We began the seminar by asking what, exactly, individual ambition entails.

We agreed that

ambition must be motivated by a strong desire, but found it harder to reach consensus on what

characteristics that desire must have. Of course, part of the difficulty was simply that we use the

word ‘ambition’ in multiple ways; the rapacious businessman scheming to win a government

contract by means of corruption, the general launching a campaign to drive a foreign power out

of a strategically important sea and the philosopher seeking to understand the nature of the good

all merit the adjective ‘ambitious’, but in the three different senses described by Bacon in

Aphorism 129.

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Still, how these ambitions relate to each other, and whether there is an essential element unifying

all of them, remained a topic for discussion. Bacon calls them “three stages,” suggesting it may

be possible to in some way ‘ascend’ from the lower to the higher, that the most base is in fact an

undeveloped form of the most noble. It’s a commonplace that a kind of societal higher ambition

can develop from individual lower ambitions; Lincoln’s mention of patent laws as joining the

fuel of interest with the fire of genius reflects the maxim, deeply embedded in the modern view

of society, that private vice can make for public virtue. But this does not tell us how higher and

lower ambition can relate to one another in a single individual. Instead we used Xenophon, who

seems often motivated by the same common desires as other key characters (e.g. fame, wealth,

personal homecoming) but also seems to be the very embodiment of the higher ambition insofar

as it can appear on the political stage, as an illustration of the individual ‘ascension’ implied by

Bacon’s stages. More on this below!

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One issue we began to discuss explicitly, and that I think ran beneath much of the seminar

implicitly, was the difference between ambition and aspiration. Agnes Callard has written that

“the ambitious person, qua ambitious, is engaged in getting what he wants, as opposed to

learning what he wants,” which latter engagement she calls ‘aspiration’. Bacon’s formulation of

the highest stage of ambition, the labor “to establish and extend the power and dominion of the

human race itself over the whole universe,” on its face seems like an example of the former (that

is, of ambition rather than aspiration in Callard’s terms). So too does his statement in the preface

that “the angels fell through hunger for power; men through hunger for knowledge” and thus that

the ultimate end of scientific work should not be base things including “intellectual satisfaction”,

but rather “charity” or again “the benefit and use of life”. This interpretation, wherein Bacon is

more interested in acquiring the means necessary for ends he takes for granted than in

questioning and developing those ends themselves, might cite as its most striking support the end

of Aphorism 129, in which he casually waves away the objection that sciences might be

“corrupted” to serve “evil purposes” on the basis that “right reason and sound religion” will

necessarily orient science towards proper ends.

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But I read the end of 129 as partly ironic; after all, the brunt of Book 1 is a painstakingly detailed

diagnosis of how many and how deep-rooted the obstacles are to “right reason and sound

religion.” Moreover, in the seminar we struggled with the paragraph following the scale of

ambitions in 129, in which Bacon writes that “the very contemplation of things as they are… is

in itself more praiseworthy than all the fruit of inventions,” and with the end of Aphorism 124:

“truth and utility are the very things themselves; so works themselves are of greater value as
pledges of truth than as comforts of life.” Thus Bacon seems at different moments to declare fruit

or light as higher than the other. We didn’t resolve this apparent contradiction (indeed, Bacon’s

leaving unanswered “if ambition [the third stage] can be called” perhaps suggests he was

sensitive to the contradiction but didn’t seek to resolve it), but we did suggest that it might be a

continuing and perhaps essential ambiguity of the scientific endeavor. Is science ultimately the

work of ambition or aspiration? Is it at heart a practical or a philosophical project?

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In the course of the preceding discussions we also made gestures towards a history of individual

ambition, noting how it had been glorified in antiquity and then rendered problematic in the

Christian world. We found it more resistant to clear diagnosis in the contemporary moment. On

the one hand, the fact that the room could not recall the name of a single 21st century Nobel

laureate in the sciences highlighted the extent to which we tend to consider contemporary science

as an arena for the accomplishments of institutions—laboratories, research teams, R&D divisions

of private corporations—rather than individual geniuses working outside or even in opposition to

those institutions. On the other hand, we noted the ubiquity of the rhetoric of individual, self-

made, genius ‘disrupters’ in business and especially technology firms. We left on the table the

question of what this apparent migration of scientific individual ambition from light-bearing to

fruit-bearing research might reveal about broader historical currents.

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Moreover, we explored to what extent individual ambition finds its most appropriate and highest

form in the ambition to achieve the legendary and even mythical status of a Newton or an

Einstein, in other words an individual who seemingly single-handedly advances history. Much of
what we discussed in Lincoln’s speech concerned the tension between his portrayal of the fervor

for the new and perhaps even the arrogance of Young America as necessary to innovation and his

urging humility and respect to its Old Fogey predecessors. The portrait he paints of scientific

history is one of gradual accumulation of knowledge and progress in application, a series of

improvements on age old inventions. He is highly sensitive both to the need to in a sense free

oneself from the weight of all that history, to brush off “the dust of ages”, and yet somehow

simultaneously to appreciate the extent to which—as Newton famously put it—if we see far, it is

because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

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Our discussion of the Anabasis of Cyrus took up many of these questions in another form. We

spent hours discussing when Xenophon was motivated by lower ambitions and when by higher,

especially in the pivotal moments of deciding to join the campaign (because Proxenus had

“promised that if [Xenophon] came, he would make him a friend of Cyrus, whom Proxenus

himself said he believed to be better for himself than his fatherland was”), of taking leadership

(following a dream which arguably portended good for Xenophon but danger for the army), of

planning and then giving up the plan to found a city (with regards to which he is accused,

arguably justly, of pursuing personal wealth and glory at the expense of the good of the army and

without their input), and of deciding whether to accept sole generalship (which he declines, but

arguably only because of the “danger of throwing away the reputation he had already earned”).

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Another topic of discussion was to what extent Xenophon was motivated by ambition and to

what extent aspiration. Socrates criticizes him for asking the oracle only about the means to join
the campaign (which god to sacrifice to), having already decided upon the ends (to join)—in

other words, for how to get what he wants rather than to learn what he should want. We debated

an interpretation of the sacrifices he offered for the founding of a city as essentially a repetition

of that moment (according to which interpretation he goes about the sacrifices having already

decided upon the end of founding a city, rather than attempting to investigate whether that goal is

appropriate). These issues seem deeply connected (though perhaps not equivalent) to what is

surely one of the most central issues of the Anabasis, whether Xenophon is primarily engaged in

a philosophical or a political endeavor and to what extent it is possible to be engaged in both

simultaneously.

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Xenophon’s fashion of leadership also raised the same questions about in what sense higher

ambition can be individual. The crucial moment at which Xenophon rises to the plate of

leadership is the one in which he realizes that he must place confidence in and rely on himself,

rather than anyone else: “Why am I lying here? […] As for defending ourselves, no one is

making preparations or showing any care…. From what city do I expect a general who will carry

out these measures? And as for myself, what age am I waiting for?” Time and time again

throughout the Anabasis, Xenophon relies on his own savvy and wisdom to lead the army

homewards. And yet he also constantly emphasizes that he is a member of the collective who

will deign do the same work as anyone else, and even more importantly that all his individual

power ultimately comes from the army itself (e.g. V.7.9). He often presents his role as merely

channeling and directing the virtues of the Greek army, by which it ultimately procures its own

success. He routinely invokes the view of leadership that was mostly clearly expressed by
Clearchus, in which “with you I think that I would be honored wherever I may be, but separated

from you I think I would not be sufficient either to benefit a friend or to defend an enemy.” (But

note that the text’s last mention of Xenophon is as “now capable of benefiting someone else as

well”—but as a result not of political rule, but rather of private wealth acquired at perhaps the

precise moment he leaves the army!)