Virtue and the Quiet Art of Scholarship

Reclaiming the University

Anne Pirrie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351044332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Virtue and the Quiet Art of Scholarship offers a fresh perspective on what it is to be a 'good knower' in a social and educational environment dominated by the market order. It explores how narrowly conceived epistemic virtues might be broadened out by seeing those who work and study in the university in their full humanity. In an era characterized by deep and enduring social and cultural divisions, it offers a timely, accessible and critical perspective on the perils of retreating behind disciplinary boundaries, reminding readers of the need to remain open to the other in a time of increased social and political polarization.

Drawing on the work of Leonard Cohen, Ali Smith, Italo Calvino and Raymond Carver, the book seeks to move across disciplines and distort the line between the humanities and the social sciences as a way of bringing them closer together. It explores virtue in the context of scholarship and research, particularly how the 'virtues of unknowing' challenge traditional notions of the 'good knower'. The book offers the framework within which to bridge the gap between 'us' and 'them' in relation to developments in the university sector, addressing the urgent need for a form of language that promotes unity over division.

Virtue and the Quiet Art of Scholarship will be vital reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, sociology of education, research methods in education and education policy.

1 Going home

Rumour has it that virtue has slipped in through the back door. It might be said that this book is not even about virtue. To talk of virtue in the quiet art of scholarship might have offered a more accurate insight into what the book is about. For rather than looking virtue in the face, as it were, I want to suggest that virtues are deeply embodied qualities that inhere in the practice of doing good work well. I want to show that this is possible, even under the circumstances that currently prevail in higher education.

The very idea of doing good work well seems to be a striking understatement in these brash and noisy times. As Julian Stern discovered as he was writing a book on ‘virtuous educational research’, the process of describing research virtues in order to shed light on the process of research can turn out to be a rather sterile affair. Stern describes how he soon became more interested in the lived experience of people who do research rather than in a disembodied exploration of values or beliefs. The result of this was that he ended up writing a more personal book than he had originally intended. He defines personal as ‘exploring personhood itself’ rather than in the sense of ‘confessional’. This book is also concerned with the personal in this first sense (any traces of the confessional are restricted to the preface). Stern gradually came to the conclusion that ‘virtues are more central to personhood than knowledge, and are more embodied than what might be stated as our values or beliefs’ (Stern, 2016: 3). This seems a sound starting point for the ideas explored in this chapter.

Julian Stern is not the only educationalist with an interest in virtue in relation to educational research. Richard Smith has recently explored how philosophers’ traditional focus on knowledge and truth has re-emerged through the back door in contemporary virtue epistemology. He describes how attention has gradually shifted from the nature of knowledge towards the qualities of the knower (Smith, 2016). Yet as he points out, it transpires that according to some exponents of contemporary virtue epistemology, the ‘good knower’ is one who is committed to the pursuit of knowledge, truth and understanding. So it comes to pass that these universal values are explored ‘outside of a framework in which the idea of judgement has a central place’ (Smith, 2016: 274). Smith charts how in the area of inquiry that has come to be known as ‘virtue epistemology’, attention is now directed towards the ‘intellectual character virtues’ evidenced by the good knower. However, these are considered in a vacuum. There is no detailed consideration of the circumstances in which the knower knows, or indeed does not know. Smith has written eloquently and convincingly about what he calls the ‘virtues of unknowing’. These he distinguishes from ignorance, considering them as a gentle framing of the attention towards the unknown. In contrast, in the work of contemporary virtue epistemologists there is a particular focus on the ‘tough-minded’ virtues, such as rigour, courage and bravery. These ‘up-and-at-it’ virtues are privileged over the ‘quieter and gentler ones’, such as diffidence and modesty. As Richard Smith (2016: 275) suggests, these are precisely the qualities that seem in short supply in education in general and in the contemporary university in particular.

Returning briefly to one of the themes explored in the preface, it is surely no coincidence that the climate that currently prevails in the contemporary university favours the tougher epistemic virtues rather than quieter personal qualities such as modesty or diffidence. In a series of articles published in the London Review of Books, the writer and mythographer Marina Warner charts the fluctuations in her own relationship with her then employer. She presents a trenchant critique of ‘the general distortions that are required to turn a university into a for-profit business’ (Warner, 2014). She explains how the net effect of these distortions was to vitiate the human relationships that are foundational to academic inquiry:

The model for higher education mimics supermarkets’ competition on the high street; the need for external funding [even, one might add, in areas of scholarship where it is not necessary] pits one institution against another – and even one colleague against another.

(Warner, 2014)

Indeed in the current climate, it appears that mythography has been Trumped by mythomania. It almost goes without saying that these are not conditions under which modesty and diffidence, or indeed the quiet art of scholarship, can thrive. It comes as no surprise that the distortions referred to by Warner have attracted the attention of a number of other scholars, notably Stefan Collini (2012, 2017). Neither is it surprising that these invidious developments have provided the ideal conditions for the flourishing of a range of vices that have taken root in the academy – and indeed far beyond it.

It is ironic that when the term ‘post-truth’¹ was named word of the year 2016 by Oxford Dictionaries, there seems to be increasing emphasis on knowledge and truth and on ‘the tougher epistemic virtues “intellectual courage, intellectual rigour and intellectual honesty” … and their character virtue cousins, such as grit and resilience’ (Smith, 2016: 275). (See also Baehr, 2013 for a more detailed account of these from the perspective of virtue epistemology). It is worth considering whether or not there are occasions upon which the demonstration of grit and resilience may be taken as indicators of moral failings rather than virtues. However, there is not scope to do so here. Suffice it to say that the manner in which the enforcers in universities set about implementing their latest diktats might be one such example. A spokesperson for Oxford Dictionaries drew attention to the expansion of meaning of the prefix ‘post-’. It no longer merely refers to the period after a particular event or movement (as in post-match or postmodernism): rather, it has taken on the meaning of ‘belonging to a time in which the specified concept has become unimportant or irrelevant’ (as in the term ‘post-racial’) (see note 1).

To explore these themes in any depth would require a lengthy treatise. Readers will recall that I promised to consider virtue askance rather than consider it head on. I now want to turn away from virtue, as it were, and draw on some examples that will demonstrate the faith in the qualities of literature referred to in the Preface.

In her novel Autumn, Ali Smith gives a vivid account of the desecration of the in-between, the world that lies between people, in the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum in the UK. One of the protagonists of the novel is Elisabeth Demand, a 32-year-old lecturer in history of art, with a casual contract with no fixed hours. The village where her mother lives is in a ‘sullen state’. Elisabeth passes a cottage ‘whose front, from the door to across above the window, has been painted over with black paint and words GO and HOME’ (Ali Smith, 2016: 53). As she and her daughter walk through the village in its sullen state, Elisabeth’s mother explains how she is tired of the news, tired of the vitriol, the anger, the meanness, the selfishness, the violence, the lying and the liars, particularly the ‘sanctified liars’. The passage ends with the following exchange between mother and daughter:

I’m tired of being made to feel this fearful. I’m tired of animosity. I’m tired of pusillanimosity.

I don’t think that’s actually a word,

Elisabeth says.

I’m tired of not knowing the right words, her mother says.

(Ali Smith, 2016: 57)

Is pusillanimosity a word? It is now. ‘Language is like poppies’, the author tells us. ‘It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about’ (Ali Smith, 2016: 69). This particular neologism deserves rich and full treatment, perhaps especially in relation to the qualities exhibited by some ‘senior managers’ in universities. Some of them seem to exhibit a remarkable combination of pusillanimity and animosity. The devil is in the detail, and in this case it is better to slip past it unnoticed. Indeed, we shall traverse this sullen landscape as quickly as possible and attend to the process of ‘Going Home’ in the work of Leonard Cohen. As going home can be a long, slow process, full of digressions, there is room here for one final example. In their exploration of the ethics of ‘Research Excellence’ Conroy and Smith (2017) describe the vice of what Aristotle calls alazony: the hyperbole or boastfulness that is nicely captured by the modern term ‘bigging up’. They note that the ‘prioritising of impact casts as marginal the researcher who is modest or diffident’ (Conroy and Smith, 2017: 12). As we shall see, Leonard Cohen’s poem ‘Going Home’ represents the very antithesis of this unfortunate and widespread tendency. The poem also manifests some interesting values or qualities that cannot be considered in terms of knowledge or truth. By their very nature these seem to question the basis for the ‘search for unchallengeable certainties’ (Smith, 2016: 272).

Like so much of Leonard Cohen’s work, ‘Going Home’ seems to re-forge the link between gravity and grace that is lacking in the post-referendum dystopia so vividly brought to life by the novelist Ali Smith, and in the distortions of the academy analysed by scholars such as Marina Warner (2014, 2015) Thomas Docherty (2015) and Stefan Collini (2012, 2017). The latter has repeatedly drawn attention to the complexities of putting intellectual enquiry in the service of economic competitiveness, particularly in respect of the humanities and social sciences. Cohen’s poem offers us a refreshing antidote to ‘knowingness’, and to a culture characterized by what Richard Smith (2016: 279) has described as a ‘hyperbolic commitment to knowledge’. The precariousness of the fictitious Elisabeth Demand’s existence makes any commitment to knowledge a tall order. She is, as her mother puts it:

living the dream … and she is, if the dream means having no job security and almost everything being too expensive to do and that you’re still in the same rented flat you had when you were a student over a decade ago.

(Ali Smith, 2016: 15)

Elisabeth may be a figment of Ali Smith’s imagination, yet her plight is all too recognizable to anyone working in contemporary higher education in the UK, and indeed elsewhere in Europe. In short, her story is recognizably true whilst being entirely fictitious.

Leonard Cohen is not an artist who is renowned for being light-hearted. Yet there is a light and sure-footed quality to the irony that pervades ‘Going Home’. This is worth exploring in some detail, not least because it affords us an interesting perspective on recent developments in virtue epistemology. Lightness is one of the qualities of irony, as well as of literature. It is also a value that is singularly absent from much academic inquiry. As we shall see, Cohen’s poem also casts some light on epistemic virtues such as diffidence and modesty.

Cohen’s ‘Going Home’, which we shall explore in more detail below, is a wry and melodic testimony to the ‘quieter and gentler epistemic virtues’ explored by Richard Smith (2016) in his elegant essay on the virtues of unknowing. The epistemic ambivalence of ‘Going Home’ is encapsulated in the fact that it hovers somewhere between a poem and a song. It is this fundamental ambiguity that provides Cohen with an ideal medium for revelling in the ‘paradox of being knowing about unknowing’ (Smith, 2016: 272). In this respect, Cohen shares certain attributes with others who are aware of this paradox, for example, the ‘wearers of masks’ identified by Richard Smith (2016: 282). Like Nietzsche, Cohen loves the mask. In ‘I’m Your Man’ (1988) he tells a prospective lover that he will wear a mask for her. And in ‘Going Home’ he repeatedly invokes the costume that he wore. Like Kierkegaard, he adopts personae; in the case of ‘Going Home’, it is his muse. In ‘You Want it Darker’ (2016), it is Abraham and Isaac. Richard Smith (2014, 2016) shows us how Plato speaks through the mask of Socrates, and that there are many layers to the dialogues. These multiplicities ‘serve to distance us from any sense that we are being offered anything solid and reliable which we can be confident that we know’ (Smith, 2016: 278). The preliminary dialogues work ‘as a kind of masking, suggesting that what we have come to think of as the philosophical parts of the dialogues cannot be understood as speaking to us with unambiguous authority’ (Smith, 2016: 282). Smith points out that the Timaeus is often taken to be Plato’s definitive account of the universe as something created by God. Yet it has only come to be regarded as an authoritative statement after the exclusion of the exchanges between the various interlocutors that take place at the beginning. The word is given to Timaeus, he who has made nothing less than the nature of the universe his specific area of expertise. As Smith explains:

The opening of the Timaeus … attunes the reader to a view of learning and knowledge in which the ease by which knowledge, still less wisdom, may be acquired is cast as deeply problematic.

(Smith, 2016: 278)

In this Chapter, I want to suggest that if we become attuned to it, and attend to it with all our senses, rather than merely with our intellect, then ‘Going Home’ can provide us with an object lesson in the epistemic virtues. This is the phrase used by Richard Smith (2016: 275) ‘to indicate the full range of our qualities of apprehension, understanding, interpretation and so on’. Moreover, in order to achieve this, we need to attend to a range of qualities that are not generally given voice in virtue epistemology, or, for that matter, in any other area of academic inquiry. These are polyphonic multiplicity, tone, pitch, resonance, melody, harmony, the interplay between speech, song and silence, and so on. In short, this is not territory that can be mapped out or confined to text. It is a force field.

In an essay entitled ‘Multiplicity’ in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino (2016) explores a broadly similar phenomenon with reference to Marcel Proust’s ‘novel-encyclopedia’ À la recherche du temps perdu (published between 1913 and 1927). Calvino describes the operations of Proust’s magnum opus in the following terms: ‘the work kept thickening and expanding from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Credits
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Going home
• 2 Untimely meditations
• 3 Icarus falling
• 4 Locked out
• 5 Travelling light
• 6 Looking sideways
• 7 Pulling strings
• 8 Closing time
• Index