Use your disillusion: A philosopher makes the case

By Jennifer Szalai

Failure, as Costica Bradatan puts it in his bracing new book, is good for you, but not for the reasons you might think. “In Praise of Failure” is maddening, disturbing, exasperating, seductive — I found myself turned around at so many points that even as I was closing in on the last chapter I wasn’t quite sure where I would land at the end.

This isn’t because the writing is convoluted; Bradatan, a philosopher, writes with elegance and wit, his every thought and sentence slipping smoothly into the next. But this very ease is what makes “In Praise of Failure” a wild ride. There you are, taking in what Bradatan is telling you, accepting his introductory promises of “failure-based therapy” and a “journey of self-realization,” when before you know it you are so startled out of your expectations that you have to ask, What did he just do? It all starts out innocently enough, with Bradatan saying we need to “take failure seriously.” He extols the virtues of humility while lamenting our “worshipping of success.” This sounds fine, if a bit familiar. There are any number of books that teach the art of “failing forward” and “turning trials into triumph.” The kids of overachieving parents will achieve even more if they’re given “the gift of failure.”

But Bradatan swiftly dismisses those who try to “rebrand” failure as “a steppingstone to success.” They have plucked Samuel Beckett’s line to “fail better” out of its dark context, shearing it off from what follows: “Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good.” Against the emollient platitudes of self-help, Bradatan encourages actual, painful humility — what Iris Murdoch called a “selfless respect for reality.” This, then, is an extreme book — but not an extremist one. It isn’t a manifesto or even a treatise; those revolve around argument, of which Bradatan offers surprisingly little, or little that is stable enough to pin down. “In Praise of Failure” is mainly structured around storytelling, as Bradatan recounts the lives of people who not only faced down failure but actively invited it.

There is Mahatma Gandhi, the anti-colonial leader and radical pacifist, abstaining from clothing, from food, from sex; failure, for him, was a forge: “I can only learn when I stumble and fall and feel the pain.” There is Simone Weil, the brilliant and sickly French philosopher, taking on physically demanding factory jobs, joining the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War (despite being so near-sighted that she couldn’t shoot straight) and eventually dying at 34 from tuberculosis and self-starvation. The work of these thinkers could be invigorating, but they themselves were often unpleasant and downright cruel. Bradatan does not try to redeem them. To the contrary, he draws our attention to everything about them that was disappointing, disgusting and deplorable. “As Hitler was wreaking havoc in Europe, Gandhi proved to be remarkably supportive,” he writes, describing how Gandhi urged the Jews “to pray — for Hitler.” (“If even one Jew acted thus,” Gandhi said, “he would save his self-respect and leave an example which, if it became infectious, would save the whole of Jewry.”)

This turns out to be a running theme — how a strain of perfectionism can doom a pursuit of failure to, well, failure. None of Bradatan’s characters cared much for the kind of democracy in which imperfection would be embraced and contained by institutions. Even Gandhi, in Bradatan’s telling, talked about democracy in spiritual terms: “What he envisioned was not new political institutions, but a transformed humanity.”

Szalai is a book critic for NYT©2023

The New York Times