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In Praise of Failure Costica Bradatan

In Praise of Failure By Costica Bradatan

In Praise of Failure by Costica Bradatan


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Summary

Success is all very well, but failure teaches us what is most important: humility. Costica Bradatan tells the stories of four thinkers who, for all their external success, courted failure throughout their years. From Simone Weil to Seneca and Gandhi, the greatest of us made meaningful lives by grasping the epiphanies of failure.

In Praise of Failure Summary

In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility by Costica Bradatan

Squarely challenging a culture obsessed with success, an acclaimed philosopher argues that failure is vital to a life well lived, curing us of arrogance and self-deception and engendering humility instead.

Our obsession with success is hard to overlook. Everywhere we compete, rank, and measure. Yet this relentless drive to be the best blinds us to something vitally important: the need to be humble in the face of life's challenges. Costica Bradatan mounts his case for failure through the stories of four historical figures who led lives of impact and meaning-and assiduously courted failure. Their struggles show that engaging with our limitations can be not just therapeutic but transformative.

In Praise of Failure explores several arenas of failure, from the social and political to the spiritual and biological. It begins by examining the defiant choices of the French mystic Simone Weil, who, in sympathy with exploited workers, took up factory jobs that her frail body could not sustain. From there we turn to Mahatma Gandhi, whose punishing quest for purity drove him to ever more extreme acts of self-abnegation. Next we meet the self-styled loser E. M. Cioran, who deliberately turned his back on social acceptability, and Yukio Mishima, who reveled in a distinctly Japanese preoccupation with the noble failure, before looking to Seneca to tease out the ingredients of a good life.

Gleefully breaching the boundaries between argument and storytelling, scholarship and spiritual quest, Bradatan concludes that while success can make us shallow, our failures can lead us to humbler, more attentive, and better lived lives. We can do without success, but we are much poorer without the gifts of failure.

In Praise of Failure Reviews

Bradatan, a philosopher, writes with elegance and wit, his every thought and sentence slipping smoothly into the next...I was absorbed by Bradatan's book even-or especially-when I felt uncomfortable with its implications. -- Jennifer Szalai * New York Times *
Bradatan wears his erudition lightly. He is a pleasure to read, and his prose conveys a happy resilience in the face of life's inevitable contradictions. His lessons in humility remind us that the pursuit of success is often motivated by the dread of failure-and that our attempts to create things are often driven by an avoidance of our mortality. -- Michael S. Roth * Washington Post *
Gleefully breaching the boundaries between argument and storytelling, scholarship and spiritual quest, Bradatan concludes that while success can make us shallow, our failures can lead us to humbler, more attentive, and better lived lives. * Englewood Review of Books *
Provocative, stimulating, wise-the book that our success-obsessed age needs to read. -- Tom Holland, author of Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
In this deeply inspiring book, Costica Bradatan invites us to humble up and embrace the fact that we are all prone to failure. But the real lesson is that this embrace is a first step on a long journey toward self-transformation and growth. We all fail, but only the wise understand that their imperfections are what make them whole. -- Marcelo Gleiser, author of The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning
I have nothing but praise for this revealing and riveting, probing and provocative book. Bradatan has succeeded in reminding us why failure is not only inevitable, but, if viewed properly, so very vital. A brilliant tour de force. -- Robert Zaretsky, author of The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas
In Praise of Failure takes a set of corrosively prophetic lives and makes them new again through a compelling, cross-cutting, swift, and entirely original mode of narration. Costica Bradatan writes with the same daring, the same interpretive anger that made his subjects notorious in their own day for choosing failure over what their respective worlds counted as success. A gripping read, start to finish. -- Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography
A belletrist following in the footsteps of Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag, Costica Bradatan exhibits, yet again, that he is an original thinker of real merit. -- James Miller, author of Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche
With eloquent passion-and compassion-Costica Bradatan puts fear of failure at the heart of human existence, yesterday, now, and forever, from the failures that frustrate our daily existence to the ultimate failure that is death. Weaving together the life and work of such disparate souls as Simone Weil, Seneca, Gandhi, E. M. Cioran, and Yukio Mishima, he reminds us why our fellow humans have always ascribed to the mad, the misfits, and those on the verge of death an uncanny capacity for second sight. A unique, insightful meditation on the essential questions of human existence that aims to heal as well as to provoke. -- Ingrid Rowland, coauthor of The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art
The ideas are boldly counterintuitive, and the illuminating historical examples complicate what it means to succeed. This is, ironically enough, a triumph. * Publishers Weekly *

About Costica Bradatan

Costica Bradatan is author of Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers and coeditor of The God Beat. A contributor to the New York Times, Aeon, Commonweal, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Statesman and Religion/Philosophy Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, he is Professor of Humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University and Honorary Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland in Australia. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Additional information

GOR013678082
9780674970472
0674970470
In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility by Costica Bradatan
Used - Very Good
Hardback
Harvard University Press
2023-01-03
288
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - In Praise of Failure