Ambition

AMBITION is – in the twenty-first century – something of a lost concept, superseded by its hustle-culture hashtag derivatives: Are you harnessing the #grindset? Are you hustling to build a mission-driven empire? When you get up at 9am, I’m starting my second shift – it’s called the rise-and-grind. If your circle doesn’t discuss stocks and real estate it’s time to elevate. So goes the advice of cultural leaders like @thewealthdad at least.¹

Ambition (whether directed or not) has become what psychologists call a ‘condition of worth’ – an implicit expectation or standard an individual must meet to gain acceptance in broader society. Ambition is socially determined; while its lack spells pity or isolation, to be overambitious is to risk ostracisation, the boundaries of each a source of constant debate. In Annie Ernaux’s 1988 book A Woman’s Story (originally titled Une Femme), the author recounts the drives at the root of her mother’s life in the early 1900s:

“She was an energetic worker, and a difficult person to get on with. Reading serials was her only relaxation. She had a gift for writing and came top in her canton when she passed her primary certificate. She could have become a schoolmistress but her parents wouldn't let her leave the village. Parting with one's family was invariably seen as a sign of misfortune. (In Norman French, 'ambition' refers to the trauma of separation; a dog, for instance, can die of ambition.) To understand this story - which ended when she turned eleven - one must remember all those sentences beginning with 'in the old days': In the old days, one didn't go to school like today, one listened to one's parents, and so on.”²

However seductive it might be for an amateur etymologist, the idea that ambition refers to the trauma of separation is one that I have not been able to corroborate; but the reality of leaving one's family as a sign of misfortune, of overambition, shows just how malleable the concept’s borders are – perhaps she too needed simply to ‘elevate’?

In its roots ambition is a spatial concept, derived from the Latin ambio meaning to ‘go around’ or ‘encircle’. In Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses, written in the 8th year of the common era, we see a related term ambītae in use to identify the billowing winds encompassing the earth:

Tum freta diffundī rapidīsque tumēscere ventīs iussit et ambītae circumdare lītora terrae; [Then poured He forth the deeps and gave command that they should billow in the rapid winds, that they should compass every shore of earth.]

In more practical, military terms the C1st Lucan used the similarly related ambīrī to denote the tactics of Roman generals in Caesar’s civil war against the Roman Senate:

Mox iubet et tōtam pavidīs ā cīvibus urbem ambīrī [He soon orders the whole city by the terrified citizens to be marched around]

On the other hand, in times of peace within the Republic, ambio and its derivative ambiuntur took on a much more specific meaning: to ‘solicit for votes’, to ‘campaign’, or to ‘canvass’. Perhaps we might say today, to act on ambitions of political office. In Cicero’s De re publica, also composed in C1st, he writes:

Ferunt enim suffrāgia, mandant imperia, magistrātūs, ambiuntur… [For they hold suffrages, mandate orders, magistracies, are campaigned…]

It is worth noting that these uses of ambio define the term as a verb – ‘encircling’, ‘marching’ and ‘campaigning’ – and none give the contemporary sense of ‘striving’ in the abstract. The Latin noun ambitio (or ambitiōnem) however, introduces precisely this idea, as in the Roman poet Horace’s writing also of the C1st:

…ab avaritiā aut miserā ambitione laborat [...he suffers from avarice or miserable ambition]

And it is this formulation that is first borrowed into Old French and then Middle English. Here the term (now styled in the C14th as ambicioun) inherits an inflection perhaps evident in Horace’s usage alongside ‘avarice’ and ‘misery’ – the idea of ambition as in some way evil, a sin. In one of its first recorded uses in English ‘ambicion’ appears in a fascinating translation of the French confessional Somme le Roi, written by Kentish scribe Dan Michelis of Northgate who titled it Ayenbite of Inwyt (‘again-biting of inner wit’) as a ‘common English’ parsing of the title ‘Remorse of Conscience’. In the C14th text Michelis writes:

Þe uerþe boȝ of prede is fole wylninge. þet me clepeþ ine clergie : ambicion. þet is kuead wilninge heȝe to cliue. Þis zenne is þe dyeules panne of helle. huerinne he makeþ his sriinges. [The fourth branch of pride is foolish desire, which in clergy is called ambition. That is, an evil desire to climb high. This sin is the devil's pan of hell, wherein he makes his fryings.]

Quite unambiguous then is the moral character of the term! For Michelis – and, one presumes, the god-fearing population of England – ambition is disavowed, a ‘drive’ to be militant against, a term to be used primarily in the pejorative sense.

However, as with the Roman poets of the C1st who first elaborated the term, in discussions of ambition the figure (or rather the ghost?) of Julius Caesar cannot be fought off for long. In his C16th tragedy Julius Caesar Shakespeare meditates on the concept through the words of Brutus, as the character plots his assassination:

“[...] But ’tis a common proof That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder, Whereto the climber-upward turns his face; But, when he once attains the upmost round, He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend.”

Is Brutus right to judge Caesar for turning his back on such humble beginnings? To murder him for his ‘avarice’ and ‘miserable ambition’? Here a question is introduced into what had, perhaps, been a relatively straightforward moral framework; one which, as the C17th Age of Enlightenment emerges, men of letters like those writers of the Spectator – Joseph Addison and Richard Steele – tackle head-on. For example, on Thursday the 24th of May, 1711, Joseph Addison writes:

It is observed by Cicero, — that men [and by this he actually meant women] of the greatest and the most shining Parts are the most actuated by Ambition…³

Not so much a re-writing of history as a re-evaluation, a new moral framework. And by way of his reply, on Tuesday the 14th of August, Richard Steele shows a whole literature devoted to this outlook, citing the work of Sir Thomas Burnet and his Philosophick Pity of Human Life in his Sacred Theory of the Earth (written in 1719):

For what is this Life but a Circulation of little mean Actions? We lie down and rise again, dress and undress, feed and wax hungry, work or play, and are weary, and then we lie down again, and the Circle returns. [...] Our Reason lies asleep by us, and we are for the Time as arrant Brutes as those that sleep in the Stalls or in the Field. Are not the Capacities of Man higher than these? And ought not his Ambition and Expectations to be greater?

Why not aim higher? Seek out more? In 1882 American minister and abolitionist William Rounseville Alger, in his book The solitudes of nature and of man, answers:

It is not aspiration but ambition that is the mother of misery in man. Aspiration is a pure upward desire for excellence, without side-references; ambition is an inflamed desire to surpass others.

And so we return, crash-landing, from the ‘Enlightened’ premises of world-historical ambition to the ‘base’ social relativism of Ernaux’s stymied mother. Rarely now does ambition, even in its most ‘naked’ and positive light surpass this ‘inflamed desire to surpass others’, to move beyond the neoliberal fantasies of work and family (which Melinda Cooper has identified so-well in Family Values). In today’s hyper-capitalist society, in which all aspects of oneself are subject to constant reinvention and improvement we have been forced to make our peace with ambition. As reporter Jeff Gammage wrote in the Washington Post in 2001, in the context of yet another financial crisis:

“Rarely has our ambition ever been more, well, naked, or more useful.” ⁴

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Footnotes

1. https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2085558-if-youre-20-30-and-your-main-circle-isnt-discussing ↩

2. p.19 in the Fitzcarraldo edition. In the orignal French: En normand, « ambition » signifie la douleur d'étre séparé, un chien peut mourir d'ambition. (p.25) ↩

3. No. 73, Thursday, May 24, 1711, Addison ↩

4. Interviewed in 2001, Jensen said: "I'm definitely ambitious," Jensen says during an interview at the company headquarters in Paulsboro, N.J. "Particularly in two areas. One is a selfish ambition for my family, but as important to me as that is the success of the organization and the people here." Washington Post ↩