Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sense and Sensibility: IARPT’s Four Existential OrientationsWilliam David Hart (bio)I. Introduction: IARPT’s Liberal HorizonThe concerns of the Institute of American Religious and Philosophical Thought are worlds apart from the preoccupations that animate the characters in Jane Austen’s novels. This is not to say that IARPT is disinterested in romance, love, and heartbreak. It is to say, rather, that Sense and Sensibility, the title of Austen’s 1811 novel, is a good cover term for the matters that I wish to address. I say this despite the fact that many characters in the novel, especially Fanny Dashwood, are insufferable members of a British ruling class that, along with its wealth-hording, patriarchy-sustaining institution of primogeniture, needed to be expropriated by the working class. I say this despite the fact that the sensibility of the British aristocracy, as is true of all aristocracies, is off-putting. With this proviso, it is precisely the sense and sensibility of the Institute (the love, romance and, perhaps, tragedy) that I wish to survey through a focus on what I take to be its animating existential concerns. I call these orientations existential rather than merely intellectual because they go beyond ideas, professional commitments, and implicate the entire range of life dispositions. These orientations are habit-forming.Constitutive of these orientations are anxieties regarding the meaning and significance of those things for which we live and die. The sheer fact of consciousness, of conscious matter, of matter conscious of its consciousness and the wonder and awe this inspires as we consider the very existence of things is part of our existential ensemble too. For some of us wonder and awe before the groundless gratuity of existence, let’s call this ontological curiosity, compete with death anxiety and its intimations for preeminence in how we imagine the meaning and significance of our life. This is not a binary matter. For some people, perhaps for most, the joy of existence larded as it is with terrible things exceeds, as the case make be, the quiet desperation, sorrow, or terror, and the emptiness at the center of all things. My exploration focuses on the anxieties rather than the curiosity. I take it for granted that the deep source of anxiety is mortality and its various intimations. Our quest for lives of meaning and significance is threatened by the “horrid d’s”1 of death, disease, dread, despair, [End Page 5] and disappointment. Various thinkers have theorized how we cope with this anxiety. Some argue that denial is a dominant way of dealing with death, which they take to be foundational to the other meaning and significance-threatening phenomena.2 Where the answers to these threats provided by traditional religions are found lacking or otherwise no longer credible, denial expresses itself in the form of various immortality projects: typically, the puritanical, maniacal, and methodical pursuit of health and wealth, in consumerism of all kinds, from the hottest new diet, to a Peloton exercise bike, to a Tesla. And then there is the pursuit of fame and celebrity, which many people can no longer distinguish, the hope, captured so well in the theme song for the television series, Fame. “Fame / I’m going to live forever / Baby, remember my name.”3 We want to be remembered. Whether by future generations or, inside the digital clouds of Instagram or TikTok, or, as some would have it, within the consequent nature of God. Of course, for some populations, death is not so easily denied. Death has an in their face immediacy, insistence, and oppugnancy that rips through flesh and leaves its subject not merely anxious but dead. I speak, for example, of the mind-numbing repetitiveness with which police kill Black people. Or the myriad ways, including environmental racism, in which Blacks are subject to premature death. Some thinkers even theorize that death is the existential horizon for Black people in an ontologically distinctive way.4 Thus the March 2020 police-raid killing of Breonna Taylor in her home may be a statistical anomaly but is experienced as a monstrous revelation of the nature of things, of Black social life as social death. This is not a...