In Praise of Failure : Four Lessons in Humility / Costica Bradatan.
Bradatan, Costica, author.
2023
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Title In Praise of Failure : Four Lessons in Humility / Costica Bradatan.
Author Bradatan, Costica, author.
ISBN 9780674287358
DOI https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674287358
Published Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2023]
Copyright ©2023
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (272 p.)
Item Number 10.4159/9780674287358 doi
Summary 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.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Mai 2023)
In EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English
EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023
EBOOK PACKAGE Philosophy 2023 English
EBOOK PACKAGE Philosophy 2023
Harvard University Press Complete eBook-Package 2023
Available in Other Form print 9780674970472
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Frontmatter
Contents
PROLOGUE
1 IN A FALLEN WORLD
2 THE RUINS OF POLITICAL FAILURE
3 WINNERS AND LOSERS
4 THE ULTIMATE FAILURE
EPILOGUE
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

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