation and emails contributed wittingly or unwittingly to many of the ideas and examples in this book include Craig Draper, Jack Feltham, Geoff Haines, Michelle Hansen, Stephen Niechcial, Mark Saltiel, Virginia Sherbourne, Matthew Simpson and John Simpson-Smith.
By the rules of the game and the nature of the subject I am bound to state that any shortcomings, failings and errors in this text are mine alone – that is, unless they can be attributed to others’ faulty texts, erroneous cultural memes, poor parenting, dumb genes, lousy theistic design or cosmic failure.
Introduction
Along with statements such as “You’re fired”, “I’m sorry to tell you that you have cancer” and “I’m leaving you”, statements containing the word or concept of failure, such as “You’ve failed your school exam/driving test/job interview”, probably rank clearly among the bleak negatives, or low points, in our lives. Small wonder that the subject of failure is not at the top of most people’s favourites for dinner conversation, bedtime reading or even academic study. But I suggest that failure in one guise or another is pervasive, inescapable and has a great deal to teach us. On a personal level failure is usually success’s ugly twin. Indeed, “unsuccessful” is synonymous with “failed’! This book is not only about personal failure but this is one of its starting-points.
I hope this book comes across as authentically diagetic (from Plato’s diagesis, the author speaking in his own voice), so let me give you a personal illustration. By some measures and in some people’s eyes I am very successful. I am an early-retired university professor (indeed, the only person from my original wider family to have even gone to university) and I enjoy a fair amount of respect in my discipline and profession. I have written many books. I am loved, have good friends, family and two beloved sons. I own my own house and car and have enough money to live on. I have travelled fairly widely. I am in reasonably good health and have quite a bit of leisure time. In many people’s fantasies I must be living the good life; certainly from the point of view of most people living in the developing world I am well off, well fed and very lucky. Few would call this failure.
However, we are raised to put the best face on these things and to conceal or play down the negatives. Like most lives, my life has had its good moments, successful spikes and peak experiences and periods of generally undisturbed well-being. But I have experienced depression and it’s always there in the background, uncured by therapy. Like many people, however successful I may appear, I often feel a mere whisker away from failure. I have two divorces behind me and several “broken relationships”. I became a professor quite late in the day, but in a subject that many regard as academically lightweight, and not the kind of high-status professor who brings in large sums of money for important research, sits on important committees and jet sets around the world. I became redundant about six months before starting this book and my pension is much more modest than that of most of my professional peers. My house is a small mid-terrace, my car is small and I can’t really afford proper holidays. I often suffer from insomnia and am sometimes lonely. You could say that after some self-pity and adjustment at sixty, I have mostly come to accept all this. But my self-concept can shift from equanimity to a dark sense of failure. Maybe I can write quite well but can I sustain a very long-term relationship? I can write but I’m almost completely impractical. I can write but not as well as many others. And so on.
Perhaps you can already see two themes emerging here. One is that self-disclosure tends to feel a little embarrassing: one is aware that it isn’t quite the done thing. Failure is stigmatic and parading one’s failures may be considered unwise. The second is that personal success and failure are relative. There are implicit pecking orders. I am “more successful” than some people, even at close relationships! My income is better than many people enjoy, my Peugeot 207 is five years old, not six or seven, and so on. On the other
hand it’s pretty easy for me to think of friends in decades-long, happy-looking marriages. I know people whose income from pension schemes and other investments amounts to several times my income, whose house or houses are much larger and more expensive, who possess high-prestige cars and go on several annual holidays. I can certainly get eaten up with a sense of envy and failure. Alternatively, if I want to, I can think of one or two peers or individuals in a similar situation but who have less money but more joie de vivre, or who are more extraverted and attractive. I can also feel like a moral failure when I hear that a colleague has given up his car altogether for the sake of the planet.
A third angle emerges, then. Success and failure are open to interpretation. I could claim to have less than some people but to be wiser. I might tell myself and others that I have risen above acquisitiveness and envy, perhaps even above concern for personal comfort; that I am following the path of ancient Greek Cynics such as Diogenes in despising possessions, pretensions and the habit of clinging fearfully to life itself. Or I might, at any rate, allow others to believe that this is the case. To some extent it is true, I think, that I have rejected the accumulation of wealth as important and even, somewhat like Plato, consider it rather vulgar or even immoral. But partly this stems from having a socialist father and a shy, introverted personality. I have not been able to put myself forward for highly responsible work roles or to take business risks. So by one interpretation I might be “philosophically” successful, wise; by another I am a failure – I have never fulfilled my potential. This raises the interesting concept of mediocrity: I am neither a great failure nor great success, but sit somewhere in the middle. However, we know that “mediocrity” is associated with failure, at least by all-or-nothing measures.
Now, another perspective on interpretation is that we can focus on the individual who is considered to have failed at certain life tasks or to “be a failure”, who has somehow failed morally to try hard enough; or we can look for other contributing factors. I have indeed already suggested something like this about myself, in my parentage and personality. Can we start claiming that our genes and upbringing are responsible for our failures? These are familiar claims. We can also begin to look at social, cultural, economic, educational and other systems’ factors. How are the predisposing factors for failure laid down? How does schooling, for example, influence future success and failure?
This book is not only about personal failure, however, whether such failure is perceived subjectively or somehow measured objectively. However virtuous we may be, and however clever we become at extending the lifespan, every one of us must die of biological failure. Beyond individual lives, certain associated dynamics of failure can and should be investigated in society itself, in the human species and in existence itself. In other words, it is not a matter simply of the individual failing to be virtuous that we need to consider but the intermediate and largest ecosystems of failure, as it were. As in most houses, there are various parts of my house in disrepair. In a recent severe winter, the flaws of my central-heating system, lagging and draught-proofing were very evident, for example. In our increasingly technology-dominated lives we rely on appliances and communications devices that fail quite often. The screen of the laptop on which I’m writing this has turned an obstructive pink and needs a repair; my printer isn’t working, ditto. All such items require maintenance, time and money: our so-called labour-saving culture frequently lets us down and demands even further layers of labour from us.
Most of us today live within capitalist systems and we are familiar with the flaws and occasional spectacular failures of free-market capitalism. Looking at the world of business, not even the most optimistic entrepreneur can deny that many small businesses fail in a relatively short time span and almost all businesses, however large and well established, eventually fail. Indeed, we may ask whether all human creations and institutions must sometimes falter and eventually fail, for example in the domains of engineering, marriage and religion. Nothing lasts forever, and entropy ensures that over time everything that we all hold dear will deteriorate, perish and disappear. Civilizations collapse, systems of knowledge become outdated and unbelievable; in some ways science makes certain aspects of religion redundant, as well as new scientific discoveries leading to the rejection of previous science; changes in society demand new moralities; social and medical improvements themselves (successes in their own right) create new demands on struggling health services and failing pension schemes; and so on. We have “failing schools” as well as failing pupils. Likewise some hospitals are deemed to be failing their patients and some social services departments are criticized for failing the children in their care when some of them are so severely abused by their parents that they die. All human life may be seen as a striving to overcome crises, adversities and imperfections.
But are there flaws in the non-human world? This question is important because we have some systems of belief and morality that tell us we are to blame for our own failures and for damaging our environment. We are sinful, fallen, alienated, flawed, and unable to appreciate and respect the beauty of the natural world, according to some religious accounts. Religion depicts a perfect God and/or a state of perfect enlightenment, and science the potential for perfect knowledge, against both of which we are seen as inadequate: not virtuous enough, not rational enough. However, it is not too difficult to point to flaws in theological and scientific theories and practices. Nor is it possible to depict all nature as good: wild animals must prey on each other and many suffer accordingly. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis are all inevitable and in the long run we must expect some catastrophes, including the very long-term return of natural ice ages. And indeed, sadly, we know that the earth itself must one day perish, even without anthropogenic damage, as must the sun and the entire universe, however vast the timescales involved. Another name for all this is entropy, and I suggest that entropy is the inescapable template for all failure.
We are looking here, then, at everything from the smallest or most transient of failures (getting someone’s name wrong, a social faux pas; missing a train; missing a penalty in a football match), through habitual failures such as addictions, personal cognitive errors and common epistemological fallacies, to large-scale and even ruinous social, ecological and cosmic failures. We are looking not only at obvious headline failures but also at the flaws and faults that may have been there all along, with the dramatic accident or catastrophe just waiting to happen, whether in human affairs or natural events.
Many of the examples of failure given in this book are interesting in their own right but inevitably we often examine failure in order to learn from it so we can improve matters in the future. Think of the notorious black box installed on aeroplanes. These flight (or accident) data recorders are considered crucial for discovering the causes of crashes. Educational and commercial endeavours commonly issue evaluation questionnaires to discover weak points and sources of dissatisfaction in the hope of remedying them and keeping on track with their pursuit of excellence. The very notion of progress seems to imply a relentless overcoming of obstacles to optimal personal and social health, wealth and happiness. Yet we know, and seem to want to know in our art and literature, that all is not well, that to err is human, that mistakes will happen and utopia will never materialize. We know, but do not like to dwell on it too much, that every one of us harbours ultimate biological failure.
Leave behind all hope of a Pollyannaish read, you who enter these pages. Forget that macho “failure is not an option” nonsense: failure is everywhere!
1.
Origins, meanings and nuances of failure
Why does anyone feel like a failure? Where do we get our ideas from about the nature of success and failure? Why does failure sometimes seem so pervasive? And why do some philosophers find themselves having to begin their enquiries with topics of failure and disappointment? The contemporary philosopher Simon Critchley, for example, throws around these themes on the firs
t page of his Infinitely Demanding:
Something desired has not been fulfilled, … a fantastic effort has failed. … Absolute knowledge is beyond the ken of fallible, finite creatures like us. … We seem to have enormous difficulty in accepting our limitedness, our finiteness, and this failure is a cause of much tragedy.
(2008: 1)
For Critchley the failures of religion and politics are uppermost but here I shall begin our look at failure both more personally and more widely.
Let’s hear Arthur Schopenhauer’s head-on portrayal of human life as a failure:
We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of voluptuousness, we end in the dissolution of all our parts and the musty stench of corpses. And the road from the one to the other goes, in regard to our well-being and enjoyment of life, steadily downhill: happily dreaming childhood, exultant youth, toil-filled years of manhood, infirm and often wretched old age, the torment of the last illness and finally the throes of death.
([1851] 1970: 54)
I shall unpack this dismal and entropy-focused account of specifically human experience further in Chapters 2 and 5. But let’s keep in mind from now on the qualities and charges of madness, down-hillwardness, toil, infirmity, wretchedness, torment and death that make this life resemble, for Schopenhauer, a penal colony rather than being a basis for human flourishing.
Some lucky souls seem to be born well, experience a minimal mismatch with their environment, thrive in love, work and health and have little use for failure as part of their vocabulary. Some are perhaps dominant and insensitive types who oppress and inflict failure on others rather than experiencing it themselves. But some of us experience painful dissonances, perhaps for a lifetime: friction with parents, failure at school, broken relationships, lots of struggle, poverty, illness and bad luck. As if it isn’t bad enough to find yourself in this last category, when you cast around for comfort, explanations and solutions, the books, people and institutions you engage with may disappoint you; they may tell you success is in your hands and you are free to change or transcend your situation. Your thoughts, mood and personality could turn you towards religious hope for an afterlife, or towards suicidal depression, towards anarchistic anger and terrorism, towards an absurdist position such as that of Albert Camus or Samuel Beckett, the contemptuous pessimism of Schopenhauer, the stillness and insight of the Buddha, the amused nihilism of E. M. Cioran, or the Stoicism of ancient philosophers or modern-day cognitive behavioural therapists.