说一个人可以成功地失败听起来真的很奇怪。在某件事上成功是达到你的目标，而在某件事上失败是没有达到你试图达到的目标。我可能成功也可能失败在卧推我的体重。如果我试着卧推我的体重并成功做到了，我就成功了，如果我试着做但没有成功，我就失败了。所以，成功和失败似乎是不相容的。

But this isn’t the end of the story. In fact, it’s just a short-sighted and pedantic beginning. If we loosen up and shift perspective a little bit, the idea that it’s possible to fail successfully not only makes sense, but turns out to have a whole lot going for it.

The principle of successful failing is significant for me as a teacher, and it’s something that I introduce right at the beginning of my introductory undergraduate philosophy classes. Here’s why. Despite its head-in-the-clouds reputation, philosophy is very much a hands-on discipline. You can’t learn it without doing it. So—to borrow an image from my scientist colleagues—each of my philosophy courses has a “laboratory” component where students roll up their intellectual sleeves and get down to doing philosophy.

This is where the trouble usually starts. Students become terrified of getting things “wrong,” and their fear of failing paralyzes them. But when you do philosophy, youalwaysget things wrong—or rather, there’s always some way of calling a line of reasoning into question (just add or subtract a premise or two). So, we find ourselves at the end of a dead-end street unless I can help the students in my class make friends with failure.

One way I do this is to introduce them to the philosopher Daniel Dennett. Dennett is a big fan of failure—or, as he prefers to call it, “making mistakes.” In fact, the first chapter of his bookIntuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking是错误的唯一值赞歌。大约四百年前，科学哲学的鼻祖弗朗西斯·培根(Francis Bacon)曾观察到，“真理更容易从错误中出现，而不是从困惑中出现”，但丹尼特将这一见解提升到了一个全新的水平。如果通往真理的快车道上铺满了错误，那么任何有兴趣获得真理的人最好继续犯一些有益的、有成效的错误，而不是东拉西扯，害怕犯错。当我让我的学生们读丹尼特的那一章时，我祈祷他们会牢记他的明智建议:“你应该成为自己错误的鉴赏家，在脑海中翻看它们，就像它们是艺术品一样，在某种程度上它们确实是艺术品。”我希望我也能记住这一点，以避免卷入某些哲学家所钟爱的那种无果而终的“想对就对”的游戏。

This is great and inspiring stuff, but it doesn’t come anywhere near to exhausting the importance of successful failure. Sigmund Freud was another aficionado of errors. In fact, he wrote a whole book about a special kind of error that he calledFehlleistungen, a term that’s entered everyday English as “Freudian slips.” To appreciate whatFehlleistungenhave to do with failing successfully, have a look at what Bruno Bettelheim has to say about them in his book onFreud and Man’s Soul.

The term combines two common, strangely opposite nouns, with which everybody has immediate and significant association.Leistunghas the basic meaning of accomplishment, achievement, performance, which is qualified by theFehlto indicate an achievement that somehow failed—was off the mark, in error. What happens inFehlleistungis simultaneously… a real achievement and a howling mistake.

只有当我们错误地假设人类的思维是统一的、对自身透明的，是一个相对没有冲突的区域，而不是像弗洛伊德那样有力地主张的，是一个混乱的、不相容的欲望的温床时，成功的失败才显得奇怪。假设你有两个欲望，但它们彼此不相容，所以满足其中一个就不可能满足另一个。在这种情况下，一个愿望的失败可能是另一个愿望成功的必要条件。这是弗洛伊德的一个例子。有一次，奥地利下议院的总统宣布，“我宣布本次会议休会。”当然，他是想说“我宣布会议开始”，所以他的拙劣的表述是失败的。但是，他那相反的不开会议的愿望蒙蔽了他的嘴巴，从这个角度来看，他的失败是绝对的成功。For Freud, our lives are littered with successful failures—bungled actions, misspeakings, misrememberings, and the like—which, if we resist the temptation to think of themmerelyas failures, offer great opportunities for gaining insight into our complex and contradictory inner lives.

My third and final witness for the defense of successful failure is the Irish writer and Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett. Unlike Dennett, whose take on successful failure has to do with the forward march of knowledge, and Freud, whose twist on it concerns the humbling task of getting to know yourself, Beckett’s approach is a deeply ethical one.

Nowadays, a lot of people have encountered the phrase “Fail better,” because it’s been adopted as an upbeat mantra by the entrepreneurial set. But its source is Samuel Beckett’s darkly enigmatic 1983 prose piece entitled “Worstward Ho!” The passage in which it appears reads: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

If you want to understand what Beckett’s on about here, you’ve got to trash the motivational speaker-ish connotations that “fail better” has become encrusted with and think of it—as Beckett intended—against the backdrop of our journey towards oblivion. It’s a basic condition of life that death and decay await us all, so ultimate failure is always looming on the horizon. And along the way, there’s no avoiding the fact there are many smaller failures that each of us must contend with.

那么，在我们所拥有的越来越少的时间里，我们能做的最好的事情是什么呢?挣扎着站起来，再试一次——就像可怜的西西弗斯把巨石推上山，结果它又掉了下来——这样再失败一次，但也许能获得一丝智慧，以便下次失败得更好一些，过一种虽然不可避免地以失败告终，但却成功地失败的生活。