Very interesting as commentary but also as a reflection on philosophy teaching I can emphasise with. I think Ford’s The Searchers, which is usually thought to be the greater film, adds a different take on the “anywhere” motif. John Wayne’s character seems like an anywhere but his vocation and blood guilt ground him as a type of transcendental somewhere. In short, a type of haunted pilgrim who must not rest. John Carroll’s reading of this film is particularly powerful in his Humanism: the Wreck of Western Culture and Carroll’s general cultural ideal type of the transcendentally grounded “anywhere somewhere” provides an alternative to the now settled postliberal narrative which seems to have forgotten the medieval pilgrim motif.
Very interesting as commentary but also as a reflection on philosophy teaching I can emphasise with. I think Ford’s The Searchers, which is usually thought to be the greater film, adds a different take on the “anywhere” motif. John Wayne’s character seems like an anywhere but his vocation and blood guilt ground him as a type of transcendental somewhere. In short, a type of haunted pilgrim who must not rest. John Carroll’s reading of this film is particularly powerful in his Humanism: the Wreck of Western Culture and Carroll’s general cultural ideal type of the transcendentally grounded “anywhere somewhere” provides an alternative to the now settled postliberal narrative which seems to have forgotten the medieval pilgrim motif.