| | I love the raw energy of her writing. It is like she chose to let this fierce, burning flame in her soul write THROUGH her - she is an intellectual channel for the heart of things important by the measure of the human experience.
She is the opposite of that bookkeeperly-like fussing about to ensure that consistency is maintained. She abhors those that would poke about in her words with little calipers and rulers and try to find flaws. It is like she were saying, if you can't see the value of the insights and the power of letting your energy have such a direct voice, then I would despair of ever trying to justify to you of the need to accept the resulting contradictions or inconsistencies.
She isn't, for me, no matter what she might write, a philosopher. Because she is too restless and impatient to weigh and ponder and perfect. She is like a guide and inspiration for the philosopher who looks at her output like an engineer looks at a earthquake - the earthquake is real, and from it the engineer can make his descriptions and plans.
(added by edit) What follows has nothing to do with Paglia - it's in response to a comment Ted made, but has since edited out of his post. It is a better way to explain something in the nature of government
How must man function? He perceives reality and then begins an inner choreography of parsing, comparing, and analyzing. It is a complex matching process that has that percept, that snapshot of reality that triggered this inner process, that may require an explicit action on his part. This is the generalized understanding and the model of all that is man - perceive, process, act. The purpose is life, and it is the means of living and it is life.
Looking inside of that choreography more closely we see it to be a matching process. There is a repertoire of possible actions, capacities - types of actions, and finding the one that fits is what his process is for. Percept in - action out. Involved are beliefs, layers of goals, values, and standards for actions to measure appropriateness, rightness, and effectiveness. One set of percepts going in and one action plan coming out - but much internal grinding to connect them.
Our delegatation of actions on our behalf to government is a complex thing to understand. We are making an automaton in essence, "Look robot, these are the kinds of percepts you must scan for. Then you must analyze them for these attributes and qualities. Then you do compare them for matches in the list of actions that you are permitted to do under the appropriate conditions. You may never do any action that isn't on your list of permitted actions. If you do have a match, then you can take that action." We programmed that robot to do a kind of choreography of matching that is like what we do. When that choreography is done by a government it is called jurisdiction.
This has nothing to do with Paglia's candid, stark, kill-what-we-eat kind of honesty in viewing organic life as it might apply to alliances or to arguments on intervention - which I suspect is what you hoped to see more of from me. But the arguments on jurisdiction on this forum are malformed as any I've ever seen - not one soul appears to grasped what I've been describing in that area - and it is my love for that dance that mentally takes principle, which is our only grasp of reality above that of a crow, and joins it the messy events of reality. Applying principles to current events is what we do as individuals, as intellectuals - jurisdiction is what a government does to find the principle that fits the current event thrust upon it.
I am so frustrated that people keep seeing what I'm saying as some kind of interference with their stance on intervention.
If we want to keep making claims about government should do this or that, it is incumbent upon us to understand HOW government works. As there is human nature there is government nature. As humans should exercise their rational faculty, governments should exercise jurisdiction. I see the current state of philosophical understanding of the nature of government as woefully lacking.
(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 9/10, 3:12pm)
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