They push the pause button on life and art, translating flowing, changing perceptual events into static intellectual patterns. Movies move, but metaphoric generalizations stand still. Furthermore, abstract conceptions have a clarity and simplicity foreign to perceptual experience. They smooth its rough, uncertain edges, making what is sensorially noisy and emotionally fuzzy into something intellectually sharp and definite. The truth of conceptions is fundamentally different from the truth of perceptions.
Conceptions represent the possibility of essential truth.
Perceptual truth is never like this. It is necessarily contingent and relative. It is always, to some extent, partial and provisional. Above all, by locating meaning in a realm beyond or behind actual sensory life and action, the symbolic method implicitly devalues the meaningfulness and importance of the phenomenal world. This devaluation of the life of the body and the senses should give us especial pause when we are dealing with a filmmaker with such a Mediterranean relish for the feeling of lived experience as Capra.