We all learn in a trial-and-error fashion to respond to these challenges appropriately. Some are faced “philosophically”: it won’t kill you to miss breakfast or be late for work once in a while. Now move up a level, where these things happen far too often. Here, you might reckon that your urban existence is too stressful and consider moving to the country and finding an easier job; that is, you face this situation by taking practical remedial actions. Now move to another level, where the novelty of your remedial action has worn off and new irritations arise: you have fewer friendship-support networks, less money and so on. You might, at another level, turning towards political philosophy, start to question the very nature of twenty-first-century, capitalist treadmill, alienated existence; you could join an anarchist commune; or invite Jesus into your heart. You might despair, or consider suicide; you might become depressed or get ill (and remember that in very different ways the existentialist philosopher and the psychoanalyst might interpret your depression or illness as bad faith or defence mechanisms).
Somehow most of us get through irritating moments, bad days and sticky patches in our lives, especially when there is an underlying resilience. But if you were unlucky enough to have had previous difficult times (being abandoned as a child, death of a parent, serious illness, say) those may have helped you cope with present adversity or they may have weakened your resolve and problem-solving capacities. And if you are very unlucky you might get more than your share of adversity. Let’s say you are struggling with your new lifestyle in the country, then out of the blue you get a cancer diagnosis or you lose your job, or both. Many people would crack under these circumstances, some might seek counselling or psychotherapy, and a few might kill themselves. Personality, personal history, present circumstances and available support will all combine to lead to defeat, triumph or a “successful” muddling through.
It’s probably wise to pause to remember how absurd all this can sound to the average ear. In Woody Allen’s film Whatever Works (2009), the lead character Boris Yellnikoff is the quintessential curmudgeon. Always sounding off about everything from chaos and entropy to our miserable “failed species” and the “inchworms” he is surrounded by, Boris is clever and amusing but eventually tedious. The upshot of the film, which shows him surviving an aborted academic career, ongoing neuroses, suicide attempts and failed marriages, is that he “totally lucks out” in finding a new love and speaks with redemptive affection of the wisdom of giving and taking whatever love one can in this uncertain existence.
We can and we should remind ourselves that failure as a phenomenon can be exaggerated and furthermore that predictions about future failures and catastrophes have frequently been wrong. There appears to be a common human craving for certainty that, combined with mechanisms of bias, can override reality. Predictions about the end of the world have a very long lineage, some of them from religious quarters being embarrassingly specific and by definition always incorrect. Dan Gardner’s Future Babble (2011) has copious examples of predictions made by experts and their embarrassing failure to come to pass. However, we must always evaluate significant new predictions on their own merits. For example, as individuals and governments we have to decide quite urgently whether climate change is real and anthropogenic, and what to do about it. If real and as serious as many claim, then failure to take due action may result in decimation of the world’s population within decades. If the evidence is inaccurate or the picture more complex than we currently know, it may turn out that we have been deceived and wasted anxiety and money on strategies for combating it. The big problem is that our science is a long way from being capable of the kinds of accurate predictions we need. What a science of failure might do is to (i) insist on identifying discrete domains of failure and suitable methods of quantification, and (ii) probe for the existence of any reliable cross-domain characteristics. But to my knowledge this kind of science does not exist.
While certain industries and institutions do focus on failure for good reasons, one can see little appetite for developing the kind of convergent, cross-disciplinary study implied by Joel Fisher’s (2010) “anaprokopology”. To some extent Joseph T. Hallinan’s (2009) “errornomics” and Kathryn Schulz’s (2010) “wrongology” are also stabs in this same dark direction. Those involved in risk assessment, health-and-safety audits, catastrophe studies, Holocaust and other studies all have excellent reasons for establishing a knowledge base that might ensure certain moral atrocities don’t happen again, or are anticipated or mitigated. The idea that links exist across all failure phenomena isn’t usually entertained. I suppose we might argue that different failure-like phenomena – from, say, various domains and magnitudes – cannot be legitimately lumped together. How are earthquakes, wars, car accidents, disease processes, botched surgery, business failures, fallacious arguments and broken marriages, and death itself, meaningfully linked? Some, for example, are clearly beyond human control. But many are not. And all demand human responses. All are studied. Many are brought about or exacerbated by faulty judgements, corner cutting and cognitive errors. In fact, even the worst natural disasters are studied and prepared for, in urgent practical terms but also as a matter of psychological interest: different personalities respond somewhat differently to the same disasters. What do philosophies of stoicism, pragmatism, pessimism and idealism have to say about differential responses? We are quite keen to promote problem solving in education but far less genuinely enthusiastic about radical problematizing: that is, identifying and exploring how things break down.
But to take a counter attitude to this, we can quite reasonably argue that at a personal level failures need not be anticipated or learned from. It is stressful and unnecessary to constantly prepare for failure. Given the relative rarity of major failures in our lives, perhaps it is wisest to live at least close to the present, to eat, drink and be merry, and to meet failure and its emotional and other kinds of fallout only when actually necessary. For example, rather than worrying chronically about the possibility of bad things happening, react to them when they do occur with all the short-term grief, cursing and emergency behaviours we have at our disposal. Crying, many would say, is a natural and perhaps necessary response to bad news, perhaps sometimes healthier than convoluted intellectual strategies for attempted sidestepping of psychological suffering.
In reality, in line with the homely advice to “try, try again” when we don’t at first succeed, we may remember that most learning involves repeated initial failures. Our early attempts to learn to crawl, walk and speak are always accompanied by falls and errors. It is quite rare that anyone’s very first girlfriend or boyfriend turns out to be their lifelong partner or that the first job you walk into is the one you happily stay with. Very few people excel at golf, ice skating or tightrope walking at their first try. As Lewis Thomas put it, writing about general biological themes: “We learn, as we say, by ‘trial and error.’ Why do we always say that? Why not ‘trial and rightness’ or ‘trial and triumph’? The old phrase puts it that way because that is, in real life, the way it is done” (1988: 170).
The world of counselling and psychotherapy (and also stress management, resilience building, happiness creation and coaching) is made up of analyses of, and remedies for, personal failures, whether these be the effects of parental inadequacy, traumatic life events, learned helplessness, faulty personal logic, bad luck, addictive behaviours or whatever. Unfortunately this is a bewildering world of multiple theories and competing clinical professions, which even in its own terms fails perhaps 20 per cent of its clients. But it can be supported by the kind of philosophy of listening advocated by Corradi Fiumara (1990) and by the practice of receptivity found in Zen Buddhism and elsewhere. The talking therapies, whatever their own flaws (which are many), hold out the offer of deep interpersonal dialogue and emotion-honouring that is not always available in books, self-help and what we might call macho-stoical solipsism. One may courageously find fortitude within oneself but the strong social element of our
evolutionary make-up means that often solutions or support are found in our fellow humans, however fallible and sometimes disappointing they turn out to be.
One thing we learn from a scan of psychotherapeutic theories is that they have conflicting epistemologies as regards the nature of being human, of suffering, and recovery. Broadly speaking, the psychoanalytic approaches recognize a somewhat faulty psychic structure full of unconscious conflicts and defence mechanisms, the effects of which can be partially ameliorated through therapy. Some forms of psychoanalysis take death, entropy and brute suffering seriously in the concept of the death drive. The psychoanalyst Rob Weatherill, for example, drawing on Lacan and Jean Baudrillard, complains that “the profession has been hugely oversold in a worldwide evangelism of human potential, which has taken flight from any notion of the brute real” (1998: 143). The texts supporting the humanistic therapies (many of these emanating from California) tend to have a somewhat, sometimes relentless, upbeat flavour, encouraging clients to think of themselves as unimpeded self-actualizers. Cognitive behavioural therapies, again by contrast, focus on individuals’ cognitive errors and related behavioural limitations, and seek to re-educate clients. What most of these lack in their conceptual foundations is much, if any, reference to relevant philosophy, sociology and biology. In this sense they can be considered incomplete or flawed epistemologies.
One school of psychotherapy that is based directly on philosophical insights (like Ellis’s rational emotive behaviour therapy, which draws from Stoicism) is existential therapy, which makes therapeutic inferences from Sartre and Heidegger in particular. For some, authenticity is the cornerstone of this approach:
Authenticity can provide an ethical grounding that can underlie all our other values. If values are chosen in an authentic way then there is a sense that one can succeed or fail in being true to one’s self. That is, we can act or fail to act in accordance with the values we have authentically chosen.
(Pollard 2005: 174)
Two of existential therapy’s planks are authenticity and courage. Faced with cancer one might be heroic about it, yet such courageous behaviour might not be fully authentic. If genuine, one might simply be terrified, feel a lot of pain, and die an undignified death. Lisa Diedrich examines exactly such experiences of cancer and of the “failure of the body, of conventional and alternative medicine, and of language” (2005: 135). There are times when fragility trumps courage, indeed when the flesh is so weak as to let down the spirit completely. The courage to be is a nice, deep, motivational slogan, with heavy-duty theological and philosophical wheels on it, but sometimes you just want to pull the duvet over your fragile head and make the world go away. It is questionable whether existential therapy is any more successful than other psychotherapies.
Touted as a breakthrough in understanding “the secret fear of failure’, Petruska Clarkson’s The Achilles Syndrome (1994) examined the “secret flaw” of many outwardly successful people. Her book contains examples of the “pseudocompetency” or shameful, phoney excellence experienced and often concealed by high achievers and how this can be overcome. She included references to stressed doctors and psychotherapists in this book, mentioning their high suicide rate. Yet in 2006, Clarkson – a distinguished and multi-qualified therapist, referred to by some close colleagues as a “deeply tortured soul” – killed herself by overdose. Of course there are debates to be had about whether suicide constitutes failure, whether it nullifies what someone has achieved, and so on. But we must surely always ask what the grounds are for confidence in any enterprise like psychotherapy, philosophy, religion, commerce or politics where public claims are made along the lines of “follow this prescription and durable success will surely follow” Many of us appear susceptible to such exaggerated claims.
Sometimes, in life and therapy, we apparently learn nothing. This time my (hairdressing, floristry, restaurant, massage) business will succeed; this is surely the right man for me; this time I’m staying off the booze for good. We may have a kind of foolhardy courage and resolution without concomitant wisdom and humility: failure returns and returns. We have constructed the most successful form of psychotherapy; ours is more rational and sophisticated than others. In the same way we are bound to think today that one school of philosophy is superior to others and certainly superior to the various philosophical schools of the ancient Greeks. Yet all are part of the same error-spotting, fault-overcoming reasoning process, and all are highly fallible.
Another take on failure is that, like all other generalized phenomena, regardless of what I or anyone else thinks about it, the world does what it does independently and indifferently, and each of us construes it according to our personality biases. In other words, the assumption of universal rationality fails, it must defer to the principle of individual phenomenology. The success-oriented, who probably also believe in omnipresent hope and happiness, will see success and its prospects everywhere, just as the religious will always see God in everything. Those who are failure-oriented, who may have depressive personalities, will see failure everywhere. Those with personalities set on moderation will always see both sides of an argument! And those like the existentialist group therapist Irvin Yalom promote therapeutic hope, fellow solidarity, the ventilation of emotion and the overcoming of Schopenhauerian despair. In his novel The Schopenhauer Cure, Yalom understands Schopenhauer better than he understood himself in a way that is similar to my observation about Kierkegaard in the previous chapter of this book.
I have elsewhere in this book despaired of religion and also one of its common prescriptions, living in the present moment. The Christian concept of providence and Buddhist mindfulness coincide in a kind of recipe for post-lapsarian living. Regrets, guilt and depression about past failures and the flawed nature of existence, together with anxieties about the likelihood of future failures, can be located in the human mind. The mind itself, or that vast part of it that is demonstrably dysfunctional, is a kluge, a crooked instrument that operates iteratively on the basis of hit-or-miss efforts to match reality against its inner-linguistic maps, always adapting reluctantly, clunking on with its fallible hardware and software: thought itself resists self-correction. That thought itself is flawed, contains a systemic flaw, and distorts all that it touches is a proposition put forward by Bohm (1994) and explored a great deal by the mystic philosopher Krishnamurti, who collaborated in many dialogues with Bohm. If the kind of individual, authentic, embodied “mystical” experience of enlightenment and nirvana associated with the Buddha and others were less elusive and many more of us could live skilfully with moment-to-moment-specific cognitive fluidity, there might be much more hope of humanity exiting its pained, flawed human condition.
If it is accepted that decay and death “haunt” us, permeate our existence even as we try alternately to deny and confront them, then there is some chance that the lives we make for ourselves will be somewhat courageous and authentic in the existentialist tradition. Heidegger’s “being-towards-the-end” challenges us all. Death is the ultimate failure of the organism and is indeed evident all around us (or was until we in the West hid it so well). I have argued that failure in its myriad forms permeates human life and all natural phenomena. How this realization impacts on each person may depend on temperament. Personally, I find it somehow comforting to know roughly where I stand and where I end, and knowledge of my own failings brings me to self-acceptance rather than to melancholy. Of course, such knowledge isn’t a conveniently packaged matter occurring only once but something recurring to us throughout life, presuming that we do not take the suicide option that is sometimes a temptation.
I like to think that the bottom line in learning from failure is that, along with success, it has no real substance. The success–failure polarity is in an important sense imaginary or exaggerated (except in some occupations, such as nuclear power safety and surgery!). Yes, you lost that tennis match, you didn’t pass your driving test, you haven’t written the great twenty-first-century novel or a
ttracted interest in your invention. Or, yes, you made your first million at the age of twenty-five, you married the person you set your heart on, you launched that humanitarian campaign that saves lives, your IVF treatment worked. It is claimed that a Japanese temple-building company, Kongō Gumi, was in business for 1,400 years and then failed. But so what? If one thing didn’t work or fail, or failed after a long period of success, something else would always happen.
Whatever is going on in your life, you can only eat and drink so much, the sun shines and the rain falls equally on everyone, accidents can befall anyone. It is tempting to make the familiar case that the “failures” are closer to heaven, or to counter-assert that the successful tend to attract yet more success. But we are all born and we all die. Most of us have our ups and downs, the vicissitudes of little successes and failures punctuating each other across the life course. Perhaps almost any of us is eligible to win the lottery of at least a few moments of grace, a little bliss that is related neither to failure nor to success but simply to being alive.
Postscript
I have presented an argument in this book for a grand scheme of failure. Grand narratives are a little out of fashion these days, as is negativity generally. If you want to be rich and successful, write a book on success, on happiness, self-esteem and positive psychology, on how to make money, or about guardian angels. I’ve lost count of how many acquaintances, when I told them I was writing this book, either pulled a disapproving face or made what they thought was a highly original joke about “Wouldn’t it be funny if your book about failure became successful?” Ha ha, yes, wouldn’t it? We should all be aware that yesterday’s big new ideas and snappy jargon constitute today’s forgotten books, sitting forlornly and anachronistically on the shelves of charity shops.
Failure (The Art of Living) Page 15