I am just back from a pilgrimage to Athens, the city of Athena, Socrates, and Zeno.
Last time I visited, in 1996, I was a mere seventeen, and just out of school. So this time, I saw it with very different eyes—showing that we see not only with our eyes but also with our mind.
The ancient agora, the cradle of Western civilization. Back in the day, there were many more shops and stalls, and fewer trees.
Athens too has changed: many of the museums I visited, such as the Acropolis Museum, had not even been built. I spent two days in the amazing National Archaeological Museum, and I also recommend the much quieter Benaki Museum and Museum of Cycladic Art. In the Museum of Greek Technology, I was reminded that Plato, whom we do not normally think of as an inventor, designed the world’s first alarm clock. It was as tall as a man, and hydraulically operated. Hydraulics was also the basis of the world’s first robot, the automatic servant of Philon, designed to… serve wine.
A rare mature Augustus in the National Archaeological Museum. Augustus was quite vain, and would always have himself represented as young and handsome.
In the evenings, I turned to the city’s wine bars. Greek wine too has come a long way. Back in 1996, it was mostly about the horrid pine-infused Retsina—which is now nowhere to be seen. At Vintage Wine Bar, where they have hundreds of wines by the glass, I was so impressed by the mineral wines of Santorini that I have already booked a trip for next spring!
On volcanic Santorini, the vines are trained in an idiosyncratic basket shape [kouloura]. Their root systems may be several centuries old, accounting for the profound minerality of the wines.
For me, travel is not about relaxing, but about getting inspired—and, also, reminding myself how happy I am at home.
A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions. —Marcus Aurelius
Ambition might be defined as a striving for some kind of achievement or distinction, and involves, first, the desire for such, and, second, the willingness to work towards it even in the face of adversity or failure.
To be ambitious is to achieve first and foremost not for the sake of achievement itself (which is to be high-reaching) but for the sake of distinguishing oneself from others. Were we the last person on earth, it would make little or no sense to be ambitious.
Ambition is often confused with aspiration. But unlike mere aspiration, which has a particular goal for object, ambition is a trait or disposition, and, as such, is persistent and pervasive. Having achieved one goal, the truly ambitious person soon formulates another at which to keep on striving.
Ambition is often spoken of in the same breath as hope, as in ‘hopes and ambitions’. If hope is the desire for something to happen combined with an anticipation of it happening, ambition is the desire for achievement combined with the willingness to work towards it. The opposite of hope is fear, hopelessness, or despair; the opposite of ambition is ‘lack of ambition’, which is not in itself a negative state.
East and West
Perhaps it is even the preferable state. In the East, ambition is seen as a vice or evil that, by tying us down to worldly pursuits, holds us back from the spiritual life and its fruits of virtue, wisdom, and tranquillity. In contrast, in the West, ambition is lauded as a precondition of success, even though the Western canon broadly falls against it.
For instance, in the Republic, Plato says that, because they are devoid of ambition, good people shun politics, leaving us to be ruled by bad people and their petty ambitions. Even if invited, good people would refuse to rule, preferring instead to hide in their libraries and gardens. To force them out, Plato goes so far as to advocate a penalty for refusing to rule.
Healthy Ambition
Aristotle had a more nuanced take on ambition. In his Ethics, he defines virtue as a disposition to aim at the intermediate between the excess and the deficiency, which, unlike the excess or the deficiency, is a form of success and therefore worthy of praise. For example, those who run headlong into every danger are rash, while those who flee from every danger are cowards, but courage is indicated by the mean or intermediate.
To this day, we speak of ambition after Aristotle, as ‘healthy ambition’, ‘unhealthy ambition’, and ‘lack of ambition’. Healthy ambition can be understood as the measured striving for achievement or distinction, and unhealthy ambition as the disordered striving for such. While healthy ambition is constructive and enabling, unhealthy ambition is destructive and inhibiting, and, thus, more akin to greed.
The Psychology of Ambition
The highly ambitious are sensitive to failure, and experience almost constant dissatisfaction or frustration. As with Sisyphus, their task is never accomplished, and, as with Tantalus, their prize is always out of reach. Just like Tantalus had a rock dangling over his head, so the ambitious have the noose of failure hanging about their neck.
The fear of failure checks the ambition of all but the most courageous, or rash, of people. For just as mania can lead into depression, so ambition can lead into anguish and despair. To live with ambition is to live in fear and anxiety, unless, that is, the weight of our ambition can be alleviated by gratitude, which is the feeling of appreciation for all that we already have. Although gratitude is especially lacking in future-focused people, ambition is much less toxic if even without it life can still seem worth living.
We are not ambitious unless we are willing to make sacrifices—even though the end of our ambition may not be worth our sacrifices, and not just because it may never be attained or approached. It could even be argued that with pure, naked ambition, the end is never worth the sacrifice. Fortunately, ambition is rarely pure but usually admixed with unselfish aims and motives, even if these may be more incidental than deliberate and determining; and it may be that our greatest achievements, that man’s greatest achievements, are all, or almost all, accidents of ambition.
In that much, ambition is like the carrot that goads the donkey that pulls the cart. Studies have found that, on average, the ambitious attain higher levels of education and income, build more prestigious careers, and, despite the nocuous effects of their ambition, report higher levels of overall life satisfaction. Owing to bad luck and poor judgement, most ambitious people sooner or later fall short of their ambitions, but that still lands them far ahead of their more unassuming peers.
Psychoanalytic theories
Why are some people more ambitious than others? To cut a long story short, ambition is a complex construct borne out of a host of factors including but not limited to: parental role models and expectations, birth order and sibling rivalries, fear of failure and rejection, feelings of inferiority or superiority, intelligence, past achievements, competitiveness, envy, anger, revenge, and the instinctual drives for life and sex.
From a purely psychoanalytical perspective, ambition can be thought of as an ego defence, which serves, like all ego defences, to enforce and uphold a certain idea of the self. Rather than ambition, which is a sophisticated defence, those who lack what it takes to put themselves out there are more likely to respond with less mature defences, for instance, by rationalizing that ‘life is unfair’ or that they are ‘less of a leader and more of a team-player’. If their ego is much bigger than their courage, they may become dismissive or even destructive, the latter also being a means of drawing attention or sabotaging themselves to provide a ready excuse for their lack of success: “It’s not that I failed, it’s that…”
A defence that merits exploration in the context of ambition is sublimation, which is among the most mature and successful of all defences. If a man is angry at his boss, he may go home and kick the dog, or he may instead take the dog out for a shared run. The first instance (kicking the dog) is an example of displacement, the redirection of uncomfortable feelings towards someone or something less important, which is an immature defence. The second instance (taking the dog out for a shared run) is an example of sublimation, the channelling of unproductive or destructive forces into socially condoned and often constructive activities, which is, of course, a much more mature defence.
Another example of sublimation, more pertinent to ambition, is the person with sadistic or even homicidal urges who joins the military to provide an outlet for these urges, or who, like Justice Wargrave in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939), becomes a judge who doles out the death penalty to murderers. In the novel’s postscript, a fishing trawler dredges up a bottle just off the Devon coast. The bottle contains the confession of the late Wargrave in which he reveals a lifelong sadistic temperament juxtaposed with a fierce sense of justice. Although he had longed to torture, terrify, and kill, he could not bring himself to harm innocent people: so instead he became a hanging judge and thrilled at the sight of convicted (and guilty) people trembling with fear.
Final thoughts
In life, few things are either good or bad. Rather, their good and bad depend on what we are able to make out of them. People with a high degree of healthy ambition are those with the insight and strength (strength that is often born out of insight) to control the blind forces of ambition, that is, to shape their ambition so that it matches their interests and ideals, and to harness it so that it fires them without also burning them or those around them. The highest understanding, born out of humility, is perhaps that it is not necessary to be ambitious to be high-reaching, or indeed to feel alive.
People shrink or expand into the degree and nature of their ambitions. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers.
Adapted from Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
When Plato first appeals to the Forms (or Theory of Forms) at the end of Book 5 of the Republic, he assumes that the reader is already familiar with the concept, perhaps from earlier works such as the Phaedo and Phaedrus.
But now, in discussing the education of the guardians, Plato introduces the elusive Form of the Good [hē toû agathoû idea]. It is by attaining the Form of the Good that the philosopher-king is made fit to rule.
As the Form of the Good is impossible to describe, and difficult to imagine, Socrates tries to convey its essence through three connected metaphors: the sun, line, and cave.
1. The Metaphor of the Sun
Just as it is by the light of the sun that the visible is made apparent to the eye, so it is by the light of truth and being – in contrast to the twilight of becoming and perishing – that the nature of reality is made apprehensible to the soul.
Just as light and sight may be said to be like the sun, and yet not to be the sun, so science and truth may be said to be like the Good, and yet not to be the Good; it is by the sun that there is light and sight, and it is by the Good that there is science and truth.
Just as the sun is the author of nourishment and generation, so the Good is the author of being and essence. Thus, the Good is beyond being, and the cause of all existence.
2. The Metaphor of the Line
A line is cut into two unequal parts, and each of them is divided again in the same proportion. The two main divisions correspond to the intelligible world and to the visible world. One section in the visible division consists of images, that is, shadows and reflections, and is accessed through imagination. The other, higher section in the visible division consists of sensible particulars and is accessed through belief. One section in the intelligible division consists of Forms and is accessed through thought, but via sensible particulars and hypotheses, as when geometers use a picture of a triangle to help reason about triangularity, or make appeal to axioms to prove theorems. The other, higher section in the intelligible division also consists of Forms but is accessed by understanding, a purely abstract science which requires neither sensible particulars nor hypotheses, but only an unhypothetical first principle, namely, the Form of the Good. The purpose of education is to move the philosopher through the various sections of the line until he reaches the Form of the Good.
3. The Metaphor or Allegory of the Cave
Human beings have spent all their lives in an underground cave or den which has a mouth open towards the light. They have their legs and their necks chained so that they cannot move, and can see only in front of them, towards the back of the cave. Above and behind them a fire is blazing, and between them and the fire there is a raised way along which there is a low wall. Men pass along the wall carrying all sorts of statues, and the fire throws the shadows of these statues onto the back of the cave. All the prisoners ever see are the shadows, and so they suppose that the shadows are the objects themselves.
If a prisoner is unshackled and turned towards the light, he suffers sharp pains, but in time he begins to see the statues and moves from the cognitive stage of imagination to that of belief. The prisoner is then dragged out of the cave, where the light is so bright that he can only look at the shadows, and then at the reflections, and then finally at the objects themselves: not statues this time, but real objects. In time, he looks up at the sun, and understands that the sun is the cause of everything that he sees around him, of light, of vision, and of the objects of vision. In so doing, he passes from the cognitive stage of thought to that of understanding.
The purpose of education is to drag the prisoner as far out of the cave as possible; not to instil knowledge into his soul, but to turn his whole soul towards the sun, which is the Form of the Good. Once out of the cave, the prisoner is reluctant to descend back into the cave and get involved in human affairs. When he does, his vision is no longer accustomed to the dark, and he appears ridiculous to his fellow men. However, he must be made to descend back into the cave and partake of human labours and honours, whether they are worth having or not. This is because the State aims not at the happiness of a single person or single class, but at the happiness of all its citizens. In any case, the prisoner has a duty to give service to the State, since it is by the State that he was educated to see the light of the sun.
The State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst… You must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life… And the only life which looks down upon the life of political ambition is that of true philosophy. Do you know of any other?
The Form of the Good seems to be the source of all existence and knowledge, and yet to lie beyond them. Looking beyond the West, it seems to me that the Form of the Good is very similar to the Hindu concept of Brahman.
The premise of Plato’s Symposium [Banquet] is that each of the guests at the banquet is to deliver a speech in praise of love. Aristophanes, however, chooses to deliver his speech in the form of a myth about the origins of love. This is the famous Myth of Aristophanes, which appears to lean upon elements of the cosmogony of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. The significance of the Myth of Aristophanes is that it contributed to the development of the modern, romantic notion of love as existential and redeeming.
The Myth
In the beginning, there were three kinds of people: male, descended from the sun; female, descended from the earth; and hermaphrodite, with both male and female parts, descended from the moon.
These early people were completely round, each with four arms and four legs, two identical faces on opposite sides of a head with four ears, and all else to match. They walked both forward and backward and ran by turning cartwheels on their eight limbs, moving in circles like their parents the planets.
Because they were wild and unruly and threatening to scale the heavens, Zeus, the father of the gods, cut each one down the middle ‘like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling’—and even threatened to do the same again so that they might hop on one leg.
Apollo, the god of light and enlightenment, then turned their heads to make them face towards their wound, pulled their skin around to cover up the wound, and tied it together at the navel like a purse. He made sure to leave a few wrinkles on what became known as the abdomen so that they might be reminded of their punishment.
After that, people searched all over for their other half. When they finally found it, they wrapped themselves around it so tightly and unremittingly that they began to die from hunger and neglect. Taking pity on them, Zeus moved their genitals to the front so that those who were previously androgynous could procreate, and those who were previously male could obtain satisfaction and move on to higher things.
This is the origin of our desire for others: those of us who desire members of the opposite sex used to be hermaphrodites, whereas men who desire men used to be male, and women who desire women used to be female.
When we find our other half, we are ‘lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy’ that cannot be accounted for by mere lust, but by the need to be whole again, to be restored to our original nature. Our greatest wish, if we could only have it, would then be for Hephæstus, the god of fire, to melt us into one another so that our souls could be at one and share in a common fate.
In Book 3 of the Republic, having discussed the class of producers and the class of guardians, Socrates goes on to discuss the third and last class of citizen in his ideal State, the class of rulers.
Rulers should be chosen from amongst the guardians after close observation and rigorous testing of their loyalty to the State.
Guardians who are chosen as rulers should receive further education; guardians who are not chosen as rulers should no longer be known as ‘guardians’ but as ‘auxiliaries,’ whose role it is to implement the will of the rulers.
Socrates says that all the citizens should be told a useful or noble lie [gennaion pseudos] so as to promote allegiance to the State and enforce its three-tiered social order.
According to this myth of the metals, every citizen is born out of the earth of the State and every other citizen is his brother or sister. Yet God has framed them differently, mixing different metals into their soul: gold for the rulers, silver for the auxiliaries, and brass or iron for the husbandmen and craftsmen.
Children are usually made of the same metal as their parents, but if this is not the case the child must either descend or ascend in the social order. If ever a child made of brass or iron was to become a guardian, the State would be destroyed.
As guardians are made of divine gold and silver, they should have nothing to do with the earthly sorts which have been ‘the source of many unholy deeds’.
Guardians should not have any private property; they should live together in housing provided by the state, and receive from the citizens no more than their daily sustenance.
Guardians may be the happiest of men in spite, or because, of their deprivations, for the arts and crafts are equally liable to degenerate under the influence of wealth as they are under the influence of poverty: ‘the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent’.
In summary: All citizens should be told a useful lie to promote loyalty to the state and enforce its three-tiered social order. According to this ‘myth of the metals’, every citizen is born out of the earth of the state, and every other citizen is his brother or sister. But God has mixed different metals into their souls: gold for rulers, silver for auxiliaries, and iron for producers. Children are usually made of the same stuff as their parents; if not, the child should either ascend or descend in the social order. Should the wrong metal ever come to power, the state will be ruined.
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