Outside Reading 2- Buddy Powers

In another reading from William James I found myself thinking of our discussions in Religion in Film. Often we explore what was meant by a scene, as we try to dig deeper into the meaning of something rather than just taking it on face value. Also often this can feel a bit unreal and uncalled for. The thought has crossed my mind, “are we trying to turn a movie that was not captivating into something ‘meaningful’ just to make it worth while?” James has an interesting commentary on the relationship between materialism and spiritualism which pertains to my question. He attempts to assert the claim that pragmatism is neither of these to but somewhere in between, the position I think we need to take when discussing these films. James says that materialism is for naught within pragmatism (a philosophical system for answering metaphysical questions) because pragmatism is about substance: what is the ultimate meaning beyond my own thoughts? To take from the metaphor James uses in an earlier lecture, if we only stay in the depth of the sea of sense we will never feel the rush of grazing the surface, the air, the superior element, which intern leaves us “re-determined” and “re-energized.” In terms of spiritualism we can not go off the deep end of applying a meaning to everything in a movie and thus ignorantly taking things out of their context within the film and twisting meanings. To continue the metaphor, a fish can not survive outside of water just as looking too deeply into a movies meaning suffocates it from the actual reality of its meaning. When we critique and discuss these movies we need to find a middle ground between over analysis and coach potato meat-headedness. There needs to be a “rich and active commerce” as James puts it between our abstract nature and our literal observations.