Failure (The Art of Living) Read online

  If, like me, you have a deeply sceptical disposition and a restless mind that is averse to belonging to any belief club, you may search for and be momentarily detained by nuggets of intellectual interest but the winds of doubt and nihilism sweep you ever onwards. Thinkers as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jiddu Krishnamurti have spurned the systematization of enquiry. A philosopher of art such as John Roberts argues that “the productiveness of the error in art operates in defiance of the programmatic, systematic or unitary ideal” (2011: 209). Stoicism, Cynicism and Epicureanism have their attractions but seem to demand inhumanly heroic ascetic actions and mental self-discipline that most us cannot command. Existentialism, similarly aligned with a personalized philosophy of living rather than the more abstract forms of philosophy, yet seems at least partly to fail the tests of my gut scepticism and of scientific data. A great deal of evolutionary, genetic and neurological essence surely does precede my own existence and limits my freedom. We may be time-bound beings facing death but we are also offered time transcendence by some oriental philosophies and religions, and “amortality” (Epicurean or otherwise) is currently a fashionable hypothesis. The Kantian club insists on moral value and effort in all circumstances, yet the recognition of contingency, of moral luck and pervasive tragedy, seriously challenges the Kantian position. Every philosophy, however attractive, is flawed. Indeed, Emmanuel Levinas famously and ironically declared that “the best thing about philosophy is that it fails” (Kearney 1984: 63).

  Where should I look to help me understand failure? Simple introspection is one well-tried route. Anecdotal and objective evidence are further promising sources of aid. We might begin with an analysis of the generic concept of failure, or we might, like Michel Foucault, examine it via the lens of historical and contemporary culture. My epistemological radar picks up a variety of suggestive data. If we want to seriously investigate the fault lines that run through our own lives, we might allow that failure doesn’t necessarily begin at home, in our own agency and culpability. Epicureans began their philosophical quests in cosmology and were far from alone in seeking patterns of behaviour that extend from cosmos to human being. Consider the following contemporary partial description of the formation of “our cosmic neighbourhood”: “The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter consists of what is thought to be a failed process of planet formation. It failed, because the enormous gravity exerted by Jupiter would have torn apart any incipient planet that emerged in that area” (Spier 2011: 66). Cosmologists may now infer, then, that this asteroid belt was destined to become a planet but the process was aborted owing to greater inhospitable forces. Fallibility may be said to be an intrinsic aspect of becoming for all phenomena. It was not viable for this asteroid belt to become a planet in the circumstances prevailing so it became something else. One thing simply leads to another. For those who believe in God the creator, however, everything must have been designed to be what it was and is. God as an all powerful engineer could not have been thwarted by anything as trivial as enormous planetary gravity. God as an aesthetic perfectionist would not have settled for a failed process and outcome.

  The same problems of inference are at work today when we ask whether a physically deformed baby was failed by God or destined by a quirk of fate to be different from the human biological norm; or if we are wrong to consider this baby “deformed” when it is simply different; indeed, whether our very perceptual and interpretative apparatuses oblige us to append labels instead of seeing and accepting “what is”.

  At one level we can infer that failure (or imperfection, or error) was an ever-present possibility; at another we shall insist that failure or imperfection is always about interpretation. Whether discussing an asteroid belt, the extinction of dinosaurs, a tsunami or earthquake that abruptly kills thousands, human diseases or one’s own idiosyncratic struggles against adversity, we might say that these are all part of a richly diverse, unfolding cosmos and biosphere: ours not to reason why, the overall and ultimate design and purpose all in God’s hands. The Hindu concept of karma offers an explanation of sorts for evolution and misfortune, based on adjustments for moral merit, but it is frankly not satisfying for all of us. Or some will say, even without God in the picture, that we must accept many things we do not like, respect differences and learn to improve where possible. For Plato, this world we inhabit is clearly imperfect and subject to decay, while in another, more real realm there is perfection. This of course parallels dualistic religious worldviews of “this life” (which is inferior and disappointing in some way) and a hereafter or heaven (which is perfect and a vindication). Also, we cannot ignore the question whether failure is the necessary and equal undertow of success in all matters or a mere sign of necessary risk on the road to inevitable success. Perhaps our utopian aspirations, always enmeshed with negotiations with failure, will eventually be realized.

  The earth’s environment is not a neutral ecology but one that generates considerable risk, cruelty, pain and premature death along the way. It may not properly be called a failure but it has its design flaws and we can at least imagine a world in which less suffering and failure was necessary. Herbert Marcuse (1987) made natural scarcity (or Ananke) a central plank in his argument concerning human repression and unhappiness. However much progress we have made as a species, and however much we personally aim for success and happiness and argue against determinism, we know we cannot evade some misfortunes. I am frankly dismissing crude creationist accounts here. One might simply say that they have failed to satisfy modern rational criteria for convincing explanation and have failed to adapt to evidence that has emerged since biblical explanations were created.

  Homo sapiens has evolved from earlier primates. We have not by any means shed all the limitations or design flaws of our mammalian cousins; we have certainly made some improvements but we have also incurred some losses in the process, the most glaring being that probably very few of us could survive for very long in wholly natural conditions. Yet humans are often bedevilled by a sense that something preciously natural has been sacrificed in the course of our evolution towards cultural dependency. And to add to our discomfort, our existentialist philosophies suggest that we collude in lives of inauthenticity, bad faith and sickness unto death.

  Before language no concept of failure-as-such can have existed for human beings but observations and experiences of failure in its broadest sense must have been common enough. Hunger, accidents, disease, predation, extreme weather and natural catastrophes, along with witnessing human deaths and rotting carcasses, would have signalled to our ancestors that all was not as they would wish it to be. However close to conditions of paradise early humans ever came, threats were never far away and vigilance was always necessary. Later, with the advent of agriculture and primitive technologies, humans would have begun to experience periodic breakdowns in their plans. Design imperfections led to learning to make improvements but all such efforts were, and remain, fallible. Language was essential in all this but it too contained flaws: words not yet invented, the birth of complex deception and misunderstanding. Vigilance, planning and the drive to survive and succeed have been constant; but equally entropy has been ever present: our best-laid plans are always subject to breakdown. We can argue that humanity intends to improve (succeeding and failing in due proportion) on natural hazardousness but that nature is indifferent. Willem Drees’s book Is Nature Ever Evil? (2003) provides copious examples of exactly how “evil” or flawed nature is. The reversal of an anthropathological or original sin account might be that nature is often blind, inefficient and cruel and the human being, however fallible, will gradually overcome these original flaws of nature. Indeed, this is the standard scientific and optimistic science-fiction view: we will anticipate earthquakes, asteroids and drought, and bio-colonize currently barren planets.

  Early theologies refined narrative accounts of the causal chain between the omnipotent God’s perfect creation and humans’ disobedience, which brought original sin, suffering a
nd death into existence. Hindu theology offered causal (karmic) explanations for suffering in relation to the many natural forms in creation. Buddhism identified suffering as a universal phenomenon, closely linked with human desire and dissatisfaction. Early philosophers – the Presocratics, Socrates, Plato and others – began to focus more closely and logically on human agency and human institutions in their imperfect and improvable forms. Concepts similar to sin (hamartia, tragic flaw, or missing the mark, and akrasia, weakness of will) arose. With Aristotle came the beginnings of formal knowledge and science. All subsequent philosophy has sought to improve on the understanding of previous philosophy and, along with science, has gradually eroded many religious views. Yet all attempts at perfect understanding and knowledge are fallible, all limited by human intelligence. Curiosity necessarily entails enquiry into how and why things go wrong or are not in line with our wishes or certainties. Human beings have been driven by their environment and consciousness to discover reasons for existence, injustice, sin (or error, or failure), evil and death, among other challenges.

  In my own view, religious explanations for the human condition have had their place but their credibility decreases steadily with the rise of much more compelling explanations. Ultimately, religion fails to explain human development and behaviour and appears not to be capable of correcting it; indeed, it may add to our flaws. Philosophy, relying on reason, has been freer to consider other explanations but it too often fails in many ways to show its relevance or potency, operating instead as if detached from brute reality. Postmodernist writers tell us that no one can legitimately pronounce on life as if disembodied, with “a view from nowhere”, but we persist in such detached exercises.

  I realize even as I write these words, however, that the intellectual terrain is so extensive that neither I nor (probably) anyone else can have the expertise to grasp all the data accurately. We all have imperfect or flawed intellects and academic research and its jargon becomes more specialized by the day. Our tendency is to multiply theories, hang on to redundant theories and fiercely defend our own self-serving theories against others rather than seriously attempt rapprochement (we have marked epistemological failures) and all human knowledge is fallible and ever changing. Science itself is flawed in spite of its remarkable discoveries: like all human endeavours, science goes wrong, as evidenced in accidents, ethical breaches, fraud, misappropriation of dangerous findings and products. Also, as Simon LeVay puts it, “for every brilliant scientific success there are a dozen failures” (2009: vii). Far more than a dozen, one would think. But many sciences, and some humanities subjects, generate new material evidence and hypotheses that far surpass the backward-looking nature of so much theology and some philosophy.

  There are many names for our human folly and destructiveness, from original sin and evil to alienation, universal neurosis and “man’s inhumanity to man”. There is much speculation, and always has been among theologians and philosophers, about the origins and causes of, and possible remedies for, our ills. “Unde hoc malum?” Where does this wrongdoing come from? The question is an old one (Jacobs 2008: xv). We can, I believe, paraphrase this with no loss or distortion of meaning as “Where do our pervasive moral flaws and associated shared failures come from?” Academics are arguably obsessed with points of evidence, detail and classification, which tend to narrow enquiry into slow-moving, discipline-specific channels and prevent broad, socially significant and urgent enquiry and remedies. Put differently, the scholarly tradition stemming from Aristotle fails to appreciate and address the enormity and urgency of the question, and it too often gets left to an unsatisfactory mixture of folk psychology and religious opinion and dogma.

  Here I perhaps need to insert a plea for patience. I am very aware from a psychotherapeutic perspective that most individuals want explanations for what they assume is their own unique form of suffering and, even more than this, they crave solutions. Quite naturally we are chiefly concerned with our own environment and being but in this regard we are often somewhat myopic. While we may demand that any therapy or philosophy of living should yield short-term personal dividends, we risk failed understanding if we impatiently dismiss explanations that place the “unique me” and contemporary humanity in the deepest context of evolution and history. This is not mere historical waffle but an account that lives on in us in our genes and behaviour. Schopenhauer did not have sophisticated cosmological and evolutionary data available to him with which to investigate the possible origins of our human condition and even until quite recently many philosophers have shied away from engagement with Darwinian themes. The foundations of much Western philosophy lie in and require a faith in reason as cerebral freedom and an aversion to anything that implies we are determined by brute forces and have only illusory freedoms. Eastern traditions are arguably more comfortable with concepts of fatalism and illusion.

  Evolutionary psychology and its incipient applied forms of psychiatry and psychotherapy argue that many of our stubborn, self-defeating traits result from deep-seated behavioural orientations laid down thousands of years ago. We evolved like all animals needing food and sex for survival. We evolved in small groups heavily reliant on social factors. Some degree of natural territoriality, kin preference, xenophobia, aggression, gender-role division, leadership and subordinate roles is inherent in our nature. We did not evolve to be entirely trusting, altruistic, cooperative, rational and so on, and we have difficulty adapting to modern lifestyles. Obviously we have adapted a great deal over thousands of years but we cannot shake off certain “primitive drives”. We evolved physically by slow adaptation from existing anatomical foundations. For example, our mammalian ancestors walked on all fours and the human spine has that same original purpose. We have succeeded in walking upright but the common backache attests to our imperfect design, and there are many more examples of a mismatch between our origins and our current behaviour. Gary Marcus (2008) refers to all such mismatching features as “kluges” (an engineering term referring to clumsy but once-effective solutions to problems of adaptation) and sees no reason to draw a barrier between physical and mental evolutionary mismatches. The point is that all such imperfect adaptations form the basis of human flaws and failures.

  There is considerable agreement among cognitive psychologists and some philosophers that many of our common perceptions, beliefs and behaviours are based on flaws in thinking and even physiology. We rarely see what is actually in our visual field but an edited version of it, owing to blinking, limitations of the fovea (where visual acuity is far greatest), saccades (necessarily jerky eye movements) and general inattention. We like to believe we are fair-minded and make good judgements, a majority believing, for example, that we are better than average drivers, more competent than others, more reliable and so on: all these are known as egotistic illusions. Psychological experiments seem to demonstrate repeatedly what distorted memories we have: “over the past three decades psychologists have demonstrated beyond any doubt that memory is staggeringly fallible and suggestible” (Lawton 2011: 39). Similar observations extend to serious doubts about the existence of free will. Yet, it is argued, we need all such illusions to maintain our sense of integrity and executive control.

  Such hypotheses are hard to prove and much disliked within liberal cultures. The very assertion of anything that smacks of “determinism” can call forth vitriolic criticism. These kinds of hypothesis seem to suggest that human nature is intractable and worthy of only the most pessimistic of expectations. Critics point to copious examples of human goodness and creativity, underpinned by burgeoning theories of neuroplasticity, social learning, positive psychology and human flourishing, to dismiss evolutionary mismatch accounts. Or certain political philosophers and sociologists press the argument that unequal social and economic conditions suppress and distort our essentially “good nature” Meanwhile, however, extensive human pathology or collective moral failure seems all too recalcitrant. At the personal level, simply stop and consider how difficult m
ost of us find it to change habits that are detrimental to our health and relationships. Where does such weakness of will come from? Are we just wilfully self-defeating, responsible for all our own failures (including backache) or are we riddled with foundational flaws of which we are usually ignorant?

  Let’s now look at the nuanced meanings of failure. Obviously it refers to some sort of breakdown, some malfunctioning or underperformance. A little less obviously, it logically implies antecedent non-failure: all was apparently running smoothly or looking perfect, as expected, before this negative event. It is as if we hold a belief, perhaps a fantasy, that things should always function without fail. Life should be just, beautiful, flawless; or if it is not so, then it surely must become so following our heroic efforts to make it so. We know very well this is not and cannot be the case (and might well turn dystopian in the event of an overdose of perfection) but something within us is offended or disappointed; we feel let down when our expectations are ruptured. In the schema offered here, however, failure in different degrees is ever present.