As I have argued, philosophers and theologians, for all the subtlety of their thinking, seem unable or disinclined to agree on much or conclude anything. While this can be accepted as inevitably slow scholarly work in progress, it can also be criticized as being off the mark: failing to comprehend the seriousness of the human condition (fiddling while Rome burns). Sometimes known as the love of wisdom, philosophy can be characterized as a love of, or even obsession with, sophistry and argument: perhaps “philosophistry”. Indeed, in different ways Lee McIntyre (2006) complains of a “resistance to knowledge” and Nicholas Maxwell (2007) of a continuing serious failure among scholars to address our species’ need for wisdom, which has both perennial and urgent aspects. Heidegger regarded himself as taking human fallenness unusually seriously but one fellow philosopher dismisses his work as “huge masses of hideous gibberish” (Paul Edwards, in Hendricks 2004: 38).
Failure may be understood in the following way. First we have the so-called second law of thermodynamics, or entropy, which ultimately means that everything that is in a certain form in a closed system must one day start to become over-complex, somewhat disordered, then irreversibly damaged, and finally cease to exist. Entropy is pervasive and runs through all phenomena, from human beings themselves to buildings, cities and planets. As many ancient Greek philosophers (famously Heraclitus) noted, change is universal and purity tends to become impure, or one becomes many, as in Plotinus’ concept of tolmatic inevitability. Humans are ambivalent about change: it is both inevitable and sometimes releasing and exciting, and also threatening and unwelcome to our psychological need for constancy.
This is linked with the principle of fallibility: the unavoidable observation that anything that exists has the potential to fail, either in its functioning or in its very being. Any romantic relationship or business project can fail. Fallibility is entwined with viability, and we might loosely refer to these two as death and life trends respectively, or as the poles of imperfection and perfection.
Let us also note a phenomenon we can refer to as a faultline or flaw. One of the most dramatic and well known of these is the geological faultline leading to earthquakes. It has been speculated that epileptic seizures may have features in common with earthquake activity. But a “basic fault” of a psychological nature is observed in some human beings too, and tragedy is usually the outcome of an existing fault, or serious flaw.
We then have failures as marked events and we might see these as manifestations of underlying faults. Our hidden flaws are sure to result in small cracks, then larger cracks, and sometimes even catastrophic disasters. Failures may be somewhat predictable, or not. They may be periodic or they may come in clusters or very infrequently and in random distributions. The Japanese earthquake of early 2011 was followed by a devastating tsunami resulting in thousands of human deaths, and subsequently by breakdowns in the security of some nuclear facilities, threatening more lives, all alongside a growing precariousness in Japanese economics. Within a human life some of us experience clusters of ill health, relationship failure and job insecurity in a short space of time. We speak of fatal flaws, we say the rot has set in, someone is on the road to ruin.
Recalling the notion of moral failure, we note that we all have seemingly inevitable “failings”, flaws in our personality, little vices and peccadilloes, tiny mood shifts within neurotic rhythms. These may be non-threatening and even charming quirks – we may like eccentrics or admire slightly flawed buildings – but little cracks in a bridge may be signs of worse to come, “accidents waiting to happen” (Petroski 1992). Near misses, events that, owing to luck, didn’t quite become failures or even catastrophes, perhaps also belong here.
In spite of the prevalence of failure, we seem to have no philosophy of failure as such. Acknowledging and lamenting this, Joel Fisher (2010) quite light-heartedly suggests creating a discipline of anaprokopology or the study of “not success” (although the translation from the Greek is botched and hamartiology might be better). My own not-yet-successful attempt to establish the study of anthropathology or human sickness works along partly similar lines (Feltham 2007). But even without such a focus we do have perennial themes of mismatches occurring in nature and human affairs that cannot be ignored. Life as given is not perfectly comprehensible, satisfying or just but must be constantly worked at philosophically, politically and personally. Existence as given lacks something and our efforts never completely fill this lack. Early philosophy was partly science in the making (understanding the natural world outside us) but also always significantly about human perception and conduct. We certainly have themes of appearance and reality, and the failure of a clear match or accessible match between them (Plato); of life as suffering and failing to produce a satisfactory solution (Schopenhauer); understanding as always limited or defective, causing alienation (Hegel, Heidegger); the notion of humanity as “crooked timber” or a “bent twig” from Kant, later borrowed by Isaiah Berlin to argue for inevitable cultural pluralism and anti-utopianism, and expanded on pessimistically by John Gray (2002).
It is not entirely true to say that we have no philosophy of failure. Paul Ricoeur, in his Fallible Man (1986), presents a case for the human species (“man” in his day) being susceptible to fault (like geological faults), faille (break, breach),écart (gap or digression), fêlure (rift) and other terms suggesting error and aberrance. Ricoeur calls on Descartes’ view that we are “subject to an infinity of errors” and an “infinity of imperfections” and on Pascal’s account of us as “full of faults”. Affective fragility, misery, moral weakness, fallibility as opening the possibility of evil, are all concepts dwelled upon by Ricoeur.
An unavoidable obstacle in human endeavours is the ambiguity of language. Consider these phrases: (at an airport) “failure to comply with these regulations may result in baggage being confiscated or destroyed” and (in debate on the moral philosophy of justice and equal social contributions) “failure to pull your weight”. Are these truly examples of failure? We could substitute a more common negative term with no loss of meaning: “not complying with” or “not pulling your weight”. This illustrates only one language problem: that of different terms meaning the same or similar things, creating potential confusion. But our Babelian inheritance also contains problems of national conflicts; abstract and symbolic language that gets confused with reality and can lead to religious conflict; language that obscures or is misleading; language that is or can be deliberately deceptive. Unfortunately, academic philosophy and many other academic discourses are frequently unenlightening for the majority of people. We might simply say that language, or languages, alongside their advantages, have commonly failed to mirror or clarify reality and have often made matters worse.
Benjamin referred to the “prattle” of language, indeed of an “abyss of prattle”, “fallen tongues” and “overnaming”. “Having too many names is worse than having none” (Pensky 2001: 53). Ludwig Wittgenstein quite bluntly stated that “A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words” (1967: 122). Philosophies of linguistic analysis and formal logic separate phenomena for study, while philosophies concerned with the big questions of existence, of ontology, seek broad underlying patterns. In this book I am seeking and often assuming such underlying patterns and explanations. Clearly we have “something rather than nothing” in cosmic and human existence but we cannot get away from the persistence of “non-being”, most obviously in distortion, decay and death. For me, these phenomena are virtually synonymous with flaws, faults, failings, sins, errors, failure and the ultimate failure: our personal deaths and the death of the universe. It is a consolation to discover that there are flaws and systemic failures that pervade all phenomena, including my own life.
2.
Failure across the lifespan
The typical human lifespan may be said to run from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Indeed, T. S. Eliot summarized existence as “birth, copulation an
d death” and some philosophers treat childhood and old age as states that are peripheral to the project of adult rationality, with “philosophy of childhood” being a very late development in the discipline.
Millions of sperm compete to fertilize one egg: it seems that the vast majority must fail, that competition and failure are prerequisites for “fitness”. Something obviously begins at conception, although it is reckoned that as many as 75 per cent of conceptions technically miscarry. Stillbirths, defects caused by intrauterine factors, diseases, birth complications and negative genetic factors, and infant deaths all attest to the human susceptibility to the earliest faults in development. Up to one in five premature babies are killed by just one bowel disease, for example: necrotizing enterocolitis. Dante Cicchetti and Elaime F. Walker (2003) discuss “aberrant neurodevelopment” in relation to schizophrenia, autism, substance abuse, personality disorders and depression, among other conditions. “Failure to thrive” (or not growing and gaining due weight) is well documented. The potential for fallibility and actual failures and flaws is present from the outset, if we allow ourselves to speak broadly of biological and systemic failures. Roberts (2011) embraces this “embodiment-as-error” as part of his discussion of pervasive errors in human enterprises.
The long gestation period for human pregnancy makes for some vulnerabilities in the foetus. Things can go wrong at any stage. Intrauterine damage is a topic that is partly well documented and partly only speculative. Likewise, birth complications and birth trauma are areas in which consensus is far from complete. Radical obstetricians such as Frederick Leboyer and Michel Odent have complained about traditional flawed medical practices that not only let mothers and their babies down but traumatize them. But enough accounts exist of long labours (painful for both mother and baby), oxygen starvation, strangulation by the chord, harsh medical deliveries and unnecessary Caesareans for us to have to reckon with birth as a precarious and fallible process. There is a theory that some of us are born with an optimal sense of “birthing ourselves” successfully, while others are born rather passively and experience all life thereafter as a somewhat pointless struggle at best (i.e. the sense of failure and doom is inborn). Such ideas do not sit well with the tabula rasa views of philosophers such as John Locke and defenders of free will. Some of us will be born with visible “birth defects”, minor or major, that shape our fortune, and some will have “faulty genes” that may be switched on at various points in our lives to dramatic effect, sometimes bringing into our lives tragic disabilities and/or causing premature deaths. This is complicated territory since genetic defects have long caused human suffering, medical progress has eliminated or reduced much of this suffering, yet equally we may inadvertently create new problems via our new technologies and ways of life. Human existence doesn’t necessarily proceed in a one-way, improvement-only direction.
Crucial bonding between mother and baby can fail. Postnatal depression and postnatal psychosis, occurring in a significant minority of mothers, can lead to later serious developmental failures in children. A single case proves nothing, of course, but a friend tells me he is convinced his mother’s postnatal depression set him up for later failure at school, his own depression, failed marriage, occupational underperformance and even failing his driving test eight times. Whether or not his attribution of the main determinant of his failures is correct, this case reminds us that we seem always to crave explanations, often to soothe or excuse ourselves, and these explanations are often false or unhelpful. Interestingly, Robert Rowland Smith’s popular philosophy text Driving with Plato: The Meaning of Life’s Milestones (2011) includes a chapter on “passing your driving test” that omits any Platonic guidance, and fails to mention failing your driving test, as if passing is something of an automatic rite of passage to inevitable self-realization. Failing your driving test is not merely a delay in driving alone and feeling like an adult but for some a (usually short-term) devastating comment on self-worth or, for young men, “manhood”. Anyway, the possibility exists in this example that an early negative event leads towards significant later failures.
In some religious accounts each of us exists across many incarnations before and after this present lifetime, depending on unique karmic factors. I shall concentrate here mainly on the single lifetime. Individual human development is also usually portrayed in conventional linear developmental terms as successful progress from one milestone or maturational task to another. Psychologists mainly rule this roost but psychotherapists, novelists and biographers also contribute abundantly. Less well known, perhaps, are the contributions of philosophers.
I quoted from Schopenhauer in the previous chapter. That this view is 150 years old, that Schopenhauer is thought by most to be terribly misanthropic, and that this is a rather male view, we must acknowledge. But even Schopenhauer allows for a happy childhood and exultant youth that many modern psychoanalytic accounts dismiss. Sartre famously declared that he had loathed his childhood but he did not blame it for any lack of freedom. Recall that some Christian theology describes us as born in sin, with Eve bound to suffer in childbirth and Adam destined for painful lifelong toil. We could easily put such narrative in positive terms: we begin in the joy of love, flourish as innocent children and healthy adolescents, enjoy happy careers and relationships, and live long lives supported by excellent medical care. Neither is an objective account, nor do many of us lead typical lives. Some of us are luckier, happier, healthier and wealthier than others. Some of us are hardier, more resilient by temperament. Very often those born well, into lucky circumstances, with lucky genes, thrive far better, giving the lie to virtue-based and merit-oriented philosophies of success. And whatever we think about our lives and however cleverly we contrive to avoid accidents, illnesses and misfortunes, many of us experience misfortunes and we must all die within a few decades. David Shields (2008), not an obvious misanthrope like Schopenhauer, nevertheless portrays the life course as studded with decline, as the very title of his book The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead shows.
We cannot ask to be born but once alive relatively few of us want to die or suffer, but we all do. David Benatar (2006), among other moral philosophers, examines the pros and cons of human existence. Concluding that pain outweighs pleasure, he does not recommend suicide but does suggest that it would be better to decide not to have children, since to do so is inevitably to bring suffering into the world with them. Cioran, the celebratedly arch-pessimistic Romanian aphorist, similarly decried human existence in The Trouble with Being Born. When he says “Whether one succeeds or not comes down to the same thing” (Cioran 1998: 63), he means that life is ultimately absurd and disappointing whatever happens within it in detail.
At the beginning, we are vulnerable babies and infants, a key feature of young human beings being our complete dependency on adult caretakers for sustenance and stability. This is familiar territory for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. Our adult caretakers are fallible, they may be poor parents, they may themselves have had inadequate parenting, they may even be abusive and sadistic. Not forgetting the majority who probably do their best, and acknowledging controversies about all this, we must reckon with the unfortunate likelihood that sometimes “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”, as the poet Philip Larkin put it so memorably. They let you down, they fail you. They can all too easily err on the side of either harsh discipline or indulgence, as if any parenting strategy may backfire. “But they were fucked up in their turn” reminds us of the transgenerational failure process, which “deepens like a coastal shelf” (another interesting geological metaphor). If these failings are bad enough, we may develop what some therapists refer to as a “basic fault” in the structure of the personality, resulting in lifelong maladjustment.
All such early developmental failures may lead to what Freud called “hysterical misery”, to be distinguished from the “common unhappiness” that most of us experience. Optimists of various radical, liberal and romantic hues will protest th
at things don’t happen this way, or if they do they are readily reversed by better social conditions, by therapy, by self-determination, or by love. Radical pessimists will perhaps say that this isn’t putting the case strongly enough: millennia of genetic, evolutionary, generationally cumulative traumas and current patriarchal and capitalist conditions conspire to ensure that our species flaws remain undisturbed, indeed are endlessly compounded. “Man hands on misery to man” in Larkin’s terms, but in an even stronger argument for anthropathology we might say that our species flaws are actively reproduced and deepened, and our typical analyses are superficial and erroneous.
Our vulnerability as babies and infants usually elicits caring attitudes and behaviours from others but some young humans are badly let down by parents, step-parents and other carers. A significant minority are seriously neglected, sometimes to the point of death, sometimes by inadequate young parents who were poorly parented themselves. I still recall working many years ago with one young couple with criminal convictions resulting from putting their baby in a cardboard box to stop it crying, a desperate and stupid act ending in the neglected baby’s death. Add to such gross neglect the catalogue of physical and sexual abuses that even many very young children are subjected to, and we must realize how fallible and fragile human parenting can be and how severely damaged the most vulnerable can be. Indeed, realizing that these abuses do occur, we appoint social workers to monitor problem families. When neglectful or abusive parents visit their own failings and hatreds on children, social workers sometimes fail to spot the abuses and are then themselves blamed for failing to do so. Meanwhile many of these children grow up traumatized and fail to develop “normally”, some of them going on under pressure from dark inner forces to become abusers themselves. When working for some years in a probation hostel I got to know many young adults who had progressed from highly faulty parenting to foster parents and children’s homes only to fail to thrive or gain any purchase on “normal” successful relationships, home life and jobs, ending up in prisons with repeated criminal convictions. An unpalatable hypothesis here is that early failures outside of our individual control are often compounded throughout life.
Failure (The Art of Living) Page 4