<i>The Art of Failure – The Anti Self-Help Guide</i> by Neel Burton
Authors: Andrew Papanikitas
Journal: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2010)

As a title, The Art of Failure conjures misleading images of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Is it really, as the cover suggests, an ‘Anti self-help guide’? The answer is perplexingly both ‘yes’ and ‘no’: The underlying aim of the book is to use philosophy and psychiatry in questioning what is regarded as success. In so doing, it claims to allow the reader to seek ‘true success,’ if this at all possible, and to flourish as a human being.

‘Know yourself’ is the central theme – the unexamined life risks a very superficial and hence fragile happiness. Socrates warns us that a busy life may be surprisingly barren. Burton builds on this idea and begins a series of symbolic assaults on the reader's ego by telling the tale of a successful 24-year-old stockbroker who jumped to his death from a trendy London rooftop restaurant in 2009. This and other narratives from philosophy, literature and psychiatry drive the book's contention that, if they aim at corporate or societal values, self-help guides may aid a superficial sense of success while a deeper flourishing goes by the wayside. The persevering reader will find that the author's symbolic challenges become tools for self-reflection.

Success is often measured against external criteria, often quantitative such as salary or possessions of social and financial value. Burton uses the cautionary tale of Tolstoy's Ivan Illich, whose social ascent comes at a cost to his intellectual development and family life. In a satirical coup de gras, he fatally injures himself while making improvements to his house. Burton loosely uses ‘Bourgeois’ and ‘Middle-class’ as soft targets throughout the book to declaim our reliance on others to tell us when we should be happy or consider ourselves successful. He quotes Renton's powerfully snide speech from the novel and film Trainspotting, ‘Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a f***ing big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electric tin openers.’

Burton uses the 19th-century philosopher Soren Kierkegard's three lives to illustrate levels of self-awareness: the aesthetic, ethical and religious lives. The person who leads the aesthetic life aims solely at the satisfaction of his desires. As the aesthete adapts his behaviour to his environment, he does not have a consistent, coherent self. Controversially perhaps, Burton uses the example of a heroin addict as someone driven by desire. When heroin is freely available the addict can generally abide by societal norms, but when the addiction can no longer be afforded he will be driven to crime as a source of funding. By contrast, the person who lives the ethical life lives according to universal moral principles regardless of the circumstances. The highest type of life, which Kierkegard calls the religious life, has characteristics of both the aesthetic and ethical. Like the aesthetic life, the religious life prioritizes individual circumstances and leaves open the possibility of immoral behaviour. However, like the ethical life, it acknowledges the authority of universal, determinate moral principles, as embodied in social norms and conventions. The religious life opens the door to moral indeterminacy. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Though Kierkegard's lives are used to illustrate the superficial disadvantage of the unexamined life (in a chapter entitled ‘Fear’), they illustrate a problem with taking some of Burton's assertions at face value. The Ivan Illich parable and the criticism of middle class are idealistic, and more criticism of specific instances of unthinking materialism than of a historical movement which allowed the possibility of social mobility, and of transcending the aesthetic. Burton paradoxically acknowledges the idea that ‘values’ which constrain freedom are not timeless and universal but the product of a given community, in a given society at a given time.

Throughout the book, there is certain ambivalence. On the one hand he describes the Soviet use of psychiatry to suppress dissenting cultural and religious views. On the other he expresses, with some nostalgia, the notion that, ‘it is too late to go back to living as our ancestors once did, and subsume our egos into the collective ego of some group’. Though he chooses not to follow the point – the book contains several starting points for discussion which are not followed – he does both describe the necessity for individualism and the pain of social alienation incumbent in accounts of mental illness.

‘The problem with the modern man,’ writes Burton, ‘… is forever stuck somewhere in-between [perspectives] … As a result, he has neither the joy of the perfect moment, nor the perspective of a human life-time, nor the immortality of the eternal.’ The chapters are progressive and thematic, they incrementally challenge the reader's ego: For example ‘Mania’ describes the possible existential dangers of the busy life, ‘Fear’ for the most part tackles the anxious discomfort of self-awareness, and ‘Death’ puts mortality and the biological survival imperative at the heart of all neurosis.

The Art of Failure is ‘pop-philosophy’ with a large side-helping of ‘pop psychiatry.’ It is aimed at the ‘hoi poloi’ or the non-philosophizing majority in 21st-century culture. It is easy to follow but many of its points are basic and some are open to challenge. One wonders if the throw-away comment that the best teachers are unwilling teachers is deliberately contentious or an indictment of pedagogical power – we never find out. A danger of eschewing all external values may be that the Art of Failure becomes a manifesto for a sublime egocentric selfishness! The Art of Failure with illustrate and entertain, will enlighten and infuriate, but has left this reviewer with a slightly deeper knowledge of himself.

ISBN 978-0-9560353-3-2, RRP £12.99Published March 2010