Some object to the popular 'Obamacare' label given that the official title of the law is 'Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act' or, as commonly truncated, 'Affordable Care Act.' But there is a good reason to favor the popular moniker: it is descriptive where the other two labels are evaluative, expressing as they do a pro attitude toward the bill.
Will the law really protect patients? That is an evaluative judgment based on projections many regard as flimsy. Will the law really make health care affordable? And for whom? Will care mandated for all be readily available and of high quality?
Everybody wants affordable and readily available health care of high quality for the greatest number possible. The question is how best to attain this end. The 'Affordable Care Act' label begs the question as to whether or not Obama's bill will achieve the desired end. 'Obamacare' does not. It is, if not all that descriptive, at least evaluatively neutral.
If Obama's proposal were referred to as "Socialized Medicine Health Care Act' or 'Another Step Toward the Nanny State Act,' people would protest the negative evaluations embedded in the titles. Titles of bills ought to be neutral.
Proponents of a consumption tax sometimes refer to it as a fair tax. Same problem. 'Fair' is an evaluative term while 'consumption' is not. 'Consumption tax' conveys the idea that taxes should be collected at the consuming end rather than at the income-producing end. 'Fair tax' fails to convey that idea, but what is worse, it begs the question as to what a fair tax would look like. It is a label that invites the conflation of distinct questions: What is a consumption tax? Is it good? Answer the first and it remains an open question what the answer to the second is.
What is fairness? What is justice? Is justice fairness? These are questions that need to be addressed, not questions answers to which ought to be presupposed.
There is no good reason to object to 'Obamacare' — the word, not the thing.
The following from Chapter 11 of Big Sur, emphasis added. After three weeks alone in Big Sur in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Bixby canyon cabin, Kerouac, freaked out by the solitude and his metaphysical and religious brooding amidst the starkness of nature, hitch hikes for the last time in his life north on Highway 1 toward Monterey and San Francisco where he receives another 'sign':
The next sign is in Frisco itself where after a night of perfect sleep in an old skid row hotel room I go to see Monsanto [Ferlinghetti] at his City Lights bookstore and he's smiling and glad to see me, says "We were coming out to see you next weekend you should have waited, " but there's something else in his expression — When we're alone he says "Your mother wrote and said your cat is dead. "
Ordinarily the death of a cat means little to most men, a lot to fewer men, but to me, and that cat, it was exactly and no lie and sincerely like the death of my little brother — I loved Tyke with all my heart, he was my baby who as a kitten just slept in the palm of my hand with his little head hanging down, or just purring, for hours, just as long as I held him that way, walking or sitting — He was like a floppy fur wrap around my wrist, I just twist him around my wrist or drape him and he just purred and purred and even when he got big I still held him that way, I could even hold this big cat in both hands with my arms outstretched right over my head and he'd just purr, he had complete confidence in me — And when I'd left New York to come to my retreat in the woods I'd carefully kissed him and instructed him to wait for me, 'Attends pour mue kitigingoo" — But my mother said in the letter he had died the NIGHT AFTER I LEFT! — But maybe you'll understand me by seeing for yourself by reading the letter:
"Sunday 20 July 1960, Dear Son, I'm afraid you wont like my letter because I only have sad news for you right now. I really dont know how to tell you this but Brace up Honey. I'm going through hell myself. Little Tyke is gone. Saturday all day he was fine and seemed to pick up strength, but late at night I was watching TV a late movie. Just about 1: 30 A. M. when he started belching and throwing up. I went to him and tried to fix him up but to no availe. He was shivering like he was cold so I rapped him up in a Blanket then he started to throw up all over me. And that was the last of him. Needless to say how I feel and what I went through. I stayed up till "day Break" and did all I could to revive him but it was useless. I realized at 4 A. M. he was gone so at six I wrapped him up good in a clean blanket — and at 7 A. M. went out to dig his grave. I never did anything in my whole life so heart breaking as to bury my beloved little Tyke who was as human as you and I. I buried him under the Honeysuckle vines, the corner, of the fence. I just cant sleep or eat. I keep looking and hoping to see him come through the cellar door calling Ma Wow. I'm just plain sick and the weirdest thing happened when I buried Tyke, all the black Birds I fed all Winter seemed to have known what was going on. Honest Son this is no lies. There was lots and lots of em flying over my head and chirping, and settling on the fence, for a whole hour after Tyke was laid to rest — that's something I'll never forget — I wish I had a camera at the time but God and Me knows it and saw it. Now Honey I know this is going to hurt you but I had to tell you somehow… I'm so sick not physically but heart sick… I just cant believe or realize that my Beautiful little Tyke is no more — and that I wont be seeing him come through his little "Shanty" or Walking through the green grass … PS. I've got to dismantle Tyke's shanty, I just cant go out there and see it empty — as is. Well Honey, write soon again and be kind to yourself. Pray the real "God" — Your old Mom XXXXXX."
So when Monsanto told me the news and I was sitting there smiling with happiness the way all people feel when they come out of a long solitude either in the woods or in a hospital bed, bang, my heart sank, it sank in fact with the same strange idiotic helplessness as when I took the unfortunate deep breath on the seashore — All the premonitions tying in together.
Monsanto sees that I'm terribly sad, he sees my little smile (the smile that came over me in Monterey just so glad to be back in the world after the solitudes and I'd walked around the streets just bemusedly Mona Lisa'ing at the sight of everything) — He sees now how that smile has slowly melted away into a mawk of chagrin — Of course he cant know since I didn't tell him and hardly wanta tell it now, that my relationship with my cat and the other previous cats has always been a little dotty: some kind of psychological identification of the cats with my dead brother Gerard who'd taught me to love cats when I was 3 and 4 and we used to lie on the floor on our bellies and watch them lap up milk — The death of "little brother" Tyke indeed — Monsanto seeing me so downcast says "Maybe you oughta go back to the cabin for a few more weeks — or are you just gonna get drunk again" — "I'm gonna get drunk yes"
[. . .]
It was the most happy three weeks of my life [the three weeks at Ferlinghetti's cabin in Bixby canyon] dammit and now this has to happen, poor little Tyke — You should have seen him a big beautiful yellow Persian the kind they call calico" — "Well you still have my dog Homer, and how was Alf out there? " — "Alf the Sacred Burro, he ha, he stands in groves of trees in the afternoon suddenly you see him it's almost scarey, but I fed him apples and shredded wheat and everything" (and animals are so sad and patient I thought as I remembered Tyke's eyes and Alf's eyes, ah death, and to think this strange scandalous death comes also to human beings, yea to Smiler [Ferlinghetti] even, poor Smiler, and poor Homer his dog, and all of us) — I'm also depressed because I know how horrible my mother now feels all alone without her little chum in the house back there three thousand miles (and indeed by Jesus it turns out later some silly beatniks trying to see me broke the windowpane in the front door trying to get in and scared her so much she barricaded the door with furniture all the rest of that summer).
It is also a test whether the infatuation was something more. If the marriage lasts and deepens, then it was; if not, then it wasn't.
To be infatuated is to be rendered fatuous, silly. Not that infatuation is all bad. A love that doesn't begin with it is not much of a love. The silly love song That's Amore well captures the delights of love's incipience. But fools rush in where wise men never go/But wise men never fall in love/so how are they to know?
This post continues my discussion with Lukas Novak who, so far, as been wiping the floor with me, refuting my arguments for the distinctio realis. Now I take a different tack. I want to see if we have a genuine problem here, but one that is simply insoluble. Such a result would be consistent with my preferred yet provisionally held metaphilosophy according to which the problems of philosophy are most of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but all of them insoluble.
I would like to uphold both of the following propositions, but they appear logically inconsistent (with each other). I will call the first the Metaphysical Primacy of Individual Existence (MPIE), and the second, the Real Distiction between Essence and Existence in Contingent Beings (RD). These are the two limbs of the dyad. I will make a case that they are each exceedingly plausible, but cannot both be true.
1. The Metaphysical Primacy of Individual Existence
MPIE includes a subthesis that I will call the Metaphysical Primacy of Existence (MPE). MPE's slogan is 'No essence without existence.' There are no nonexisting individual essences, no nonexistent items in Meinong's sense, no merely possible individuals. MPE, then, is a rejection of possibililism and an affirmation of actualism, the view that everything (actually) exists. Actualism, however, allows for Plantinga-style haecceity properties capable of unexemplified existence. These abstract and necessary properties actually exist; they are not mere possibilia. But they too must be rejected if we are to affirm the metaphysical primacy of individual existence. The idea is that the individual essence of a concrete individual cannot exist apart from the individual. Individual essences or quiddities there may be, but none of them float free from existence. Peter, for example, is a concrete existing individual. But there is no such haecceity property as identity-with-Peter (Petereity), a property that can exist unexemplified (and does exist unexemplified at times at which Peter does not exist and in possible worlds in which Peter does not exist) . This putative property is an haecceity property of Peter in that, if exemplified, it is exemplified by Peter, by Peter alone, and not possibly by any individual distinct from Peter. If there are such properties, they nail down, or rather are, the nonqualitative thisnesses of concrete individuals. (See here for arguments against haecceity properties.)
MPIE, then, amounts to the rejection of nonexistent and nonsubsistent items, together with Meinongian items having Aussersein status — whatever exactly that is! — as well as actually existing haecceity properties. Consider the golden mountain. On MPIE, there exists no golden mountain; there subsists no golden mountain; and it is not the case that some item is a golden mountain. (Each of these clauses makes a different claim, by the way.) Furthermore, on MPIE, nothing's identity or nonqualitative thisness is a property that can exist at times and in worlds when and where the indivdual whose nonqualitative thisness it is does not exist.
But MPIE is not anti-Platonic: it allows for multiply exemplifiable properties (universals). Thus MPIE is not to be confused with nominalism.
2. The Real Distinction between Essence and Existence
In each concrete, contingent individual there is a real distinction between individual essence and existence. To say that the distinction is real is to say that it is not merely conceptual or notional: the distinction subsists independently of us and our mental operations. Thus the distinction is not like the distinction between the morning star and the evening star, which is presumably a distinction between two ways one and the same physical thing, the planet Venus, appears to us. But the reality of the real distinction does not imply that essence and existence are capable of separate existence. Thus the distinction is not real in the way the distinction between Venus and Mars is real, or in the way the distinction between my glasses and my head is real. If Giles of Rome thought otherwise, then he was mistaken. The real distinction is more like the distinction between the convexity and concavity of a lens. Neither can exist without the other, but the distinction is in the lens, and is not a matter of how we view the lens. This analogy, however, limps badly inasmuch as we can empirically detect the difference between the convex and concave surfaces of a lens, but we cannot empirically detect the existence of a thing. But then every analogy limps, else it would not be an analogy.
3. Are the Limbs of the Dyad Logically Consistent?
I'm having doubts. It would be easy to argue for (RD) if (MPIE) is false. Suppose there are merely possible individual essences that subsist necessarily whether or not they exist contingently. Then we can argue as follows. Peter is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human. His existing cannot therefore be reduced to his being the particular human he is. Existence cannot be reduced to essence because Peter's essence subsists in possible worlds in which Peter does not exist. (It also exists at times at which Peter does not exist.) Essence and existence differ extensionally: for every contingent being, there are possible worlds in which the essence of the individual subsists but the individual does not exist. In the case of Plantinga the actualist, abstract and necessary haecceities exist just as robustly as the concrete and contingent individuals whose haecceities they are; so there is no call in his case for a distinction between subsistence and existence.
But if (MPIE) is true, then the extensional difference disappears: in all and only the possible worlds in which Peter exists does his essence subsist/exist. But then we have no good reason to maintain that there is a real difference between essence and existence. This is the brunt of Novak's point against me.
4. Neither Limb is Easily Rejected
Now if the limbs of the dyad are logically inconsistent, we can solve the dyad by rejecting one of the limbs. But which one? I find both to be very plausible.
MPIE is plausible. Something that has no being is nothing at all. So if essences have no being, they are nothing at all. Kein Sosein ohne Dasein. A merely possible individual is one that is not actual, hence nonexistent, hence, in itself, nothing at all. Haecceity properties, though existent, are objectionable for the reasons given here. To put it very simple: the identity of a thing is nothing apart from the thing whose identity it is! In short, there are no individual essences apart from the existing individuals whose essences they are.
Why is RD plausible? When I say that Peter, or any contingent thing, exists, I am saying that he is not nothing, that he is, that he is 'there,' that he is 'outside' his causes and 'outside' my mind and indeed 'outside' any mind. But the dude might not have existed, i.e., there is no logical or metaphysical necessity that he exist. There is nothing in his nature or individual essence to require that he exist, whence it seems to follow that he cannot be identical to his existence. But if Peter is not identical to his existence, then he is distinct from his existence. And if he is distinct from his existence, then that is equivalent to saying that Peter qua individual essence is distinct from Peter qua existing.
But is this distinction real? Or is perhaps merely notional? Is it a distinction we make, or one we find and record? Well, Peter's existence is real, and his essence is real, and his contingency is real, so I say the distinction is real. It is in Peter intrinsically and not supplied by us.
5. Contingency Merely Epistemic?
But wait! How do I know that Peter is really contingent, really possibly such as not to exist though in fact he does exist? Might this contingency be merely epistemic, merely a matter of my ignorance as to why he must exist? His nonexistence is thinkable without contradiction. But does that suffice to show that his nonexistence is really possible? Peter's nonexistence is conceivable, i.e., thinkable without logical contradiction. But there is a logical gap between conceivability and (real) possibility. On the other hand, if conceivability is no guide to possibility, what guide do we have? So I'll set this problem aside for now.
6. Where Does This Leave Us?
I think it is reasonable to hold that the problem is genuine but insoluble. Both limbs are plausibly maintained, but they cannot both be true. It could be that our cognitive architecture is such as to allow us to formulate the problem, but also such as to disallow a solution. This is not to say that there are contradictions in reality. I assume that there are none. It is to suggest that discursive reason is dialectical in roughly Kant's sense: it comes into conflict with itself when it attempts to grasp the Unconditioned. Existence, after all, is the unconditioned or absolute 'aspect' of things. Better: it is the absolute or uncinditioned depth dimension in things. For a thing to exist is for it to exist outside its causes, outside minds, and outside relations to other things (a thing is not constituted by its relations, but must exist apart from them if it is to stand in them).
This goes together with the fact that existence is what confers uniqueness upon a thing. To the conceptualizing mind, nothing is strictly unique. For every concept is repeatable even if not repeated. Existence, however, cannot be conceptualized. As the absoluteness and uniqueness in things, it is perhaps no surprise that the difference between existence and essence cannot show up extensionally.
But this won't convince many. They will insist that there has to be a solution. Well, then, let's hear what it is.
Robert Paul Wolff has an answer for us. Ready? The bolding is Wolff's own and is twice-repeated:
Because Obama is Black.
Is Professor Wolff serious? I'm afraid he is. But given that the man is neither stupid nor the usual sort of left-wing moral scumbag, how could he be serious? What explains a view so plainly delusional? How account for an emotion-driven mere dismissal of the conservative position the arguments for which he will not examine? How is it that a professional philosopher, indeed a very good one, can engage in such puerile ad hominem psychologizing? Wolff himself provides an answer in a later post:
My knowledge of the beliefs and sentiments of those on the right is based entirely on things I have read or have seen on television. I have never had a conversation with a committed right-wing opponent of the Affordable Care Act, nor have I even, to the best of my knowledge, met one. You would be quite correct in inferring that I live in a left-wing bubble [called Chapel Hill — before that, I lived in a left-wing bubble called Amherst, MA, and before that I lived in the right wing bubbles called Morningside Heights, Hyde Park, and Cambridge.] If this strikes you as disqualifying my from having an opinion, you are free to ignore the rest of this post.
But the sound and fury against the Tea Party is a sideshow. The second aspect of the current partisan divide reveals the real extremism in politics today, and it isn’t to be found among Tea Partiers. The complaint against the supposed “extremism” of the Tea Party is nowadays followed by a much more risible lament: that the very design of our government is to blame for “gridlock” and the increasing conflict between the two parties in Washington. Supposedly serious people have written in the last couple weeks that Tea Partiers should be arrested and charged with treason or sedition for causing the government shutdown. More frequent are the calls for abolishing the Senate because of its equal representation of small states and out of frustration with the filibuster. A couple of liberal pundits, like the usually more sober-minded Jacob Heilbrunn at the National Interest, have suggested abolishing Congress altogether. And New York Times columnist Thomas “China-Is-Awesome” Friedman periodically recycles his fantasy that we could be “China for a day” so that his favorite authoritarian wish list could be imposed without our democratic consent.
This is not a brand new phenomenon. Starting with Woodrow Wilson, “progressives” (to use a name more accurate than “liberal”) have complained that our various mechanisms of “checks and balances” prevent government from being more “effective.” This is just code for the liberal desire that its opposition should simply shut up, surrender, and submit to their rule unquestioned. It is a liberalism that has grown too lazy to argue with—or even tolerate—opposition, which is what happens when you come to believe that you embody “the side of history.” This display of contempt for the institutions of democratic deliberation reveals today’s progressives to be highly undemocratic—and illiberal, too. With their will to power checked as intended by our founders, the Left is letting out a primal scream.
William J. Bennett and David Wilezol, Is College Worth It? (Thomas Nelson 2013), p. 134:
Knowing that students prefer to spend more time having fun than studying, professors are more comfortable awarding good grades while requiring a minimum amount of work. In return, students give favorable personal evaluations to professors who desire to be well received by students as a condition of preserving their employment status. Indeed, the popularity of the student evaluation, which began in the 1970s, has had a pernicious effect.
I would say so. Here is an anecdote to illustrate the Bennett thesis. In early 1984 I was 'up for tenure.' And so in the '83 fall semester I was more than usually concerned about the quality of my student evaluations. One of my classes that semester was an upper-level seminar conducted in the library over a beautiful oak table. One day one of the students began carving into the beautiful table with his pen.
In an abdication of authority that part of me regrets and a part excuses, I said nothing. The student liked me and I knew it. I expected a glowing recommendation from him and feared losing it. So I held my tongue while the kid defaced university property.
Jeff H. and I had entered into a tacit 'non-aggression pact.' (And I got tenure.)
The problem is not that students are given an opportunity to comment upon and complain about their teachers. The problem is the use to which student evaluations are put for tenure, promotion, and salary 'merit-increase' decisions. My chairman at the time was an officious organization man, who would calculate student evaluation averages to one or two decimal places, and then rank department members as to their teaching effectiveness. Without getting into this too deeply for a blog post, there is something highly dubious about equating teaching effectiveness with whatever the student evaluations measure, and something absurd about the false precision of calculating averages out to one or two decimal places.
Jones is a better teacher than Smith because her average is 3.2 while his is only 3.1? Well, no, but if the chairman is asked to justify his decision, he can point to the numbers. There is mindless quantification, but it takes someone more thoughtful than an administrator to see it.
I strongly recommend the Bennett-Wilezol book to anyone thinking of attending college or thinking of bankrolling someone's attendance. Here is a review.
Sweet gone Jack really did try to be a good boy and give up the booze and dissipation and all the near occasions of sin & temptation that fame brought him once he made it in '57 with the publication of On the Road. Here he is arrived at Lawrence Ferlinghett's (Lorenzo Monsanto's) cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur:
And in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I'll do in three weeks only) "no more dissipation, it's time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that's it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters only, in fact, in Milan, Paris, just talk to waiters, walk around, no more self-imposed agony . . . it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time.. . Yay, for this, more aloneness" — "Go back to childhood, just eat apples and read your Cathechism — sit on curbstones, the hell with the hot lights of Hollywood" (remembering that awful time only a year earlier when I had to rehearse my reading of prose a third time under the hot lights of the Steve Allen Show in the Burbank studio, one hundred technicians waiting for me to start reading, Steve Allen watching me expectant as he plunks the piano, I sit there on the dunce's stool and refuse to read a word or open my mouth, "I dont have to R E H E A R S E for God's sake Steve! " — "But go ahead, we just wanta get the tone of your voice, just this last time, I'll let you off the dress rehearsal" and I sit there sweating not saying a word for a whole minute as everybody watches, finally I say, "No I cant do it, " and I go across the street to get drunk) (but surprising everybody the night of the show by doing my job of reading just fine, which surprises the producers and so they take me out with a Hollywood starlet who turns out to be a big bore trying to read me her poetry and wont talk love because in Hollywood man love is for sale)… So even that marvelous, long remembrances of life all the time in the world to just sit there or lie there or walk about slowly remembering all the details of life which now because a million lightyears away have taken on the aspect (as they must've for Proust in his sealed room) of pleasant movies brought up at will and projected for further study — And pleasure — As I imagine God to be doing this very minute, watching his own movie, which is us. (Big Sur, ch. 6, pp. 24-25)
As the USA drifts daily farther in the direction of leftist totalitarianism, the words of Solzhenitsyn ought to be considered. Excerpt:
. . . the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. The 1920’s in the USSR witnessed an uninterrupted procession of victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox clergy. Two metropolitans were shot, one of whom, Veniamin of Petrograd, had been elected by the popular vote of his diocese. Patriarch Tikhon himself passed through the hands of the Cheka-GPU and then died under suspicious circumstances. Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, pressured by the Chekists to renounce the Word of God, were tortured, shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate tundra of the far North, or turned out into the streets in their old age without food or shelter. All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the faith; instances of apostasy were few and far between. For tens of millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked, and they were forbidden to bring up their children in the Faith: religious parents were wrenched from their children and thrown into prison, while the children were turned from the faith by threats and lies.
. . .
from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of your wish:
"The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that
slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead." (Mexico City Blues, 1959,
211th Chorus).
In 1955, The Paris Review paid a struggling Jack Kerouac fifty dollars for an excerpt from a then unpublished manuscript. The excerpt appeared as a short story titled “The Mexican Girl” and, after much acclaim, was picked up a year later by Martha Foley’s The Best American Short Stories. Due in large part to the success of “The Mexican Girl,” On the Road was soon accepted by Viking Press; the full novel was published in 1957. (reference)
Here is an audio clip of "The Mexican Girl." Meanwhile, the Mexican Girl, Bea Franco, has been found, written up, and assumes her place in the Beat pantheon.
Lest we forget, however, "Pretty girls make graves." (The Dharma Bums)
The term "female philosopher" doesn't even make sense to me. Simone de Beauvoir was a thinker rather than a philosopher. A philosopher for me is someone who is removed from everyday concerns and manipulates terms and concepts like counters on a grid or chessboard. Both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, another favourite of mine, have their own highly influential system of thought, and therefore they belong on any list of great philosophers.
This paragraph illustrates a conversational move I find very annoying. Characterizing the ploy in the abstract is not easy, but here goes. One takes a word in use and arbitrarily assigns one's own pejorative meaning to it while opposing it to some other word in the semantic vicinity of the first to which one assigns a non-pejorative meaning. Thus for Paglia 'philosopher' is a pejorative while 'thinker' is not, and no one can be both.
Simone de Beauvoir therefore cannot be a philosopher (bad!) but must be a thinker (good!). And because she cannot be a philosopher, 'female philosopher' makes no sense. Of course, the distinction is bogus, and there is no justification for Paglia's idiosyncratic re-definition of 'philosophy.'
Here is another example of the annoying move in question.
The trendy embrace the term 'spirituality' but shun
its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my
kitchen a few years ago whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to
Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term
‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a ‘spiritual’ one. How typical. Being a good host, I didn't lay into
her as I probably should have for her 'spiritual' good. The opposing of 'religion' to 'spirituality' is bogus, religion being a form of spirituality, and there is no justification for reading a pejorative meaning into the former.
To make matters worse, Paglia, in the paragraph cited, contradicts herself. Having just gotten through telling us that de Beauvoir is not a philosopher but a thinker, she reverses course and tells us that she belongs on a list of great philosophers.
