What makes this distressing is that most accounts of what makes science scientific is its ability to identify and explain true causes and distinguish them from pseudo-causes such as magic or mystical powers. This is probably what prompted England’s Nobel laureate and philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1929 to say that we should eliminate the word “cause” from our vocabulary. As he puts it: “The Law of causality, I believe . . . is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.”101
In the end, this essay is a plug for science fiction; after all, science fiction and fantasy allow us to examine possible ways this world could’ve been different, compelling us to analyze our scientific and philosophical concepts in a way that helps us get clear about what our concepts mean. What we mean by “cause” is a very important question, and one that the fictional reality of the Force allows us to examine more deeply than we would otherwise.
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The Force Is with Us: Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit Strikes Back at the Empire
JAMES LAWLER
Central to the unfolding plot of Star Wars is a question and a mystery: What is the Force? In A New Hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker that his father was betrayed and murdered by Darth Vader, a Jedi Knight who “turned to evil . . . seduced by the Dark Side of the Force.” “The Force?” asks Luke. Obi-Wan replies: “The Force is what gives the Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”
All living beings create the energy field of the Force, and at the same time this energy field is essential to living beings, binding the entire galaxy—ultimately the entire cosmos—in a unified whole. The Force has both Dark and Light sides, but there is not a Dark Force and a Light Force, not Evil over against Good. Such a conception of good versus evil is understandable in the context of Episodes IV through VI, dominated by the malevolent Lord Vader. Even when we learn that Vader is actually Luke’s father, the news only deepens our sense of repulsion for the evil servant of the Dark Side, which we maintain until the very last moment when Vader unexpectedly turns against his Master—Darth Sidious, the Dark Lord of the Sith and Emperor of the Galaxy—and dies reconciled to his son.
In the absence of the background trilogy of Episodes I to III, this ending to the entire story lacks depth and a sense of conviction. However, as the background story emerges, not only is the final ending fully justified but our understanding of the nature of the Force becomes more profound. We learn why there isn’t a Dark Force and a Light Force, a Good opposed to an Evil, but only one Force whose two sides must be brought into balance. And we understand how it is that Darth Vader, formerly known as Anakin Skywalker, is the Chosen One whose destiny it is to bring about this balance.
Thanks to the background story, Vader’s death-bed conversion to the acknowledgement of love is no artificial happy ending, but the outcome of what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, at the conclusion of his Phenomenology of Spirit, calls “the Calvary of Absolute Spirit.”102 All life goes through transformations in which what at first appears to be evil turns out to be good, while the good must be crucified, as Jesus was on Mount Calvary, in order that a higher good be achieved. This transformation of light into dark and dark into light is the pathway of Spirit—Hegel’s philosophically probing conception of what George Lucas calls “the Force.”
Mythic Journey of the Hero
Star Wars provides an unparalleled modern account of the archetypal journey of the hero into the nether world of darkness as a means of discovery and knowledge, of power and freedom, of love and fidelity. The Force is Lucas’s distillation of religious thought and feeling throughout human history.103 In his understanding of this history, and at the core of Star Wars, the divine is no separate deity controlling events from the outside, but the inner God-force that impels the hearts and minds of all of us as we seek to fulfill our inner truth. Connecting with the Force gives the hero within each of us the insight and energy to rise to new levels of fulfillment.
Such an understanding of human destiny is clarified by the contrast between the religion of the Force and the secular view that the primary means for achieving human goals are provided by science and technology. The opposition of science and technology to the religion of the Force is presented from the start in A New Hope. Obi-Wan is training Luke with the aid of a robot ball that hovers in front of him, shooting laser beams as Luke attempts to defend himself with his lightsaber. Han is skeptical. “Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.” Luke comments, “You don’t believe in the Force, do you?” “Kid,” says Han, “I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff, but I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything. No mystical energy field controls my destiny. It’s all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.” In the face of this skepticism, Luke demonstrates the reality of the Force by blocking the laser attack with his eyes covered. Han calls this luck. “In my experience,” says Obi-Wan, “there’s no such thing as luck.”
There’s no doubt in the minds of the audience that the Force is something real, and that Han’s reliance on empirical evidence and technological force is missing the deeper picture. But how seriously should we ourselves take this idea of a mystical Force? When we think objectively about it outside of the film, when we ask ourselves what is really real, don’t we live most of our lives as Han Solo does, relying on external technologies of power and control to achieve our goals, with little or no confidence in the inner power of our own consciousness? With his idea of the Force as an external controlling deity, Han fails to understand its profound connection with the inner power of the human spirit.
For both the scientifically minded and conventional religious viewers who believe in such an external deity, the Force is magic and make-believe, not something to be taken seriously outside the realm of film and fantasy. However, this understanding of the Force only pushes the question of its nature to a deeper level. What is the appeal of this magic? How does the fantasy of Star Wars, with its magical drama of the Force, cast its own spell on its audience? If we dismiss this force of fantasy itself, aren’t we too acting like the skeptical Han Solo, dismissing in our minds as inessential and irrelevant the power of imagination that we nevertheless can feel—a power that holds us in its thrall throughout the many hours of artistic wizardry that makes up Star Wars? In his lightsaber training lesson, Obi-Wan tells Luke: “let go your conscious self and act on instinct . . . Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them … Stretch out with your feelings.” It isn’t by thinking that we understand the Force. It’s by feeling. But feelings too are real.
Each episode of Star Wars begins with the same opening lines: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . .” We’re put in mind of the opening lines of the fairy tale, “Once upon a time.” Under the surface of a technically advanced galactic society, we’re invited to enter a deeper realm of myth and magic and ancient religion. With Star Wars, George Lucas has created a myth for our time, the germ, in fact, of a new religion—one clothed in the garb of the future and the ancient spirit quest of the hero. As the civilizations of our own time clash over rival theologies inherited from the past, mankind is in need of an empowering belief for our time, one that provides a unifying distillation of all the world’s religions. To appreciate the way in which Star Wars, with its heroic drama of the Force, responds to this need, we must first of all to let go of our conscious minds and all dependence on empirical evidence, and stretch out with our feelings and imagination. We need to let ourselves be captured by the spell of magic.
Spirit: Hegel’s Distillation of the History of Religion
Like Lucas, Hegel attempts to distill the essence of religion in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and other works. Religion, he argues, is distinguished from science and philosophy in being a matter of feeling a
nd “picture thinking,” rather than of rationality and conceptual thought. The object of religion may be called God or Absolute Spirit, but for the religious person such terms are labels for a peculiar object of feeling and imagination, not concepts for rational inquiry. The ultimate goal of the philosophy of religion is to justify the truth of religious feeling by explaining the reality that it taps into—the all-encompassing and dynamic reality of Spirit.104 Each civilization has its own religious picture of the ultimate nature of reality, the divine, the God, the Absolute Spirit. This picture reflects the kind of civilization it is, and the stage of humanity’s self-development that it represents. A scientific-technological civilization that puts Matter in place of Spirit is no exception to this rule.
Hegel traces a developmental pattern in the historical succession of religious beliefs, one that produces in effect a distillation of divinity. In the succession of basic religious orientations, what one religion calls “good” another religion denounces as evil or darkness. But for the final distillation to appear it’s necessary for the human spirit, on its heroic journey to self-fulfillment, to find the balance between these opposites.
Human history begins with the divine in nature, as human beings living off plants and animals in the wild are immersed in the natural world. For such people there is no separation between the divine and the human. Like the spirits of nature, human beings too wield magical power in controlling the world around them by their wishes and in their dreams. This is the childhood of humanity, Hegel says. The mindset of the child, who willingly enters the fantasy of “once upon a time,” is the general outlook of the culture itself. As Yoda remarks in Attack of the Clones, “Truly wonderful the mind of a child.” This is also the general outlook of all the ancient nature-centered cultures of the East, as exemplified in the Daoism of China. Giving expression to this history, Star Wars appropriately culminates with the battle between the monstrosities of the most advanced technological civilization and the slings and arrows of the nature people, the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, who take C-3PO as a god. As a product of the advanced civilization, though, the gentleman droid cannot accept this worship: “It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” 105
In the next major stage of human history, which takes place primarily in the West, no one could mistake a physical object for a god. As human beings develop greater technological powers over nature, together with mighty systems of economic, social, and political power in which a small number of people have immense control over the lives of the majority, the divine is conceived of in the image of the rulers—a power radically separate from and ruling over the world. The progress of such separation between the higher realm of the gods and the lower world of nature and humans culminates in the slave empire of the ancient Romans. This slave state, which subjects all conquered peoples to an order based on the might of the Roman army, reduces everything sacred in life to an object of utility for political purposes. Star Wars, with its portrayal of the slide from Republic to Empire, borrows liberally from this Roman history—while suggesting parallels with our own time.106
To the individual trampled under by the overwhelming machine of deadly imperial force, the divine inevitably recedes to an “unattainable Beyond.” Hegel calls this dark but necessary moment of the journey of mankind “the Unhappy Consciousness.”107 All the childlike magic of life is gone. The Stoic sage of the time of the Roman empire preaches detachment from emotional involvement in the surrounding world, because the individual is thought to be powerless to change matters governed by forces that are wholly outside of our control. Epictetus advises: “If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.”108 The Stoic recommends acquiescence to external powers in the belief that whatever inscrutable plans the gods have orchestrated for humanity, there must be good in them. But the Skeptic delights in refuting such beliefs as infantile by pointing to the empirical testimony of hard realities. There’s no all-powerful Force that masters the universe, including the power of the Emperor himself. There’s only my own cunning, and the power of a good blaster, as the rebel Han Solo says.
We therefore see two opposite forms of religion in early world history. From the earliest societies and the East, there is the divine as an all-pervading natural force capable of emerging in the most unexpected objects, as in the Ewoks’ vision of a divine C-3PO. From the beginnings of Western civilizations the contrary concept emerges of an external divinity that supposedly controls all, yet dwindles to being an “unattainable Beyond.” If there is to be a distillation of the essence of religion as the core of a new myth for our time, it must combine these two opposite conceptions of the divine. Just such a synthesis, Hegel argues, is represented by the “Consummate Religion” of Christianity with its story of a God who becomes a human babe, grows up with a family, enters upon his mission, and accomplishes this mission only by dying the ignominious death on Mount Calvary of a criminal nailed to a cross.109
What is this mission? To teach a people plunged in the darkness of a world ruled by pitiless physical force that God is not a menacing power ruling over us, but the deepest inner reality of each person. It’s the inner Holy Spirit that binds us all together in a powerful unity that is the irresistible Force by which we can resist and overcome all inner darkness and every outer unjust form of rule. Thus, at the peak of the imperial power of Rome, intrepid bands of Christian rebels, believing that divine Force has merged with the human spirit, began the long climb from a world of Empire whose principle is that only one person is completely free, the Emperor, to a world whose dominant inspiration is that all should be free to rule themselves. Hegel calls this evolution of the state from tyranny to freedom “the march of God in the world.”110 Similarly, defenders of liberty can justly say, in the language of Star Wars, that the Force is with us. It is with us—a people united in the spirit of creative freedom and mutual love. For this is the nature of Spirit, according to Hegel. It’s the Force that runs through us all together. It’s truly understood only when we overcome the darkness that we ourselves cast by our separation from one another, our egotism—only when we learn the ultimate and unconquerable power of love.
Anakin Skywalker as the Chosen One
Anakin’s mother, Shmi, tells Qui-Gon in The Phantom Menace that her gifted son was conceived without a father. “He is the chosen one,” the child of prophecy, Qui-Gon later tells the Jedi Council. The same prophecy that foretells the growth of the Dark Side also tells of “the one who will bring balance to the Force.” All these echoes of Hegel’s Consummate Religion of Christianity, from prophecy to Virgin Birth to a mission of liberation from darkness, set up certain natural expectations. And yet Anakin is no clone of the Christian Savior as Jesus is conventionally understood. Upsetting the standard Christian paradigm, the prophesied savior of Star Wars becomes the archetype of modern villainy, the evil Lord Darth Vader, a machine as much as a man, whose every breath sounds with menace. And yet the prophecy is fulfilled. Anakin-Vader indeed brings balance to the Force, striking down the Emperor, and then dying in the loving embrace of his son.
Giving reason to this reversal of conventional Christianity, Hegel is sharply critical of a theology according to which Jesus is the sinless savior whose mission is to redeem a humanity sunk in darkness. He is the light, the Gospel of John says, “and the light shines in darkness, and the darkness does not comprehend it” (John 1:5). If he is the light, Hegel effectively argues, he nevertheless himself enters into the darkness. The Christian God enters the very darkness through the paradigmatic journey of the Son of God to the cross on Mount Calvary, where Jesus experiences utter abandonment, crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).
The essence of sin, Hegel argues, is the belief that one is an isolated individual, an ego separated from the All—all other human beings and the rest of reality.111 In his sense of abandonment Jesus too experienced such a condition of
sinfulness. He plumbed the Dark Side of reality to demonstrate “that the human, the finite, the fragile, the weak, the negative are themselves moments of the divine, that they are within God himself, that finitude, negativity, otherness are not outside of God and do not, as otherness, hinder unity with God.”112
If we seriously accept the Christian conception of Jesus as both God and man, then the Christian religion is truly the story of the hero’s journey in which the Son of God descends from his exalted heights into the darkness of an oppressive epoch of earthly life, and so is able to connect the darkness to the light in a renewed balance. Only in this way does God realize himself as God. 113 Just as we understand light only through its opposition to darkness, so God truly appreciates himself as God only by becoming something other than God—a finite human being subject to despair and death. God becomes human in every human being, for, as Hegel’s contemporary William Wordsworth writes, “trailing clouds of glory do we come, From God who is our home.”114
The emerging human ego soon separates itself from this original divinity experienced in childhood—that is, identifies itself as a separate being in opposition to everything else—to the Infinite reality outside of itself. Thus begins the war of the separate human ego with the All, our infinite home becomes the Dark Side of God. Through the Son, which represents every solitary human being, the God within us enters into the darkness of separate, finite, ego-centered existence. The inexorable outcome of this journey finds tragic expression in the solitary despair of Jesus’s cry from the cross.
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