Relationships of virtue: rethinking the goods of civil association

Abstract

This paper focuses, not on the existing conditions of institutional association, but on hoped-for conditions that would have to be met for professional relationships within higher education to aspire to what Aristotle referred to as ‘virtuous friendship’. Such relationships, it is argued, constitute the social content of hope in that they look to new perspectives on institutional renewal and professional regeneration. They provide a context of mutuality and reciprocity within which individuals can begin to realise, through the acquisition of ‘functional capabilities’, their particular capacities. The question then arises as to the conditions necessary for generating and sustaining such relationships within the increasingly differentiated and stratified institutional settings of the higher education sector and across an academic workforce that has become fractionalised and atomised around increasingly complex divisions of academic labour. It is that question which this paper seeks to address.

‘Civil society is fragile, and it needs to be extended’ (Hall, 1995, p. 27)

Keywords:

• Capability
• Friendship
• Hope
• Professionalism
• Virtue

Notes

Notes

1.  This normative use of the notion of ‘friendship’ should perhaps be distinguished from its anthropological usage in studies of, for example, peer group relationships among young people (see Epstein, 2002). In both, however, there is a strong emphasis on friendship as practice or activity; as a way, that is, of doing relationship. Being friends is what Hey (2002) refers to as ‘(identity) work’ (p. 232) or ‘friendship work’ (p. 234).

2.  Hey (2002, p. 236) ‘speculates’ that ‘empathy is likely to be different for boys and girls. Feminine rapport … seems always in process, mediated through the intensities of relational work as an ongoing fellow feeling for the other … In contrast, what this friendship narrative shows is that fellow feeling for boys has a more ‘finished’ quality, that boys at times ‘sign off ’. [For boys] friendship seems to result in a much more straightforward pleasure’.

3.  ‘Pathic understanding’ does not preclude disagreement (even strong disagreement on points of principle) between ‘virtuous friends’. The notion of ‘dissensus’ that Mouffe (2004) sees as central to that of ‘democratic citizenship’ (and her particular model of ‘agonistic’ democracy) could also be applied to the notion of ‘virtuous friendship’.

4.  This last point is spelt out by Frankfurt (2004, p. 59), who, from a similar neo-Aristotelian perspective to that adopted by Carr, argues ‘that final ends are instrumentally valuable just because they are terminally valuable, and that effective means to the attainment of final ends are intrinsically valuable just because of their instrumental value’.

5.  Throughout this section the first person plural pronoun has been used deliberately to denote the, albeit fragmented, community of academic workers. It is the ‘we’ that Bourdieu (2003) is referring to when he speaks, with reference to ‘a scholarship of commitment’, of ‘research scholars’; or what Said (2004) has in mind when he refers to ‘scholar-teachers’, carrying forward what he sees as a radical tradition of ‘critical humanism’. It is also, in part, the ‘we scholars’ that Damrosch (1995) evokes in an attempt to envisage ‘the next intellectuals’.