Failure (The Art of Living) Read online

  As an example of a philosophical attempt to lay the groundwork for an understanding of mental illness, the philosopher George Graham asks if the following statement is true or satisfactory: “A mental disorder should be analyzed as the harmful failure of a mental faculty to function as nature designed. Something is a mental disorder if and only if it is a harmful mental dysfunction” (2010: 21).

  Graham decides that this will not do because blindness, for example, is partly a mental phenomenon. Even in this small vignette of attempted analysis we can see how much (dysfunctional?) effort goes into trying to clarify something that most of us apprehend intuitively or by common sense: that some individuals suffer terribly from a disturbance of what we regard as “normal” mental functioning. We haggle over names and related ethics, and we search for remedies, but we already know that something is not right and that it entails suffering. Also in this small passage above we see that the terms “disorder”, “failure” and “dysfunction” are used very similarly, almost tautologically. It is as if Graham, the author, or any one of us can axiomatically stand outside of mental illness and pronounce on it with precision and detachment. But we do not ask, perhaps we never seriously ask, if our species itself is mentally disturbed and our primary tool of analysis, language, isn’t somewhat dysfunctional. Indeed, I am partly asking in this book whether all human beings suffer from a form of “pathology” that we have deceived ourselves into considering normal. As I suggest below with reference to Walter Benjamin, language is replete with duplications and ambiguities; in other words, to some extent it fails us and our need to communicate clearly.

  Our topic contains many related “f” words: failure, fail, failing, fallible, fault, flaw, fall, fiasco, fracas, flop, flunk, fuck-up, falter. It embraces a wide scale and many moral and aesthetic dimensions: defect, imperfection, peccadillo, error, breakdown, malfunction, collapse, catastrophe, meltdown, sin, blunder, blemish, pathology, foolishness, folly, wrong, abortion, underperformance, inferiority. We might add the terms lack, disappoint, mistake, defeat, let down, end, shortcoming, miss, frailty, fragility, weakness, misjudge. Again, we may be tempted to believe or be lulled into thinking that these all represent quite distinct phenomena; indeed, they do to some extent belong to different contexts and have different uses. But they are joined by the sense of things going wrong, not meeting our expectations, being less than the ideal. Failure and the fear of failure lie at the centre of a web of risk, fallibility, adversity, stigma and disappointment that none of us can escape.

  I turn now to some distinctly different kinds of failure. Some of these come from within or surround us, and others precede us. Let me suggest that, first, we have a kind of failure of constancy. As already discussed, human beings seem to expect or fantasize an existence of untroubled continuity – for the sun to rise, food to be available, loved ones to be safe, life to be fair, and so on – but we all know that things go wrong in nature: that both large-scale catastrophes will happen and smaller-scale, personal misfortunes will interrupt our sense of continuity. Apparently we are so dependent on non-shocking conditions, on an “average expectable environment”, that many of us experience very problematic states of post-traumatic stress disorder, with neurological features, when exposed to life-threatening shocks.

  We are all subject to biological failure. We can and we do use every possible euphemism to avoid the unpleasant subject of death. But some pregnancies do not even become viable biologically; some babies are born and live with terrible genetic faults, visible and invisible, that cannot be escaped and that may severely limit their life chances. One interpretation of biological failure is that not succeeding to reproduce is the only failure. All of us, as “soft machines”, are susceptible to accidents and diseases. Many live in pain. And all of us must die of one form of biological failure or another. It is clear why Schopenhauer was sympathetic to Buddhism with its identification of suffering as central in human life.

  Since we are highly dependent on tools, technology and every kind of mechanical aid for our standard and style of living, mechanical failure has become a serious interruption to our sense of mastery and our comfort. Everything from collapsing bridges, inadequate water barriers, faulty brakes, aeroplane faults and the compromised safety of nuclear power plants to medical errors, internet failures and serious glitches in military hardware can bring unexpected deaths and arrested daily functioning to our complex, technically dependent lives. The Northeast blackout of 2003, for example, affected the lives of around five million people in Canada and the USA. High temperatures and other chance and unforeseen factors combined to create a power surge that led to huge electrical failure affecting transport, water supplies, communication and industry. Our mechanical and technological environment is progressively internalized, so that we may now feel helpless and lost when our computer or smartphone breaks down.

  Failures in intergroup, social and interpersonal cohesion create mayhem and heartache for human beings. On the one hand we have the gifts of rationality, communication and cooperation (underpinned by a great deal of religion and philosophy) but on the other we have disproportionate aggression, anxious territoriality, a readiness to engage in war and the weapons of mass destruction to wipe us all out. While failures in romantic, sexual, marital and family relationships are not usually fatal, they frequently cause acute heartache, hardships and long-term negative consequences, and do include some cases of murder and suicide. Our empathic failings are pervasive.

  Moral failures are abundant and seen in apparently universal akrasia, or weakness of will, but also in conative failure. As Edmund Burke allegedly said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”. The strong argument here is that all human beings are failures morally since we all acquiesce in a civilization of much selfishness, greed, mendacity and violence. Some of us stand up for selective good causes (usually those with which we identify personally) to some extent but most of us opt for an easy life of compromise. It is difficult to say whether our common habit of denying how bad matters are is a question of false consciousness (we can no longer see the extent of tragedy and absurdity around us) or of moral failure, of our seeing but doing nothing. Moral failures, like sins of commission or omission, occur at both individual and collective levels.

  Aesthetic failure is that domain of life in which ugliness prevails or in which our best efforts to produce beauty result in imperfection. We may have relatively little choice about our own physical characteristics until genetic engineering and cosmetic surgery become commonplace and cheap. We say someone’s face is her fortune and another’s face doesn’t fit. The French novelist Michel Houellebecq, celebrated and hated for his bitter Schopenhauerian negativity, declared in Whatever that “sexuality is a system of social hierarchy”; to a great extent we are driven by sex, and sexual selection favours the beautiful over the ugly. And in spite of our best architectural designs and aspirations, vulgarity, ugliness and urban decay seem commonplace. A clear example of this is overcrowded cityscapes and slums, alongside the rape of forests and green areas. We do not seem much to notice or mind or, if we do, we feel powerless to change matters. In a different vein, we may refer to an eccentric piece of architecture as a folly, recognizing its aesthetic failings with fondness or amusement. It is also problematic to note that youth is typically beautiful compared with old age. Many philosophers have tackled aesthetics but it may be that in mathematics we see the supreme hope of attaining perfection, of formulae that cannot fail.

  Then we have epistemological failure and cognitive errors. The very existence of philosophy attests to the problems of nonconsensual and non-axiomatic knowledge. While science now at least aims at the discovery of incontrovertible truths, human history is littered with myths, legends and all manner of disputed and frequently aggression-arousing claims to knowledge and counter-knowledge. At the individual level, cognitive errors abound in our lack of logic, making faulty inferences, being influenced by superstition and so on. Etymolo
gy of the terms “crazy” and “cracked” suggests pervasive mental flaws that we might liken to geological faults. If you are not a good knowledge processor you may be labelled or feel stupid. If we pause to consider catastrophic failures of human judgement, the case of the Titanic immediately comes to mind. Human error lies behind tragic medical misdiagnoses, many plane crashes and a wide range of other troubling phenomena.

  To this list we should add the failure of meaning or purpose of life. This failure is probably at its most acute in our own time and perhaps coincides with the so-called death of God. Often associated with Nietzsche and nihilism, the death of belief in God should be seen in the light of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the rise of science and intellectual critique, later from Karl Marx, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. A great deal of twentieth-century literature also conveys a sense of the meaninglessness, anomie and absurdity of life, unsurprisingly in times of world wars, the Holocaust and increasing urbanization, boredom, loneliness and dehumanizing work routines. A major paradox at the heart of this failure is that the more we have, the less we seem to appreciate life.

  It is inevitable and valid that the question must arise, simply because all the negative events above can attract the term “failure”: is there any logical or justified convergence in a unitary concept of failure, such as the one presented in this book? Well, we certainly have an outstanding precedent for such an overarching concept in the Abrahamic religions’ theology of the Fall. Since disobeying God’s original commandment, we have brought all kinds of “failure” (understood as sin) on ourselves and on the world we live in, according to this view. The concept of original sin was promoted by Augustine in the fourth century and by Aquinas in the thirteenth. Michael Moriarty (2006) pushes an argument that it was further raised in seventeenth-century France by René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Blaise Pascal and Jean-François Senault. Among some later theologians the concept of original sin is widely disliked and dismissed, however, both among atheists and many Christians, for its negative, stigmatizing and guilt-inducing properties. Alan Jacobs (2008) acknowledges that it has been called “baleful, repulsive and revolting”.

  In its simplest form, original sin suggests that God’s creation was wholly good (flawless, perfect, not subject to failure or death) but human beings spoiled this ideal scenario through their wilful sin, corruption and vice. Original sin, ushered in by Adam and Eve and subsequently passed down through the generations, is therefore anthropogenic sin and can be reversed only by Jesus Christ and belief in him (with obvious variations in other religions). Without religious salvation, such arguments run, we continue to sin individually and cast sinful conditions all around us that will eventually result in the catastrophe of Armageddon.

  This concept of original, global sin is hard to bear, since it suggests that everything we touch goes wrong. As Stephen Mulhall puts it, “Human beings are not only naturally capable of acting – even perhaps disposed to act – sinfully, but are always already turned against themselves, against the true and against the good, by virtue of their very condition as human” (2005: 6).

  Sin of such negative magnitude and intergenerational heaviness is in our very nature and we are helpless to pull ourselves out of it, and yet we also have the theological tradition that imputes agency to each of us. As we see in the seven deadly sins of sloth, pride, envy, covetousness, lust, gluttony and wrath, such sins or vices are construed as particular forms of personal, moral failure. Any of us might be capable of not sinning or sinning less: of improving our behaviour, regardless of collective human tendencies to original sin. In pre-psychological or pre-psychoanalytic understanding, failures to act with due energy, humility, appreciation, contentment, chastity, gastronomic restraint and placidity are nevertheless correctable. The philosopher Gabriele Taylor (2006) discusses the importance of such “countervailing virtues” in her analysis of the well-known “ordinary vices”.

  It is important here to recall that in its Greek sense of hamartia, from Socrates and Aristotle, sin means “missing the mark”. It also has connotations of error of judgement, mistake, accident, moral deficit and character flaw. For Aristotle it included the concept of a “tragic flaw”. Interestingly, this sense of deviating from a moral or behavioural norm does not quite carry forwards today in the domains of crime and mental illness. We do not today generally refer to a criminal as a sinner or failure but think of him or her as one who has knowingly or pathologically broken the law, who has perhaps taken a risk but did not get away with it. Similarly, the person suffering from some form of severe mental illness is not generally referred to as a failure but as unfortunate.

  We do not speak of Hitler as a failure (unless as a failed painter and military tactician) but as an evil perpetrator of genocide. We do not describe the perpetrators of 9/11 as moral failures but as evil, callous, psychopathic and so on (although we might well claim their theology to be seriously flawed but, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, we cannot fault their planning or courage). My point here is simply that the nuances of our terminology are problematic and trends in moral perception change over time. But we seem emotionally attached to particular words and we may mistakenly attribute greater significance to them than is due. In all the cases mentioned above, can we not provisionally agree that something is awry or amiss, is off the mark, or has failed?

  Today the concept of sin has relatively little of its former currency, or so it may seem. One of our many human problems is the complexity and distortion of language; linked with this is our obstinately tribal nature, which permeates not only territorial identities but also intellectual traditions and divisions between them. In other words, philosophers, theologians, psychologists, sociologists and others constantly criticize each other’s theories and create new theories that ostensibly set out to correct the failings of previous theories and lead to greater clarity, truth, social utility and so on. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle addressed moral problems in Greece, the Buddha in Nepal, Jesus in Israel, Mohammed in Mecca, all within many centuries of each other but in different locations, all leaving distinct legacies. On one reading of these traditions, they were all seeking solutions to universal, painful human problems of identity, morality, meaning, death and salvation, and perhaps, in some cases, intellectual clarity. But we have to ask whether they have (i) failed to promote any convergence of enquiry, or consensus, and (ii) ultimately failed altogether to have a significant moral and practical impact on human affairs. It was the repeated lament of the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti that this was indeed the case, echoing the early search of the Buddha, who consulted and researched among the sages and teachers of his time to no avail.

  The mid-eighteenth century saw the Enlightenment in Europe propel the cause of reason in philosophy and science, leading to a major surge in scepticism towards religious traditions and a massive growth of technology and industry, and social sciences. The moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has been famously critical of the Enlightenment Project, arguing that it “had to fail” and has indeed failed, largely because it attempted to ignore or bypass the virtue ethics of Aristotle, later refined by Aquinas and still the strongest candidate for an adequate moral theory in the view of MacIntyre (2007). For the vast majority of humanity such arguments probably have little direct relevance to their everyday lives, in spite of the value of MacIntyre’s critique of emotivism, managerialism and other contemporary ethical systems, and of the principle that we are all free rational agents. MacIntyre is highly critical of existentialism, consigning Jean-Paul Sartre for example to the category of mere “emotivist rhetoric”.

  Whether consciously incorporating religious themes and terminology, rejecting them or unwittingly duplicating them, many philosophers address these questions in one form of jargon or another. Martin Heidegger did not explicitly draw on Christian theology but his concept of fallenness (or “falling prey to”, in some translations) raises the central theme of inauthenticity in human behaviour: we are aware of this fallenness but comp
elled to suppress our awareness. Existentialist thinkers generally make abundant use of a dichotomy between being and non-being, real and false self, and in the concepts of alienation or estrangement emphasize our being sundered from another, original, better or potential state of consciousness. This dualism has seemed inescapable in most philosophical and theological systems, unless we credit postmodernist thinkers with taking us into acceptable intellectual pluralism and diversity. Splitting, disagreeing and fragmenting is the overall trend, perhaps representing the disordered complexity of entropy.

  Sartre’s well-known arguments revolving around being and non-being include looking at the problem of whether we can speak meaningfully of non-being at all. But we can easily say that once I did not exist (although being itself always did) and one day I shall cease to be. As this entity, after the process of what Schopenhauer called the dissolution of all our parts, I will not be. More helpful to our discussion is to point out that any particular form of being is subject to change, the vitality and viability of each of us being susceptible to corrosion by flaws and failure events. Aristotle wrote in terms of generation and corruption, or coming to be and passing away, and how these may differ, or not, from mere alteration. I may seem a pale version of my former self following some traumatic event from which I cannot bounce back, or existentially choose not to recover well from. Human being especially is subject to a chronic inward negation, which Sartre refers to as bad faith:

  One puts oneself in bad faith as one goes to sleep and one is in bad faith as one dreams. Once this mode of being has been realized, it is as difficult to get out of it as to wake oneself up; bad faith is a type of being in the world, like waking or dreaming, which by itself tends to perpetuate itself.

  (Sartre 1958: 68)

  Most of us appear to choose to be less than we can be. We opt for a partly inauthentic existence. However hard it is to shake ourselves out of bad faith, as Sartre admits, the choice remains. This position, developed from Søren Kierkegaard’s “sickness unto death” and Heidegger’s fallenness, leaves us with access to full being, whatever interpretation we settle on. We could say that we let ourselves down or fail ourselves. We might agree that we share some human state of fallenness or bad faith but always individually remain free, as Sartre insisted. Authentic existence is a tough demand for most of us, since the exercise of perpetual free choice, constantly waking oneself up, in a trance-like anti-authentic world, can feel like too heroic a challenge.