A Life Without Ideals

As one who has many ideals, this notion is foreign to me and the position is difficult to entertain. It seems to me that ideals are an integral aspect of personal identity, without which one will find the struggle to assert themselves infinitely more difficult.

In Jean-Luc Godard’s film Le Petit Soldat Bruno identifies himself as a “guy without ideals.” As the film progresses Bruno becomes a Sartrean hero, compelled to find and assert his identity. The issue for Bruno is that he has no concrete identity, nor does he appear to develop one through the course of his remembering the events of the film. Bruno is swept up in the tide of conflict and since he has no ideals he is simply dragged along by whoever imposes their will upon him. The few times that Bruno does assert his will, he does so without apparent motivation. His inner monologue reveals that he often forgets his motivations or simply does not know (“je ne sais pas”).

*Warning* Nerd Content

Braved the congestion of the Orange Park Amc24 last night to see Transformers with my family. It was well worth it. I really don’t want to go too far into it because that would quickly lead to utter silliness – the utter silliness that overtook me at certain points in the film:

- “more to you than meets the eye,” I “lol”ed in the theater for that one.
-”All Hail Megatron!”
-”Autobots, Roll Out!”

I really don’t think I could have been happier. It was sweet to see Transformers come to life like that.

The Point? Oh, I’m not really sure….

Summer session is Philosophy free for me. It’s actually been kind of difficult to get into the “philosophizing” attitude at times. My contributions to the Student Blog have been minimal.

I have all this time on my hands. An hour here, twenty minutes there. Always before something, between this and that or, alternatively, late at night. I guess it has been an interesting break. Sometimes thinking Philosophy all week can be a burden. I actually find myself reluctant to check up on current discussions over at the blog, because despite my interest in contributing my mentality is just too far detached.

French Cinema started last week. As usual, my tendency to philosophize things I read has dominated my considerations of the texts. The only other emergent feature is my cinephilia.