The Philosophy of Failure and Failure of Philosophy
Costica Bradatan | In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility | Harvard University Press | January 2023 | 288 pages
Stephen Gaukroger | The Failures of Philosophy: A Historical Essay | Princeton University Press | February 2023 | 316 pages
Everyone knows what it is to succeed, even if it at times eludes us. Our sense of failure often emerges precisely from this negation: it is the absence of something that went well, or helped us, or bettered our lot in the world. Failure is at once intimately personal and totally communal. We may fail to accomplish something and bear the sting of a wounded ego, but our measure, our scope, of what it means to fail relies on the totality of all other failings in our social sphere: you may have not gotten the job, but at least you didn’t get a DWI.
In such a frame, all failure is comparative. There is no one true form of failing, no root cause. Only iterations and repetitions of something in some dimension of our lives being out of joint, of not quite making it. Costica Bradatan’s In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility challenges us to dwell on the experience of failing. In four portraits of famous thinkers who in some way failed, we are walked through the dark and at times insidious powers that failure holds for human life. We are asked to feel failure as the wound that it is, as the humiliation we wish to avoid. In contrast, Stephen Gaukroger’s The Failures of Philosophy: A Historical Essay considers the comparative nature of failure by working through all of the forms that failing may take. Guiding us through the ones that have deranged or stunted—at times nearly killed—the project of thinking that we call philosophy, we find that all failure is different.
This is why it’s so hard to avoid. There’s no programmatic inoculation that ensures we always make the cut. “The history of philosophy has been treated as a story of progress,” Gaukroger tells us, and this is a mistake for several reasons. First and foremost, it isn’t clear to Gaukroger, an emeritus historian of philosophy at the University of Sydney, what exactly philosophy is. Progress implies some kind of coherent object which moves forward, evolves, accretes in nuance and complexity. This understanding of the philosophical project, dating all the way back to Socrates, requires that we accept that the project has “engaged in a number of perennial substantive questions,” Socrates once wrote. Instead, Gaukroger argues that philosophy has been modular, concerning itself as historical contingency demands with a number of related, but not sequential, issues.
Thus failure creeps in, leading us to count philosophy not as a major discipline in the humanities but something weaker and more fragile, always a crisis away from coming undone. In each section of the book, Gaukroger undermines philosophy’s self-spun narratives of permanent insight. Moving from classical antiquity and its pursuit of eudaimonia (flourishing and the good life) to medieval theology, Cartesian epistemology, and Kantian transcendental thought, we are shown time and again that philosophy is the story of ideas failing to account for the very questions that spawned them.
In the contemporary moment, analytic philosophy has ossified by virtue of its fetishization of physics as the model par excellence for how inquiry ought to proceed. Gaukroger sees this as the culmination of a sequence of “self-generated problems”—trivialities that the discipline has chosen to foreground; problems simply created for their own sake, rather than issues that need to be addressed in order to achieve greater clarity and deeper insight. It’s nothing short of a crisis: “If philosophy is to avoid becoming merely a form of air guitar to the music of science, it must be recognized that… there is no model of understanding that philosophy can simply lock on to.”
In considering philosophy not only as a set of interrelated but isolated failures to convincingly address certain questions, certain problems of human life as it finds itself in the world, we’re guided to the core of what failure is for Gaukroger: an impingement of the extra-philosophical into the realm of numinous things. It is philosophy’s confrontation with its own limits, an outside which reason cannot penetrate, the blind spots in the panopticon of rationality. Vis-à-vis the contemporary French militant Alain Badiou, a philosopher one can only surmise Gaukroger would not appreciate terribly much, these impingements are the discourses that account for the total epistemic content of a given historical moment. Philosophy, being the weakest of all the discourses by virtue of its isolation from material culture, must only follow this totality, must only describe and ratiocinate with impotent but exacting commentary. This confrontation with a capital ‘E’ Event—the failure of Aristotelian and Neoplatonist accounts of flourishing after the loosely-termed “fall” of Rome, for instance—forces a reconfiguration of all existing knowledge into a greatly expanded form that can address the anomaly. In the aforementioned case, the recount led to the dominance of Scholastic theology, something better able to respond to the material conditions of the moment.
This is where the modularity of the philosophical project finds grounding. There is no stable archive, knowledge does not flow from more to more. It cycles and morphs. The concerns of its practitioners change. This mechanism of change is the failure of a given system of thinking to account for what it beholds. It is also a very fine history of philosophy, as such. Gaukroger’s story shows in minuscule all of the changes from the Greeks to Cambridge scholars that have led philosophy to its present form. In clear and engaging prose, particularly for an academic work and despite its failure, we can see what all the fuss has been about.
The Failures of Philosophy stridently pursues an ethic of care about philosophy’s practitioners, both those circulating around its academic core and those edging its periphery. It would be difficult to fully characterize the tone as optimistic, but it is certainly hopeful as Gaukroger leaves us with an assignment: to recognize philosophy’s earlier failures for what they are—not lines of flight that have given no ground to further thinking, but lessons on how to go about thinking things through, again, anew, and to continue the project of philosophy, however disjointed it may be in reality.
Gaukroger’s optimism is more a default than an exception. The story of philosophy often assumes, even in its failures, something, somewhere, can be improved, learned, overcome. On the other hand, philosophical pessimism is a mixed bag. It ranges from the thoughtful to the edgy, from the annoyingly insightful to the downright mean. As a tradition, it gets less attention than its bright and excited sibling and maybe for good reason. It is easier to find something enlivening in a philosophical outlook that does not, a priori, condemn us to suffering, that says no matter what we do, we’re doomed so why try at all. The philosopher Eugene Thacker places pessimism historically less in the category of tradition and more in the category of mood: “There is no philosophy of pessimism, only the reverse… What you need is a change in attitude, a new outlook… a cup of coffee.” There is no need for pessimism, he goes on, “though I like to imagine the idea of pessimist self-help.”
Costica Bradatan enthusiastically heeds this call in his latest book In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility, which distances itself from any form of redemptive, “rise-and-grind,” podcast-and-kale, self-help regimen. Instead, for our health, we are called to do what makes us uncomfortable: “take failure seriously.” Failure is a pathway to confronting the instantaneous flash of existence that we take ever-so self-seriously as “life”: “As a rule, we fail to take failure seriously,” he writes, and this is a great mistake, he shows us, for failure not only gives us the necessary distance from the world and the self to see the faint arc of how both are composed, but that it may save our lives. As readers we’re taken through a spiraling study of failure, a Dantean route that moves from bodily failure, the failure to engage physically with the world around us, to political failure, failures of statecraft and polis, to social failure, the figure of the loser, and finally to the icy core of it all, “the ultimate failure” to be the person you want to be. In each circle, our psychopompic Bradatan introduces us to a sample of relevant figures and their failures, including Simone Weil, Mahatma Gandhi, Emil Cioran, and Yukio Mishima. Bradatan proves an entertaining, quippy, and insightful Virgil, structuring his arguments around vignettes that are engaging and ruthlessly disruptive to the quietude of our presumed success. He develops miniature biographies of each of the four major thinkers he is concerned with. They are generally entertaining, if not elucidating, about failure in its full bouquet of expressions.
In failing we must become abject in some form or another. For Weil this was a diaphanous border between the body and mind, and body and object. She was, literally, clumsy, unable to feed herself, and fragile. She was always on the brink of starvation, and never much at risk of being taken seriously in her life. Gandhi, for all of his world-historical successes, witnessed on the eve of his assassination in an India thrust into ethnic strife a nearly total collapse of his policy of swaraj. Cioran, ever the inveterate loser, lived most of his life in obscurity and poverty, his philosophical writings only saved from obscurity by luck as he wasted away into the oblivion of dementia. Mishima, a cornerstone of Japanese literature, died with his guts cut out by his own hand, failing to be the revolutionary he always fancied himself.
To fail is to be humiliated, at once publicly and privately. One need not have been of historical importance to know this. Much of this public pillory is of some use. “Naming and shaming” is a powerful tactic, and we like to imagine that those who are the subject will learn something of themselves in the process and improve. Bradatan agrees, and does us one better by taking steps to prune the poisonous flower of humiliation from failure’s nourishing roots: “Humility is the opposite of humiliation… There is nothing demeaning about humility; on the contrary, it is rejuvenating, enriching, emboldening. Humiliation relies on the exercise of raw, external power; humility is all inner strength.”
Failure, then, is a tonic for hubris, a lesser ward against the performative narcissism of perfection we wear as both shield and mask to navigate these craven times. Time, as always, is out of joint, no more so when failure swiftly descends. In remembering a failure we are often blasted by the psychic sense that it is revenant; that we are, again, living through it.
And yet we are confronted by our guide’s failures, namely Bradatan’s own pessimism. Throughout the book, we are presented with moments where failure takes on the tone of a theoretical lapse, a critical lacuna. Despite Bradatan’s avowals and the appeals to the lives of his co-narrators, there is very little life-affirming content in this book. Failure humbles us, but it also lames us, imparts the wisdom of a lugubrious conservatism, suggesting that the best path is to surrender to the politically regressive. Democracy, for instance, may be given its two cheers, but its core mechanics are swiftly explained away as mere historical chance, or human folly, and at times simply dismissed with little evidence. In chapter two, Bradatan argues that there is an inverse correlation between the number of people who have access to higher education and the quality of instruction: if everyone is educated by a university, then the institution and its teachers will come to lack rigor. This is never justified, nor empirically substantiated. Bradatan is utterly silent about the larger socio-economic dynamics that have impacted higher education in the 2020s: the collapse of the tenure system and the rise of the contingent faculty model, the explosion of administrative positions and the concurrent shift to a customer-based service model for the retention and development of students, the desertification of humanities funding, and the overreach of corporate interests into curriculum development. Bradatan, being a professor, is presumably aware of all this, yet his silence is deafening.
It would be too trite, too superficially Marxist, to describe Bradatan’s book as reactionary. Hobbesian is perhaps better. It commits to an interpretation of the human condition that is cruel, nasty, brutish, and short. Homo rapiens rather than homo sapiens. Bradatan’s pessimism is not a tonic then, but something darker—an enjoinder against aspiration, thoughtful risk, any kind of presupposition that this could, or ought to, go the right way. This is resignation of a distinctly spiteful kind, camouflaged as humility—a bad mood, a hangover, a misanthropic interaction at the coffee shop—which claims instead to be care and concern.
Failure pace Bradatan is its own kind of hubris. What can at first seem like a healthy, or at least pragmatic, “respect for reality” vis-à-vis Iris Murdoch is really a dismissive, brooding arrogance, a quieter sort of narcissism which demeans and humiliates with the aim of gaslighting you into believing that this, things as they are, are (tautologically) as good as they’re ever gonna get: the worst of all possible worlds is also the best.
In reading Bradatan’s book, I am left with ghosts from Gaukroger. His analysis, lean, cooly historical, critically supportive of philosophical paradigm shifts which may, lead us to glimpse failure as a productive construction, defies Bradatan’s myopia. Why, in other words, does Bradatan not ask us to fail spectacularly?
Perhaps he does, in a certain sense. As a New York Times review pointed out, much of the book lacks any coherent argument about failure, instead opting for a sampling of some moments where failure took the day. At first, this seems strange. Bradatan is an accomplished academic philosopher, laboring in a discipline whose basic unit of expression is the syllogism.
Additionally, there are genuinely shocking—it’s tempting to simply say “inappropriate”—moments in the book. At one point, Bradatan draws a questionable parallel between the guillotine of the French Revolution and the mass murder of Jews at Auschwitz and Treblinka, the implication being rather hazy, but having something to do with the efficiency of machinery in the eighteenth century. At another point, he quotes a filmmaker who compares communism to AIDS, a simile that is as illogical as it is tasteless (to be clear, Kieslowski is quoted as saying: “Communism is like AIDS,” followed by a short paragraph which demonstrates the auteur is unclear about both the nature of communism and the nature of HIV).
It is concerning too that of the four primary thinkers that Bradatan has selected as exemplars of failure, three of the four were, at some point in their lives, enthusiastically supportive of fascism, Nazism, and Hitler himself. Emil Cioran, despite some later distancing, wrote extensively about his excitement towards Hitler’s policies, and as a young man was closely involved, financially and practically, with Romanian fascists. Yukio Mishima died after committing seppuku in a failed attempt to restore Japan to an ultra-nationalist fascist state, and once wrote a play called “My Friend Hitler,” which Bradatan does not address, and which is not an ironic theatrical production. Finally, Bradatan talks at length of Gandhi’s personal letters, sometimes addressed as “friend,” to Hitler himself, including after he was aware of the Holocaust, an occasion which led him to suggest à la satyagraha that the Jews should have allowed themselves to be murdered, that resistance was unbecoming, that they should welcome their executions.
Bradatan is uncomfortably understanding of these actions as mere foibles, lesser-order mistakes. We can presume from context—this is, after all, a book about failure—that these are decisions which we should treat as falling outside of the scope of success, and should be condemned. Yet this condemnation seems to go against the notions of failure laid out in the book. According to Bradatan, failure can be a revivifying lesson; it should not be resisted or ignored, but rather embraced for its insightful power. And while it should not be orchestrated into a brand of self-help, it can teach us things about ourselves and the world if we only choose to confront it. However, Bradatan never makes the relationship between his argument and choice of fellow travelers explicitly clear. While we can work out the intention, the overwhelming question remains: why were these people selected? What would be lost had Bradatan chosen other exemplars not explicitly tainted by proximities to Nazism? Surely the lesson’s potency would not have faded had he opted to select from the dazzlingly failed thinkers, leaders, writers, and artists, hubristic to the last, who tried and failed, were humiliated, broken, even executed, and who did not directly endorse the Holocaust?
Gaukroger and Bradatan’s books magnetically repel in structure, tone, and approach. Bradatan’s must be read, appropriately enough, when one is lost in the sticks of self-hatred, cynicism, and despair. When one hasn’t had a good night’s sleep, didn’t get the job, has been dumped, is all out of fucks. It is, as the author acknowledges in the introduction, a failed study on failure, from which one may learn, given one’s tolerance, quite a lot about what it is to be forsaken by the world, though not what to do about it. Gaukroger challenges us to think clearly, to confront what cannot be contained by the systems of meaning we cherish, to fail boldly, badly, and with hope that something new will emerge for a time before it, too, collapses under its own blindness and weight.
All failure is different, neither blessing nor curse, a defense against cosmic indifference and a motivator to resist the world as we find it. It is intimately personal and deeply social. In confronting it, we claim a space that inures us to its painful ways. We may dwell in failure and still go on living. Why, then, should we even bother with success?