Everyone knows what it is to succeed, even if it at times eludes us. Our sense of failure often emerges precisely from this negation: it is the absence of something that went well, or helped us, or bettered our lot in the world. Failure is at once intimately personal and totally communal. We may fail to accomplish something and bear the sting of a wounded ego, but our measure, our scope, of what it means to fail relies on the totality of all other failings in our social sphere: you may have not gotten the job, but at least you didn’t get a DWI.
In such a frame, all failure is comparative. There is no one true form of failing, no root cause. Only iterations and repetitions of something in some dimension of our lives being out of joint, of not quite making it. Costica Bradatan’s In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility challenges us to dwell on the experience of failing. In four portraits of famous thinkers who in some way failed, we are walked through the dark and at times insidious powers that failure holds for human life. We are asked to feel failure as the wound that it is, as the humiliation we wish to avoid. In contrast, Stephen Gaukroger’s The Failures of Philosophy: A Historical Essay considers the comparative nature of failure by working through all of the forms that failing may take. Guiding us through the ones that have deranged or stunted—at times nearly killed—the project of thinking that we call philosophy, we find that all failure is different.
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