The challenge of failure

`Failure` is an iridescent term: it can cause anxiety, but it can also somehow express a particular appeal. At what point do we think that a thing (or a person) has failed, and what exactly do we associate with this expression? The work tries to describe the social atmosphere of our present more precisely in order to be able to give an answer to these questions. What people understand by `fail` is different at each time; but what exactly is understood by failure today? What fears are associated with this term? With the help of sociological and philosophical perspectives, the work shows that people today are strongly influenced by the fact that they have to constantly optimize themselves and at the same time they also have to perform and achieve more and more. At the same time, we are thrown back on ourselves in the question of how to shape our lives: There are no longer any religious or cultural grand `narratives` that answer the question of a successful life per se. The pressure on the individual to create a successful life is thus increasing - and yet at the same time there are also social conditions that significantly shape this seemingly completely individual and private project. The work tries to work out this tension in the concept of failure. On the one hand, it tries to show that only where a risk of failure is taken, something like new meanings can be found; on the other hand, it elaborates that failure is never just a purely individual experience (or worse: a completely individual guilt). For this very reason, it is particularly interesting who a society also perceives as `failed` and who not. The work likewise attempts to relate the question of failure to fundamental questions of contemporary religious education. For an example: Why is it necessary to put the narratives of a religious tradition at stake (in processes of religious education) and not simply pass on its (fixed?) meaning? Especially in the field of (religious) education, `failing` or the risk of failure is an essential component, which is necessary in order to uncover and find new meanings and thus also new knowledge: Education is always already more than handing down existing orders of knowledge. Where learning, on the other hand, is thought of as merely the acquisition and adoption of what is already there (what is already known), we cannot yet speak of education: Education always means risk, venture, and the search to unfold anew the meaning of something (a work of art or, say, a biblical narrative) for today.