We tend to equate failures with mistakes, but is it really? Maybe failure is our chance to figure everything out, to understand how to proceed?
We lack a truly philosophical approach to failure! Such an approach could reveal their positive side, show that failures can become a source of wisdom, while success at best breeds only intoxication.
Reflection on the beneficence of failure is absent from the Western philosophical tradition. And what the great philosophers say about them inspires us rather with a sense of guilt. According to Descartes, if we are deceived and mistaken, it is because we have misused our will, and this is the most important human ability, the only one that makes us like God. There really is something to blame yourself for! For Kant, failure is primarily due to the misuse of reason: that human “instrument” with which we try to break free from the fetters of base inclinations.
So when we fail, it is a failure in our becoming human, in our “humanization”! How far this thought is from the saving idea that failure helps us grow above ourselves. From the idea first put forward by Freud and then by Lacan, and which is confirmed by the entire history of medicine: only when something “does not work” do we begin to understand how it should work. After all, this is precisely the meaning of the symptom: it is a dysfunction that says a lot about our usual “functioning”.
Take, however, a simpler example – a juicer. When it works, you don’t ask questions, you just take half an orange, press a button, and wait. The juicer will interest you the day it breaks down or starts to malfunction: then you will begin to feel it, turn it over, take it apart. Just when it breaks, you begin to understand how it works.
Crisis is the moment when we can try to see what is really happening
This reasoning is also true for global capitalism: the crisis that it is experiencing sheds new light on its essence. The word “crisis” comes from the Greek “krinien”, “to separate”. A crisis is the moment when reality opens up to us, the moment when we can try to see what is really happening.
Such is the beauty of failure: it gives us time to pause, reflect, return to ourselves, gives us a chance to stop moving forward. Of course, there are failures from which we can no longer recover, failures with which we unfortunately identify ourselves, painfully mixing “fail” and “be a failure.” Of course, we all have different resources for recovery. And this is another reason to recall that success is not always a successful outcome. There are dangerous successes, premature ones, intoxicating ones: the sport of high performance offers us many examples when champions failed to win too early.
We often forget that success has a price and that the road to achievement is never a series of victories. Achievement in the long run is always the result of a succession of successes and failures.