Star Wars and Philosophy
Page 18
But if there’s full comprehension of the divine nature of this journey, of the unity of the light with the dark, such a death is the death of death itself, and the return of the Son to the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Then, the empowered individual sees with the very eye of God. Hegel cites with approval the thought of the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (around 1260-1328): “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him: my eye and his eye are the same.” With such a vision, the individual shares in the divine substance: “If God did not exist,” Eckart argues, “nor would I; if I did not exist, nor would he.”115
Hegel thereby shows how both things can be true, as Obi-Wan says: the Force is both “an energy field created by all living things”—it’s our own energy, infinitely magnified for the one who knows how to connect consciously with all living things—as well as the Force that “binds the galaxy together.” For Hegel, Jesus’s crucifixion begins the destruction of the old paradigm of separate human egos at war with one another. It’s the birth of a new kind of community, bound together in the spirit of love. Overcoming ego-separation and re-connecting through love with all living things, the empowered individual actively participates in the God-force, the Spirit, that binds the galaxy together.
The Force of Love
Reality is ultimately “Spirit,” Hegel argues. And Spirit is “‘I’ that is ‘We,’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I.’”116 Our deeper nature is not to be an “I” separate from other “I”s by the confines and distances of our material bodies. Wherever there is one such separate “I” there are others, and each of these egos struggles against the others. Where every “I” asserts itself against every other “I,” there’s murder and mayhem—that perilous life of mankind described by philosopher Thomas Hobbes as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”117
If the human species is to survive, Hegel argues, some individuals must surrender to others. Out of surrender of the weak to the strong, there emerges the world of Masters and Slaves, until finally everyone is subservient to the one Emperor—the Dark Lord of the separate ego that is the deepest potential and ultimate aspiration within every separate ego.118 Here is the Dark Side of the Force, which for Hegel is the negative being of God. But the true nature of God, which Hegel calls Spirit, is not that of a separate power ruling over a universe of dominated creatures. This is an idea of an outmoded religion, as Han Solo recognizes. Such an all-controlling God is really the ultimate Dark Lord of unlimited egotistical power.
On a psychological plane, the “I” that is “We,” or Spirit, is discovered most vitally in the experience of love. The true meaning of the sacred journey of the hero, exemplified in the life and death of the Christ figure, is infinite love.119 But, as Diotima teaches Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, the path to infinite love begins with the love of one person.120 A crucial moment in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is the love of the intellectual and magician Faust for the young maid Gretchen, a love that is made possible only through Faust’s bargain with the devil—to give up his soul in exchange for the intense experience of life that can only be found through love. This is indeed what the power of love seems to be for the separate ego—the very loss of one’s soul. Such love, which Faust obtains by giving himself over to the powers of darkness, brings about death to Gretchen as well as peril to the immortal soul of the lover. But for Hegel passionate love in which body and soul are totally at stake is the only way to achieve a higher level of vitality and wholeness.
Hegel thereby helps us appreciate a central problem with the Stoic philosophy of the Jedi Knights. Their ideal of detachment from emotional involvement with others seeks to forestall the descent into the darkness of a Faustian love, but in doing so it leaves no room for the higher vitality that only comes through deeply personal connections with particular individuals. It’s this unnatural Stoic detachment that leaves a lovelorn Anakin no alternative, and so precipitates his Faustian bargain with the devil.
In a debate with the Jedi Council in The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon defends Anakin’s candidacy for Jedi knighthood despite his age. Anakin has spent the first nine years of his life living alone with his mother. Yoda explains to Anakin why his attachment to his mother is dangerous for a Jedi warrior: “Afraid to lose her, I think.” “What’s that got to do with anything?” Anakin protests. “Everything,” Yoda tells him. “Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Qui-Gon disagrees with the negative assessment of Anakin. He tells the Jedi Council, “Finding him was the will of the Force. I have no doubt of that.” Indeed, for the devotee of the Force, as Qui-Gon says to Shmi earlier in this episode, “Nothing happens by accident.” Only the mysterious operation of the Force could explain the series of events that led from the Naboo cruiser’s leaking hyperdrive, to an emergency stop on an obscure planet, to the discovery of the slave boy Anakin with his remarkable abilities. As skeptical here as Han Solo, the Jedi Council would rather put this all down to accident, for accepting Anakin means confronting their own deepest fears. If it’s possible to be seduced by the Dark Side, it must also be possible to be overly attached to the light—and overly fearful of the dark. The Jedi too are afraid—afraid of real human love, afraid of connection with the other person, afraid of the loss of self-control that comes to the “I” of passionate love which is at the same time a “We.”
Padmé asks the grown-up Anakin in Attack of the Clones: “Are you allowed to love? I thought that was forbidden for a Jedi.” Anakin replies: “Attachment is forbidden. Possession is forbidden. Compassion, which I would define as unconditional love, is central to a Jedi’s life. So you might say we are encouraged to love.” But such compassion without attachment, without possession and being-possessed, is a superficial, abstracted, intellectualized form of love. Attachment and possession are forbidden because such connections to particular things and people lead to fear for them and fear of losing them. And fear leads to the Dark Side. Therefore, the love of the Jedi Knight must be a detached love—if it can indeed be called love with its willingness to sacrifice friends and loved ones for the perceived higher good. Anakin rejects this detached love of the Stoic sage, as does Luke in The Empire Strikes Back when he spurns Yoda’s declaration that his training is more important than the life of Han and Leia. Giving an ironic twist to the deeper unity of the light with the dark, the Emperor echoes Yoda’s counsel in Return of the Jedi, when the Dark Lord tells Luke that his faith in his friends is his great weakness. The Jedi fears what the Sith Lord despises, the power over the ego wielded by human love.121
Anakin’s eventual declaration of love in Attack of the Clones, in the most sexually seductive scene in the whole of Star Wars, is worthy of Shakespeare: “I’m haunted by the kiss you should never have given me. My heart is beating, hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in my very soul, tormenting me. What can I do? I will do anything you ask.” Such passionate, personal love indeed leads Anakin to the Dark Side. He kills indiscriminately out of rage against his mother’s murder. From the beginning of their relationship, Anakin and Padmé sense that their dark, secret love will ruin them.
With such an understanding of the background story, we finally come to appreciate why Luke recognizes the good in his father. It’s because Anakin doesn’t fear to go where love takes him, both when his love of Padmé takes him into the darkness and when his love of Luke brings him back again. We understand that his destiny, subtly and beautifully orchestrated by the will of the Force and the magic of George Lucas’s art, has all along been to love. By loving in a way that’s truly unconditional, without fear of the darkness into which his love leads him, he fulfills his destiny, destroys the Emperor, and so brings balance to the Force.
Part IV
“There’s Always a Bigger Fish”
Truth, Faith, and a Galactic Society
13
“What Is Thy Bidding, My Master?”: Star Wars and the Hegelian Struggle for Recognition
Star Wars, as the name suggests, is about struggle and conflict, hope and renewal, war and death. On the one side, there are the Rebels, whose struggle for freedom from Imperial domination and fear motivate their supporters and give life to the movement. On the other side, there is the Emperor and his minions who, driven by what philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) refers to as the “will to power,” willingly sacrifice entire planets and their populations in a ruthless attempt to achieve their goals. Art really does imitate life or, at the very least, it illuminates an important feature of it—namely, the exercise of a certain kind of power.
It isn’t difficult to explain how this kind of power arises; fear is the mechanism that accounts for its existence and strength. It is fear of losing his sister that moves Luke to do the Emperor’s bidding and strike down his father. It is fear that motivates the Senate to form the clone army that ultimately brings about its own demise. And, it’s the fear of losing his mother that sends the young Anakin Skywalker down the path to the Dark Side and prompts the ancient Jedi Master, Yoda, to voice the mantra of his religion: “Fear leads to anger . . . anger leads to hate . . . hate leads to suffering.”
Fear illuminates the path to slavery and suffering, the path that leads to the Dark Side. At the same time, though, it reveals a certain mode of exercising power—the way of the Sith Master. The Master rises to his station and maintains his dominance over his apprentices or slaves by evoking and playing upon their fears. And the apprentice or slave maintains himself as a slave by allowing those fears to determine his being. This interplay between power and fear is what the nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770-1831) called the “master-slave dialectic.” By looking at the Star Wars saga through the lens of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic we will not only better understand the nature and limits of the Emperor’s power, but also why—apart from the Hollywood impulse to give audiences a happy ending—that power failed. And, as an added bonus, Hegel’s analysis forces us to look most carefully at the personal exercise of power, bringing into sharper relief the various characters within the Star Wars galaxy and their motivations.
Masters and Slaves: Who Rules Whom?
Thales, the very first philosopher in the Western tradition, was once asked, “What is most difficult?” He replied, “To know thyself.” Indeed, Thales was not far off the mark: coming to understand ourselves and the value and meaning of our experiences really is one of the most difficult things any of us can do. Similarly, coming to understand how self-knowledge is itself possible, how it arises, and in what it consists is one of the more challenging problems philosophers grapple with. In Star Wars, two of the most compelling themes are Luke’s journey of self-discovery and his father’s redemption as the result of his own coming to a new self-identity at the end of Return of the Jedi.
As unlikely as it may sound, it’s the problem of self-knowledge that ultimately leads Hegel to examine the relationship between master and slave. For Hegel, knowledge about ourselves as individuals, knowledge about the value and meaning of our projects and experiences, necessarily implies a relationship to other people. Our individual self-understanding does not arise independently of others; rather, it emerges in the context of a relationship with other people. Their recognition (or lack of recognition) of us as having valuable, independent projects and experiences shapes how we perceive ourselves. Not surprisingly then, the type and quality of our relationships to others will have a direct influence on our capacity to know and value ourselves. Some relationships can enhance our capacity for self-knowledge while others, like the relation between a master and a slave (or between the Emperor and his subjects), distort the picture we have of ourselves. But, what’s really interesting about this is, the fact that it is the master, and not so much the slave, whose self-understanding is distorted by the relationship. Let’s see why.
From the standpoint of self-knowledge, the individual becomes aware of herself as an individual (she becomes self-conscious) at the moment when she confronts another like herself, a subject capable of interpreting and understanding the world.122 In this meeting, the two are aware of each other, but that awareness carries with it a certain tension. Insofar as the other is a co-interpreter of the world, she is a subject for whom the world presents itself. On the other hand, insofar as the world remains an object to her, the other is likewise an object within that world.123 When, for instance, Luke and Vader first meet in The Empire Strikes Back, Vader is torn. On the one hand, he regards Luke as a trophy, a mere object of conquest. On the other hand, he also sees Luke as a potential rival to the Emperor, an equal and partner.
In any case, at this point the individual is only aware of herself in terms of her capacity to interpret and understand the world. What she lacks is an understanding of herself as an active creator, that is, as a being with meaningful projects and goals. Yet in order to know herself in this way, the individual must somehow fashion a world according to her own will; she must, in other words, make for herself a human world. Then and only then will her individuality emerge and itself become something to be interpreted and understood by another. The problem is that being creative in this sense requires that we impress our will on others by ordering our world. In this respect, we are all like the Emperor, attempting to remake the world in our own image.
The struggle begins! Each refuses to see the other as a co-equal subject, and each sees in the other the means to create a world of their own design. Both risk all in the life-or-death struggle for supremacy, for it is by such a struggle that, Hegel thinks, we come to know and value life with all its creative possibilities.124 In the end, one reaches the brink of terror and backs down, only to become the slave of the other. This, in simple terms, is how Hegel understands the historical emergence of the relation between masters and slaves.
It’s tempting to think that at this point the master has what he wants. As master, he can command the labor of the slave and make the world into what he wills. Freed from the drudgery of mundane work, the master can live in lavish surroundings, indulge in fabulous pleasures, and do pretty much as he pleases (think Jabba the Hutt). It certainly looks as if the master has what he wants, just as it looks as if the Emperor, with his crimson-clad guards and fawning courtiers, has what he wants; but appearances can be deceiving.
It was to be recognized by another, an equal, that the master risked everything to become master, not to live a life of pleasure. The slave is a human being, but as long as he remains a slave he cannot give the master the recognition he desires—the recognition of an equal. Why does this matter? Hegel expresses it this way: “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.”125 Although I am surely something independently of others, the understanding I have of myself, of the value of my projects, of the meaning and sense of my experiences, is dependent upon the way others see me. Naturally, I must trust in and value the judgments of those who evaluate me. If I judge them to be unequal, incapable of understanding or passing judgment upon the value of my life, then their opinions are worthless to me. Only an equal is capable of understanding me in the way I understand myself. Thus, if I am to gain the recognition I desire as a self-conscious being, if I am to understand the truth about myself and my possibilities as a human being, then I must seek out an equal.
But this is impossible for the master. By definition, the master “prefers death to the slavish recognition of another’s superiority.” 126 And it is only through death, his death or that of his adversary, that the master achieves what he wills—lordship. The possibility of peaceful co-existence with co-equals—with other masters—is likewise foreclosed. The original struggle for (a one-sided) recognition is merely transplanted to a new site. For as long as the master refuses to recognize the other as a co-equal subject, for as long as he wills that he be master, his most important human aims are, and will forever be, frustrated.
Of course it goes without saying that the slave’s aims are likewise frustrated. Being a slave is only a happy state of affairs in bad histories. In reality slavery is a brutal and inhuman institution, and the brief glimpse of slavery on Tatooine that we get in The Phantom Menace is tame and whitewashed. Nevertheless, the situation for the slave is also not what it might at first seem.
To begin with, it is the slave whose labor creates the world of things, and through that labor he comes to experience himself as a creative being. This is certainly the case for young Anakin working in Watto’s shop. While the master cannot in the end be satisfied with himself—for he can choose only to live a life of animal pleasure or fight anew and die in the field of battle—the slave can go beyond himself and his situation by overcoming his fears. In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke’s experience in the cave and his subsequent Jedi training symbolizes his own struggle with, and overcoming of, fear. His fear at first enslaves him and prevents him from acting as a Jedi Knight. Although Luke claims that he is not afraid, Yoda knows better and warns, “You will be . . . you will be.” His overcoming of that fear in turn constitutes an important part of his maturation and in their duel on Cloud City, Vader praises Luke for overcoming his fear. Consequently, it is the master who represents an historical dead end. He can never go beyond what he is and realize himself as a free self-conscious subject. The slave, on the other hand, has nothing to lose but his fear; he can and will go beyond what he is because his desire is not to be master, but to be free. Hegel says that he finds this freedom in his work, a space in which he controls his small, limited world and recognizes the freedom of having a “mind of one’s own.”127