Ineluctable failure does not prevent winners and losers, truths and errors
Evidence
In Plutarch Lied Pierrefeu rightly says that in war there is no victory which can not be regarded as unsuccessful, for the objective which one aims at is the total annihilation of the enemy and this result is never attained; yet there are wars which are won and wars which are lost. So is it with any activity; failure and success are two aspects of reality which at the start are not perceptible. That is what makes criticism so easy and art so difficult: the critic is always in a good position to show the limits that every artist gives himself in choosing himself; painting is not given completely either in Giotto or Titian or Cezanne; it is sought through the centuries and is never finished; a painting in which all pictorial problems are resolved is really inconceivable; painting itself is this movement toward its own reality; it is not the vain displacement of a millstone turning in the void; it concretizes itself on each canvas as an absolute existence. … Art and science do not establish themselves despite failure but through it; which does not prevent there being truths and errors, masterpieces and lemons, depending upon whether the discovery or the painting has or has not known how to win the adherence of human consciousnesses; this amounts to saying that failure, always ineluctable, is in certain cases spared and in others not. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 123
Categorization
- SHARE: The Pierrefeu war point — a victory is always ‘unsuccessful’ against the total-annihilation objective yet wars are still won and lost — is a neat epistemic nugget for a friend into military history.
- XREF: connects to: Incorrect for practical endeavors is revealed through catastrophic failure rather than mere anomalies