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.

"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." - 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." - Washington Post

"Charming and brilliant…Bradatan transcends the pessimistic visions of Cioran and co, for it is clear that he believes in the possibility of spiritual progress once we have been sufficiently humbled by failure." - Times Literary Supplement

"What [Bradatan] offers is a normative argument for why we should be humbled by failure rather than, like Hitler and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, see failure as a mere ‘stepping-stone to success’…Humans in Bradatan’s eyes are not featherless bipeds or rational animals but the only creatures who can recognize failure. It is this failure-detecting faculty, rather than, say, Aristotle’s nous, that makes us fully human…Thought-provoking." - Literary Review

"Bradatan argues that we should not run from failure, but face it, clear eyed, because facing our failures makes us humble, and, by becoming humble, we can live better lives…This book is about the art of living a good life, and Bradatan’s voice is like a steady and charming guide through a moonless night." - Hedgehog Review

"A true belletrist, a fair cross-examiner, Brădățan’s In Praise of Failure is a trial faithful to the form of Montaigne…The examination of total, irredeemable failure is what sets [the author’s] exploration apart. He takes failure not as a guide in what we should avoid, but as a guide in what we must be willing to accept." - Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion

"[Bradatan] has an encyclopedic knowledge combined with the gift of a master storyteller who knows how to stay out of the weeds. His prose is limpid and calm but spiced with just the right dash of irony. Most chapters move gracefully along, with switchbacks between a tale about one blunderer and a story about another. A rarity, In Praise of Failure is at once a substantial history of ideas and a page-turner." - Christian Century

"In Praise of Failure is a book that nearly anyone can read, and yet it will spark reflection in even the most seasoned professor. Both highly readable and thought-provoking, Costica Bradatan challenges readers theoretically, but also, and perhaps more importantly, challenges them on a more practical level…In our times of multiple crises, and especially for us who live in cultures where success is directly analogous to dignity, failure is something we all experience in penetrating ways." - Philosophy Now

"The style of [this book] reflects the humility Bradatan advocates at the moral level. His clear thinking and erudition come through in limpid, simple, yet highly articulate sentences...If the goal of Bradatan’s 'failure therapy' is to make us feel more at ease amid the ruins, it succeeds brilliantly." - New York Review of Books

"Each of the four failures in this book—physical, political, social, and ultimate—shows us the importance of philosophy for finding a good life. How shall we live today? We live in a fallen world, and the author inspires us to consider how to weave a life story, around and through our failures, into a better future." - Englewood Review of Books

"‘More than a form of behavior…humility should be seen as a form of knowledge,’ writes Bradatan. Such a knowledge has always been essential, but it is now so more than ever as our creaturely existence is threatened on every side…In Praise of Failure is a helpful orientation into this way of knowing—one that is an invitation toward the ground of our being." - Plough Quarterly

"Bradatan makes a persuasive case for failure’s generative ability to knock us out of our self-centeredness…Give[s] us good reason to hope that failure and disappointment are better understood as preludes, not conclusions, to the messy but fascinating narrative of becoming we call ‘life.’" - Yale Review

"Invites us to lean into failure, to domesticate it and allow it to guide us on the journey from the nothingness before birth to the nothingness after death…Bradatan is precise and captivating." - Textual Practice

"The ideas are boldly counterintuitive, and the illuminating historical examples complicate what it means to succeed. This is, ironically enough, a triumph." - Publishers Weekly