INTRODUCTION:

One may have a million definitions of failure but one thing always stands out of the crowd. It simply entails not getting at your target. One sets goals for oneself and one finds oneself not actualizing it. In another language I may choose to call it ‘missing the mark.’ Imagine hanging a piece of orange on the air and trying to throw stones at it. One fails when one is unable at each time to hit the orange. There is a difference though between goals and targets. Goals are general while targets are specific and quantifiable.

It suggests simply that there are different contexts we can view failure. If for instance, someone is contesting for a political position, and after the elections he is unable to win, in a general note or context; we may say that he has failed. Another example is in examinations. If you are not able to get up to the pass mark say 40%, in any of your courses, you are deemed to have failed.

This one pricks more than others: Have you heard people call others failure? Trying to analyze that further, it means that this individual has graduated from failing to being a failure. He has personalized it. It may take the most stringent and sophisticated philosophies to unravel the essentialities of failure. Is it a physical thing? Is it metaphysical? Is it between the real and unreal world? In fact there are much more questions than answers.

CONCEPTUAL CONSIDERATIONS

To a physicalist, failure is the inability not to have physical things desired at particular times, at least to a bearable minimum. If you do not have cars, clothes, houses and all that money can buy, you are not considered as a success but rather a failure. One is seen to have failed in life. It means that because one did not pass a course of study, one has failed and that if one failed again and again one becomes a failure. This view will be so enticing to a realist because to him, the only real things are things he can feel, touch, see, hear and smell. The limitation of this school of thought is that the individuals are just restricted to what comes into their conscious level of the mind. For them, ‘seeing is believing’ i.e. appearance is reality. The next question is: what does it mean to see? Extreme realists do not believe in the innate qualities of a person; they only asses a person by what they have done or have at the present moment. This makes them write themselves or other people off. But to their amazement, those people may turn to be ugly-ducklings.