A note on the failure and success of actions

Sometimes an action leads to a dead end.

Being able to act is one of the foundations of human life. I think that it’s even more basic than being able to think. That’s why in one of my blogs I replaced Descartes’s famous “I think, therefore I am” by “I act, therefore I am” (see my blog dated 3 March 2008: http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2008/03/i-act-therefore-i-am.html).

Although acting is fundamental to man, this doesn’t mean that the performance of an action always goes smoothly. Some actions are better to be described as attempts that can fail or succeed. Nevertheless, it belongs to the essence of actions that most of them succeed. Therefore, it is not normal to see each action as an attempt, before it happens. We just do, and when a normal action fails, afterwards we may say that we attempted to perform it but failed, but this doesn’t mean that it is right to say that the action concerned was an attempt. We just say something like “Something went wrong”.

An action can fail in two ways. Either it is so that the action hasn’t been finished, or the action didn’t bring the result we expected or hoped for. In the latter case, the action hasn’t failed in the sense that it hasn’t been accomplished, for the action as such is there. The runner has finished the race, but didn’t break the record. The long-jumper had a personal record but didn’t qualify for the championship, which was her aim. In such cases the finished action failed in view of its outcome. The jump is good but it doesn’t have the aimed result, even though it was her personal best. Or, another example, she opened the window and fresh air streamed into the room, but the room didn’t cool down, which was just why she opened the window: The effect was absent even though the action – in the sense of an intentional piece of behaviour – had been performed as planned.

What we see here is that the success of an action is not the reverse of its failure. For what should “the reverse” mean in this case? If an action failed, because the intended aim hasn’t been achieved, there are at least two things that might have happened, as we have seen: The agent has not performed the action to its end or the agent fully performed the action without achieving the aimed result. If we should call the latter the reverse of a successful action, there would be no room for unfinished actions, even though they happen often in life. But if we should call an unfinished action the reverse of a successful action, there would be no room for a nice try.

Is failing in acting bad? In a certain sense it is but not if we keep in mind that acting is basic for existing as a human being and that also a failed action is an action. Failures belong to acting. Nobody is perfect and when failing has become inherently impossible, we cannot act any longer. Then life has ended.