Ambition (character trait)

Ambition is a character trait that describes people who are driven to better their station or to succeed at lofty goals.

It has been categorized both as a virtue and as a vice.

The use of the word "ambitious" in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599), for example, points to its use to describe someone who is ruthless in seeking out positions of power and influence:

The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault.^[1]

Today, however, someone may be described as "ambitious" who has more benevolent aspirations: someone who has lofty goals, drive, initiative, tenacity, and the pursuit of excellence.

Aristotle encountered the same ambiguity in Greek, where φιλότιμος (ambition) and ἀφιλότιμος (lack of ambition) each had positive or negative connotations depending on the context. He was unable to discover a good term that unambiguously described the desirable golden mean for this trait: "as there is no recognized term for the observance of the mean, the extremes fight, so to speak, for what seems an empty place".^[2]