Because of our culture’s obsession with success, we miss something important about what it means to be human, and deny ourselves access to a deeper, more meaningful layer of our humanity. A sense of what we are in the grand scheme of things, an openness towards the unknown and the mysterious, humility and reverence towards that which transcends and overwhelms us, the wisdom that comes from knowledge of one’s limits, the sense of personal redefining and self-fashioning that results from an encounter with a major obstacle – these are some of the rewards that a proper grasp of failure could bring about. In my contribution I will sketch a phenomenology of failure, with a focus on a few prominent moments in the history of thinking about failure such as Gnosticism and Existentialism (especially EM Cioran).
This paper is part of a larger ongoing book project titled In Praise of Failure (under contract with Harvard University Press). |
