Costică Brădățan, "In Praise of Failure"

I was delighted by this little book, which aims to reorient our attitude toward failure and thus to the whole universe and our place in it.

When it occurs, failure puts a distance between us and the world, and between ourselves and others. That distance gives us the distinct feeling that we don't fit in, that we are out of sync with world and others, and that there is something amiss. All of this makes us seriously question our place under the sun. And that may be the best thing to happen to us: this existential awakening is exactly what we need if we are to realize who we are. No healing come unless preceded by it.

Should you experience failure and be visited by such feelings of inadequacy and out-of-placeness, don't resist them – follow them. They will tell you that you are on the right track. (4)

Brădățan, a Romanian-American philosopher born in 1971, could have given this 2023 book several other titles. From the starting point of failure he goes on to say interesting things about humility, spiritual emptiness, the ups and downs of careers, and the old idea of the good death. The tone is conversational but serious, the weight of the intellectual content never killing the mood of a great argument with an old friend. 

There are four chapters, each focusing on a kind of failure: spiritual desolation, political ruin, personal failure, and biological failure, that is, death. Each section takes up a series of historical figures who experienced and reflected on that kind of failure, with one in particular usually serving as the main focus. We start with the French mystic/anarchist/self-starver Simone Weil, who seems to be something of an obsession with Brădățan. Besides her near inability to function as an adult (e.g., feed herself) and her experiments with giving up all of her class privileges, Weil was a gnostic whose most profound belief was that this world is a mistake and we do not belong in it. In the realm of politics Brădățan chooses to focus on Gandhi, which might surprise anyone who has not tried to read his autobiography. If you have, you already know that it is self-flagellation from one end to the other, nothing but an extended meditation on how he had failed at everything from parenthood to teaching nonviolence. His assassination in the midst of the horrific violence that accompanied India's partition did not surprise him in the least. Brădățan's examplar of personal failure is another Romanian exile, the nihilist E.M. Cioran (1911-1995), who refused ever to hold a job and so endured a sort of couch-surfing existence, feeding himself by being charming enough to get invited to a lot of dinner parties, crowing about how badly his books sold. Three figures share the chapter on dying: Socrates, Seneca –who had some sort of asthma so severe that he regularly came close to fatal asphyxiation – and the Japanese writer and neo-Samurai Yukio Mishima (1925-1970).

Brădățan focuses on individual thinkers partly because he is unimpressed by big solutions to human problems. He regards democracy as a great thing but so opposed to human nature that it will never endure anywhere for long: "The urge to rule over others, even to annihilate them if need be, has defined Homo sapiens. We certainly collaborate with others, but in most instances only to assert ourselves more efficaciously." (66) In particular he has no confidence that education can improve the mass of humanity:

Twenty-five centures after Socrates's death by democracy, we seem to have learned at last that conversions through humanist education are next to impossible. Paideia (defined as a rigorous and comprehensive training in the liberal arts) is one of the finest things one can experience in life, and does involve a radical transofrmation when done properly. . . . But by its nature this form of education is an individual exercise; it works only in limited numbers, and – when successful – creates highly individualized people. The transformation brought about by paideia takes place within the individual, and only indirectly, in severely diminshed form, in society. Statistically, whatever the thinkers of the Renaissance and revolutionary period may have hoped, it's just not possible to cause, by education alone, a radical transformation in society at large. (77)

If there answers, we must find them for ourselves. And to Brădățan, those answers will be more truthful, more beautiful, and more profound if we root them in an honest appraisal of ourselves, our societies, and our fate.

I did not agree with everything in In Praise of Failure,  but that is not the point of a book like this. The point is that it sets one thinking. The point is the dialogue between the writer and the reader, the answers and objections one can't help formulating as one reads. I was launched, to take one example, on a long train of musings about people who somehow became famous for their humility. Like, say, St. Francis, or Gandhi. How humble were they? In writing about Gandhi, Orwell was mostly positive but found himself wondering to what extent Gandhi was motivated by vanity, that is, by a sense of himself as a scrawny, nearly naked man shaking empires with his spiritual force. Surely there is some truth in that. Surely if these people had been were truly humble, we would never have heard of them. Brădățan mentions Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote a book called The Ladder of Humility while founding a new religious order, intervening decisively in a papal schism, writing a bunch of other books, and generally serving as one of the church's leaders. Would any truly humble man have done as much? Cioran talked all the time about doing nothing, and he did do a lot of nothing, but he also published several books, one of them a volume of aphorisms many of which are about how one should avoid doing things like publishing books. 

Humility, I think, is a much more troublesome concept than Brădățan makes it seem.

But I would love to talk to him about it.