In Praise of Failure

• Four Lessons in Humility
• Costica Bradatan

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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.

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The failure-based therapy that I offer in this book may seem surprising. After so much worshipping of success, failure’s reputation is in tatters. There seems to be nothing worse in our world than to fail—illness, misfortune, even congenital stupidity are nothing by comparison. But failure deserves better. There is, in fact, much to praise about it. Failing is essential to what we are as human beings. How we relate to failure defines us, while success is auxiliary and fleeting and does not reveal much. We can live without success, but we would live for nothing if we didn’t come to terms with our imperfection, precariousness, and mortality, which are all epiphanies of failure.

* * *

Costica Bradatan is a professor of humanities at Honors College, Texas Tech University in the US and an honorary professor of philosophy at the University of Queensland in Australia. He has written and edited several books and writes regularly for the New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, Aeon, Dissent and The New Statesman. His book Dying for Ideas has been translated into about twenty languages.

• ISBN: 978-953-369-027-8
• Dimensions: 136x210 mm
• Number of pages: 300
• Cover: paperback
• Year of the edition: 2023
• Original title: In Praise of Failure. Four Lessons in Humility
• Original language: English
• Translation: Dijana Bahtijari and Marko Maras