Failure (The Art of Living)

by Colin Feltham

  Such institutionalized failures are far from new but there is often scant political will or success in transforming them. Meanwhile, school pupils in these situations learn that they are abandoned and devalued and create their own responses, often angry and violent ones.

  Of those who are relatively successful in any school system, they must also be aware where their grades and their choice and level of subject and college or university place them. Indeed I know mature adults who lament that they “only went to X University” and “only got a 2:2”. Saddest of all are those with high aspirations who, failing to get into the prestigious university of their choice, or failing to gain high enough grades, commit suicide. Now, we might easily claim that education is the site of considerable failure creation and aim to reform education itself but, as Bourdieu and others have repeatedly shown, it is easier to allow victims to continue in failure than to make genuine changes at the macro-level.

  While religion often presents the case that each of us is unique and precious in the sight of God, the downside of religion for individuals is fairly clear: if you fail to accept the terms of most religions you may be regarded as a sinner or infidel and be banished from heaven or paradise for all eternity, as if punishment in this life is insufficient. Even if you are religious you may suffer from the terrible feeling of guilt that you will never be good enough, you will never be saved, and God can see beyond your outwardly religious compliance into your rotten hypocritical soul. Such negative sentiments probably drive the behaviour of ascetics who deny themselves pleasure, flagellate and in other ways punish themselves. Not all religions or all individual religious experiences are of this negative nature. But all religions have positive images of prophets and saviours (and contrasting stories of evil and heretical characters) and it is small wonder if, in the face of these, many feel like failures. I have not achieved anything like the enlightened insight of the Buddha, nor the heroic self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ (nor anything like the tormented but celebrated Kierkegaard’s contribution). Nor, in the domain of philosophy, can many of us match the powers of reasoning and heroic self-sacrifice of Socrates or the readiness of Diogenes to spurn worldly comfort and status. In all such moral hierarchies, most of us are perhaps miserable failures.

  In the domain of psychotherapy, many of us can be counted as failures in terms of our neuroses or pathologies as we suffer from a panoply of depressions, anxieties, sexual and other personal problems. Most of us have not wrestled successfully with our demons in the reportedly heroic and insightful manner of Freud and Jung or the lead characters in the dramatically successful case studies of some psychotherapists. Many of us deny that we have such problems or dimly perceive that we have but are too fearful to seek therapy. Some who enter therapy still remain neurotic – the double failure, as in religion, of seeking salvation or cure but failing to find it or benefit from it: ten years of psychoanalysis, say, and “still as fucked up as ever”. In my own case (and many others’), expensive immersion in Janov’s primal therapy (touted as “the cure for neurosis”) in the 1970s would have to be considered a failure, or double failure, of this kind, unless, of course, we point the finger of failure at the therapy and its originator. Or perhaps in some cases it is both the needy person and the supplier of hope who are moral and neurotic failures.

  Albert Ellis, the late American psychotherapist who created rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT), took particular exception to the ways in which we rate ourselves as failures. In his The Myth of Self-Esteem (2005) he repeats his message that if we want a reasonably happy life we had better learn to accept ourselves with all our failings. We may recognize those of our behaviours that are undesirable but we are wise not to condemn ourselves as persons. He uses the term “unconditional self-acceptance” (USA, a nice undermining of the American obsession with success) to underpin the idea that we are worthy as persons regardless of our actions and our fallibility. Ellis has been highly critical of perfectionism as a common driver of unhappiness, since perfectionism by its nature demands standards of excellence in all spheres that must sooner or later prove unachievable. Ellis is of particular relevance here because he has always insisted that his ideas are derived from Epictetus’ Stoicism. In The Myth of Self-Esteem, he specifically alludes to a number of philosophers and theologians who have stimulated or informed the creation of his REBT concepts, including Martin Buber, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Lao Tzu, Sartre, Baruch Spinoza and Paul Tillich. Suggesting that the obsession with self-esteem (or “not being a success”) is a sickness, Ellis heavily promotes the view that self-acceptance and anti-perfectionism are roads to better mental health and happiness.

  Fear of failure haunts many, including those who attempt to hide the fear. There is the woman who, feeling a failure, marries a man she does not love so that she can have married (“successful”) status; and her marriage soon fails. There are many who suffer from imaginary failure, especially those with obsessive-compulsive disorder who imagine they have left taps and switches on or hurt people. It’s likely that some highly successful intellectuals, such as Wittgenstein, can be considered to fit the profile for Asperger’s Syndrome: as socially unresponsive as they are talented in their own specialisms. It has been well documented that many suffering from bipolar disorder (previously manic-depressive disorder) are high risk-takers and a significant portion of these enter business professions. The energy and elation of the entrepreneurial bipolar personality may lead to great successes in the short to medium term but non-medicated or uncontrolled manic flights are quite likely to cause boom and bust effects in the long term. A friend of mine went from moderately successful management positions to a wealth-generating property business only to crash to poverty in later life via divorces, alcoholism, anger problems and hospitalization. Among those celebrities reckoned probably to have suffered from bipolar disorder are Vincent van Gogh, Kurt Cobain, Stephen Fry, Mel Gibson, Ernest Hemingway, Spike Milligan and Jackson Pollock. Highly creative risk-takers are likely to contribute to business and arts successes disproportionately but also to experience disproportionate failure and, often, mental illness and suicide. This is contentious territory that rightfully attracts the attention of the philosophy of mind (Graham 2010).

  We might also consider anomalous cases. Take, for example, Howard Hughes, the American billionaire. Enormously gifted, Hughes was an industrialist, engineer, aviator, film producer and director who broke several air-speed records, designed aircraft, developed the company Trans World Airlines, married and was associated with Hollywood stars and wielded political influence. From about his thirties he developed severe mental health problems, chiefly obsessive-compulsive disorder, which led to a reclusive and eccentric lifestyle living in hotels, having dietary and contamination obsessions, urinating in bottles and becoming extremely unkempt. In chronic pain and on multiple medications, Hughes finally died of kidney failure. By many standards Hughes, one of the world’s richest men, could never be classified as a failure. One could reasonably assume, however, that his bizarre behaviour and many interpersonal conflicts were accompanied by great subjective distress and he would probably not be nominated for many all-round successful human being awards. This example brings up questions of whether a balanced life is necessarily better than an unbalanced one, that is, whether outward success and inner happiness combined is a superior formula to, say, genius with outward success but inner distress; and again, who is to judge who is a success or failure?

  Controversy and ambiguity still surround the case of Bruce Ismay, owner of the White Star Line, which built the Titanic. Ismay was aboard the Titanic just before it sank a hundred years ago. He may or may not have urged higher speed but he did find his way into a lifeboat and to safety when 1,500 passengers out of 2,223 died. He is said to be responsible for the decision to limit lifeboats to a much smaller number than the ship’s capacity. During subsequent hearings he denied any impropriety or cowardice but many considered him ignominious and the press were unforgiving. At least one wri
ter names him as a “moral failure”, links his fate with that of Joseph Conrad’s character Lord Jim, but suggests that the guilt he must have lived with is actually not so uncommon, many of us holding a secret sense of letting others down (Wilson 2011).

  One could multiply examples similar to that of Howard Hughes. For instance Wittgenstein, as mentioned above, was regarded as a genius of modern philosophy and talented in many other ways, yet he was a troubled and often disliked person. Take Stephen Hawking, wheelchair bound with motor neurone disease for decades yet a leading theoretical physicist: we might speak of him as suffering from a serious biological failure alongside outstanding academic and scientific success. The footballer George Best, for all his sporting and financial success, failed to conquer his alcohol problem and died of it. Eminent politicians such as Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson have succumbed to extramarital sexual temptations, which may not earn them the epithetic of “failure” so much as “flawed character”. We can object that neurological disorders should not be conflated with moral errors or hypocrisies (the former being passive, the latter active) but this distinction would also bring us back to questions about the very nature of tragic flaws.

  Let’s note in passing too the modern tendency to assume that explanations for personal failures lie more in the domain of psychology and science generally than in philosophy. The psychologist Robert Sternberg’s Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid (2002), for example, gives a brief mention of Aristotelian akrasia but mainly focuses on foolishness and folly that can be framed in psychological terms. The philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards contrasts two examples thus: (i) “she failed the exam because she didn’t want to seem cleverer than her friend” and (ii) “she failed the exam because she wasn’t clever enough to pass” (2000: 19). We might see in these examples of psychoanalytic thinking and the psychology of intelligence respectively but Radcliffe Richards designates the first as teleological and the second non-teleological. Like anything else, we can use failure as a means to something if our own priorities differ from those of others. Here, friendship is more important than academic success. We saw the same in the case of the writer Charles Bukowski: the choice to fail for his own ends, to distance himself from his hated father.

  There was at least one point in my life when I definitely felt “a failure” I was about twenty and had taken LSD. I was standing in a street in the suburbs of London, staring across the road at a pleasant, affluent-looking house. The husband and father was getting out of his car on returning from work. His attractive wife and children seemed to appear on cue on the doorstep, full of genuine enthusiasm and love. The scene was no doubt magnified by the drug but the intensity of its meaning and rebuke for me couldn’t have been sharper: I would never have any of that, I was a loser, a failure through and through. I would never have a career paying a salary that would make me an attractive prospect; I would never have a pretty wife or kids, or a nice house. I was an outsider. I would be lucky to avoid becoming a tramp. I wanted the love and success that this scene represented but I didn’t have it in me to grasp any career, to believe in any occupation, and I never would have. I adopted a contemptuous attitude towards mindless adaptation to the capitalist treadmill but deep down I wanted at least some of the goodies, especially the pretty wife. Later I got many of the things in this scene, lost some of them, and even now experience some of the related vicissitudes of desire and disappointment. Love, beauty, contentment: now you have them, now you don’t. And who knows what actually happened to the actors in my poignant, LSD-enhanced snapshot?

  We cannot talk about contemporary individual failures without also asking questions about failure as socially constructed. Some humans have always been weaker or more vulnerable than others. Many have been exploited as slaves, from the time of ancient Greece and Rome through medieval times to the transatlantic shipping of Africans to America in the sixteenth century and even into our own day. Nietszche accuses us of succumbing to a “slave morality” engendered by Christianity. It is not that humans underwent a Fall, but that we bought into the theology of the Fall, which betrays our true nature, in Nietszche’s terms. In some sense we all allow ourselves to be enslaved to a religious morality of meekness instead of accepting and pushing through the pain and violence inherent in life’s tragedy. Those who are physically enslaved may have little real choice but most of us have been in thrall to Christian and other religious recommendations of guilt, weakness and altruism: to the superstition that God is watching us like an omnipotent slave-master. Religion – a good deal of it patriarchal in character – has failed us.

  Perceptions of some as inferior – even as belonging to a wholly inferior race – underpin slavery, a point that brings us uncomfortably close to acknowledging the gender dimension of failure. Women have been treated as inferior and certainly as exploitable: as domestic slaves in all but name. Paradoxically, it is men who have most commonly received the designation of “failure”, however, at least in terms of commerce, sport and other traditionally male domains. Women have been more likely to refer to themselves or been referred to as failures in connection with reproduction, mothering and appearance. Female friends readily tell me that they have always felt like failures on the basis of “not being good looking enough, not having the perfect body”. Whole social and ethnic groups have internalized some sense of being failures. You might not be disabled had you not displeased God somehow, and some cultures frankly frown on female babies and dispose of some of them. For some gay people, their sexuality feels like a failure, so that a homosexual man may feel like an inferior or “failed man”.

  Interestingly, philosophers for all their probing of important themes have not been above relegating women to an inferior status. Vigdis Songe-Moller (2002) argues forcibly that from Socrates onwards women have been excluded and vilified, not only being treated as insignificant as thinkers and citizens but as to blame for many of life’s problems. In ancient Athens, where democracy was formulated for equals, those equals notably excluded women and slaves. For Plato, Aristotle and most other early philosophers, “man was, as it were, the true human, whereas the woman could only be defined as a negation of the man (Plato) or as a defective man (Aristotle)” (Songe-Møller 2002: 80). What is a defective man if not a failure? What does it mean to be a woman or slave if not an “imperfect version of a man”?

  Things have changed somewhat, so that today when “godly humans” are those with great wealth, power and celebrity status, the poor are (perceived as) the failures. Money, not intellect as in ancient Greece and Rome, is the defining criterion of success and status. We have no Socrates or Diogenes in our midst. Individually we may have no particularly outstanding flaw, yet through any prevailing sociocultural lens you and I can be designated a failure simply for being black, gay, a woman, disabled and so on, and doubly and trebly so if we fall under two or more of these groups. Factor in the adjectives and phrases fat, short, ugly, old, unhealthy, poor, “not very bright” and similar others, and it is clear just how failure-loaded any person’s existence can be. And despite our rational protests to the contrary, we may internalize such judgements to the extent that we find it extremely difficult not to think of ourselves as failures, hopeless failures: abject, worthless persons.

  But it can work like this too. I am white, male, heterosexual, not disabled or ugly; I am financially comfortable enough, have some success under my belt and am loved. So what can I authentically know about the wretched state of feeling like a failure and being cast in a failure role, sufficient to write about it and expecting to be taken seriously? In what ways, if any, have I taken on board the moral impact of what I am saying here to the point of doing anything meaningful about it? Most of my time is devoted to self-maintenance and the pursuit of pleasure. In tiny ways I may salve my conscience, for example by giving occasional small amounts to charity and by being warm and kind towards friends and acquaintances. But my own daily existence is quite comfortable. I read that “the income of the world’s 358 richest peo
ple equals that of the 2.3 billion poorest” and I am aware that my middle-range comfort is the flipside of the discomfort of billions who are out of sight, powerless and exploited (Farmer 2005). These macro-failures of global justice help to sustain my quite moderately successful Western lifestyle, and not only mine but that of millions of my compatriots, even some of whom are relatively oppressed and who feel like failures. To some degree, most of us fail to be affected by shocking facts and figures like that above, and we fail to do anything about it. Let us recall here Descartes’ “infinity of errors and imperfections” and Ricoeur’s echoing this in the case he makes for human fallibility.

  Now, all this leads us into an area I shall refer to simply as semantic perplexity. Failure is a plastic term that can be inserted into almost any discourse to the point where its meaning may be overstretched and lost. We can use it to refer to individuals, institutions, aspects of history and cosmology and its meaning is highly context-sensitive. It can also refer to major events, enduring states or fleeting moments. Following on from the above discussion about individuals as perceived failures and about moral failure, we easily enter into semantic perplexity. I might say I am a moral failure for pretending to care about those commonly perceived as failures, as well as a failure as a human being who does nothing active to alleviate the plight of billions on whom my own success is partly parasitical. (This is my bad faith, a kind of phoney ethical agonizing.) I could then say that thinking along such lines is a cognitive error or pointless exercise resembling the pathological scrupulosity of people afflicted by obsessive-compulsive disorder. In fact I am inclined to claim that we are all failures as human beings who share in sustaining a grossly unjust world, and further that we attempt to hide these failures behind weaselly linguistic pseudo-discriminations.

  Indeed, at this point I want to reiterate that we (our species) are all “sinners”: we all lack moral seriousness. As many religious commentators of various stripes, including the Buddha and John Calvin, have argued, our species flaw pervades our morality, behaviour, feelings and routine mental functioning. It is not that some of us may be identified as failures; we all share a deep moral defect. It has even been argued that our biological success and religious mission to “go forth and multiply” has led directly to untenable population levels and accompanying anthropogenic climate change. Alongside this, the huge increase in our numbers swamps each of us as an individual, so that we may indeed, as Sartre put it, feel “de trop” gratuitous, surplus to requirements. It may be that this very interplay of forces between memory of and suitability for (now lost) small communities, contemporary mass civilization and a pressure to achieve as individuals fuels increasing despair at the impossibility of counting or standing out in this context. Put differently, we are maddened, failed by our own overcrowding.