Star Wars and Philosophy

by Kevin S. Decker

  49 I would like to thank Jason Eberl, Kevin Decker, and Jennifer Kwon for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

  50 For further discussion of love and attachment, see Chapter 12 in this volume.

  51 See Plato, Timaeus, 28b-29; Republic, Book X, 596b-597d.

  52 Plato, Phaedo, 66-67, translated by R. Hackforth, in R.E. Allen, ed., Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle (New York: The Free Press, 1991), p. 164.

  53 For more on the issue of freedom, see Chapter 1 in this volume.

  54 Augustine, Confessions, Book VII, paragraph 7, translated by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 116.

  55 In the recent DVD release of Return of the Jedi, Hayden Christensen (the young Anakin) appears as Anakin at the victory celebration instead of Sebastian Shaw (the old Anakin), further underscoring the theme of triumphant redemption.

  56 See Richard Routley and Val Routley, “Against the Inevitability of Human Chauvinism,” in K.E. Goodpaster and K. M. Sayre, eds., Ethics and Problems of the Twenty-First Century (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).

  57 Peter Singer, “Not for Humans Only: The Place of Nonhumans in Environmental Issues,” in Ethics and Problems of the Twenty-First Century, op. cit., p. 194.

  58 Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (St. Albinos: Paladin, 1975).

  59 Holmes Rolston, III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 199.

  60 Holmes Rolston, III, Conserving Natural Value (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 81.

  61 Ibid., p. 174.

  62 Rolston, Environmental Ethics, p. 228.

  63 Rolston, Conserving Natural Value, p. 177.

  64 Ibid., pp. 143-44.

  65 For more on this Platonic view of the Force, see Chapter 6 in this volume.

  66 Symbiotic relationships regularly occur in the natural world; for example, think of all the good that bacteria do to clean environments. Rolston describes an ecosystem as “a community, where parts fit together in symbiosis” (Rolston, Environmental Ethics, p. 311).

  67 Rolston, Environmental Ethics, p. 105. See Aristotle, Physics, Book II, Chapter 1, 192b10-35, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 236.

  68 For further discussion of a philosophical view of technology, see Chapter 9 in this volume.

  69 Rolston, Conserving Natural Value, p. 81.

  70 Ibid., p. 311.

  71 This chapter has benefited from helpful comments and suggestions from Jerold J. Abrams, Jason Eberl, Kevin Decker, and Bill Irwin. May the Force be with them.

  72 For further discussion of the ethics of Jedi “mind tricks,” see Chapter 5 in this volume.

  73 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Staumbaugh (New York: SUNY Press, 1996).

  74 For an excellent study of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, see George Pattison, The Later Heidegger (New York: Routledge, 2000). For an analysis of Heidegger’s general philosophy, see Magda King, A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); and George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, 1989).

  75 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 1.

  76 True thinking for Heidegger has been lost today—lost really ever since the fifth century B.C. It was Plato and Aristotle who started to lose sight of the question of being. They effectively shifted the problem to a new set of questions: “How can we know beings?” and “How are beings related to one another?” The medieval philosophers, such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, were not much better, following closely in the footsteps of Plato and Aristotle. But it was really Descartes who achieved the modern shift in knowledge, putting the human knower over and above the material world, separate from nature and matter as the set of objects to be known and controlled.

  77 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Heidegger, Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1977), p. 221.

  78 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 31.

  79 Heidegger made this remark in an interview with Der Spiegel, entitled “Only a God Can Save Us,” translated by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo in Philosophy Today 20 (4th April, 1976), pp. 267-285.

  80 David West Reynolds, Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary (New York: DK Publishing), p. 25.

  81 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 214.

  82 See Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, p. 193.

  83 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, p. 301.

  84 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 31.

  85 See Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Chapter 4, 1253b20-35, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, translated by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1131. For more of Aristotle’s theory of technology, see his Physics, Book II, Chapter 1, 192b10-193b20, in Basic Works, pp. 236-38.

  86 Heidegger writes: “Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free into its own essence. To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from boundless spoliation” (“Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Basic Writings, p. 328).

  87 I would like to thank Bill Irwin, Jason Eberl, Kevin Decker, and Elizabeth Cooke for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this chapter, and Chris Pliatska for many discussions of Star Wars.

  88 See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975 [1694]), Book 2, Chapter 27; John Barresi, “On Becoming a Person,” Philosophical Psychology 12 (1999), pp. 79-98; Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms (Montgomery: Bradford, 1978); Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Scott Glynn, Identity, Intersubjectivity, and Communicative Action (Athens: Paideia Project, 2000).

  89 Most thinkers doing work in psychology, philosophy of mind, and the neurosciences subscribe to the idea that “the mind is what the brain does.” Those doing work in artificial intelligence alter this by saying that “the mind is what something that functions like the brain does.” Since personhood is an extension of one’s mind, it is safe to say that for these folks personhood is what the brain (or something that functions like it) does as well. See Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991); Hans Hermans et al., “The Dialogical Self: Beyond Individualism and Rationalism,” American Psychologist 47 (1992), pp. 23-33; Eric Kandel et al., eds., Principles of Neural Science (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000).

  90 See Dennett, Consciousness Explained; Ned Block, “Troubles with Functionalism,” in Ned Block, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 268-305; Philip Johnson-Laird, Mental Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1984).

  91 See George Boolos and Robert Jeffrey, Computability and Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and James Robert Brown, The Laboratory of the Mind: Thought Experiments in the Natural Sciences (London: Routledge, 1991).

  92 See Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).

  93 See David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 6-11.

  94 See George Roth and Michael Wullimann, Brain, Evolution, and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  95 See Mark Hollis, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Ronald Lipsey, Introduction to Positive Economics (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).

  96 Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 58-61.

 
97 See David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), Book I, Part iii, §§ii-vi.

  98 Ibid., Book I, Part iii, §vi.

  99 G.W. Leibniz, Monadology, in G.W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, edited by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), §7, pp. 213-14.

  100 In this example, I’m using the actions of a person, whom we might reasonably believe makes his own decisions and acts autonomously, so the analogy with inferences about causes in general wouldn’t make sense in this case. But the main point still holds; in any series of events, from the fact that they’ve always been observed to behave in a specific way, it doesn’t follow that they must continue to behave that way unless we have an independent reason for making that judgment.

  101 Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (New York: Norton, 1929), p. 180.

  102 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 808.

  103 Lucas relates that in preparing for Star Wars he read fifty books on the religions of the world, but of these he mentions only one, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell’s book details the many myths and tales of the hero’s adventures as essentially a journey of self-transformation. Based on this reading, Lucas says that he “worked out a general theory for the Force, and then I played with it.” (Laurent Bouzereau, Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays [New York: Ballantine, 1997], p. 35).

  104 See G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume I, edited by Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

  105 For further discussion of the depiction of technology and nature in Star Wars, see Chapters 7 and 9 in this volume.

  106 For further discussion of this political transformation in Star Wars, see Chapter 14 in this volume.

  107 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 131.

  108 Epictetus, Enchiridion, #3. Available at http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html . For more discussion of Stoic philosophy, see Chapter 2 in this volume.

  109 See G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume III, edited by Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

  110 G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 279, paragraph 258.

  111 See G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume II, edited by Peter C. Hodgson. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 740-41.

  112 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume III, p. 326.

  113 Ibid., pp. 327-28. See James Lawler, “God and Man Separated No More: Hegel Overcomes the Unhappy Consciousness of Gibson’s Christianity,” in Jorge J.E. Gracia, ed., Mel Gibson’s Passion and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), pp. 62-76.

  114 William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Available at http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww331.html.

  115 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume I, pp. 347-48.

  116 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 110.

  117 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, Chapter XIV, in Great Books of the Western World, Volume 23 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), p. 85.

  118 For further discussion of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as depicted in Star Wars, see Chapter 13 in this volume.

  119 See Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume III, p. 128.

  120 See Plato, Symposium, in Great Books of the Western World, Volume 7 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), pp. 167, 210.

  121 In the climactic battle of The Matrix Revolutions, Agent Smith, with characteristic disgust, similarly tells Neo that “only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love.” See James Lawler, “Only Love Is Real: Heidegger, Plato and the Matrix Trilogy,” in William Irwin, ed., More Matrix and Philosophy: Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded (Chicago: Open Court, 2005).

  122 G.W.F. Hegel, translated by A.V. Miller, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) §178-184. All other Hegel citations will be from this edition, with the relevant sections in the text.

  123 Ibid., §186

  124 Ibid., §187

  125 Ibid., p. 111.

  126 Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire and Recognition: Texts and Commentaries, edited by John O’Neill (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 55.

  127 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 119.

  128 See Chapter 14 in this volume, which also discusses the Emperor’s use of fear in governing.

  129 For a discussion of Luke’s faith in his father and its effect on Vader, turn to Chapter 17 in this volume.

  130 See Philip Pettit, Republicanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  131 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, translated by G.D.H. Cole (London: Dent, 1973), quoted in part in Michael Rosen and Jonathan Wolff, eds., Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 62.

  132 You can read a defense of the idea that droids are deserving of equal treatment in Chapter 10 of this volume.

  133 Aristotle, Politics 1295a20-23, translated by B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2, edited by J. Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 2056.

  134 Niccolò Machiavelli, selections from The Prince, in Michael Curtis, ed., The Great Political Theories, Volume 1 (New York: Avon, 1981), p. 222.

  135 Plutarch, Parallel Lives: “Solon,” quoted in Readings in Ancient History: From Gilgamesh to Diocletian, second edition (Lexington: Heath, 1976), p. 151.

  136 Leo Strauss, “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 28.

  137 John Dewey, “Individuality, Equality and Superiority,” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1925. Volume 13 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), p. 297.

  138 John Dewey, “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us” in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1952. Volume 14 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 227.

  139 See the interview with Shadia Drury: http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-3-77-1542.jsp.

  140 I am grateful to Jason Eberl, Keith Decker, Robert Arp, Bill Irwin, and Suzanne Decker for reading and commenting on this chapter. This wise “Jedi Council” helped to improve it in crucial ways.

  141 Aristotle, Physics, translated by Richard Hope (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 194b12.

  142 Ibid., 193b9-12.

  143 Aristotle, De anima, translated by J.A. Smith, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 414a28-b20.

  144 Aristotle, Metaphysics, translated by Hugh Lawson-Tankred (London: Penguin, 1998), 1028b33-1029a7.

  145 Aristotle, Politics, translated by Ernest Barker (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), 1253b35.

  146 Aristotle, Parts of Animals, translated by A.L. Peck (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, revised edition 1945), 645a29-31; 645a23.

  147 For further discussions of Yoda as a “Zen master” and a “Stoic sage,” see Chapters 2 and 3 in this volume.

  148 For further discussion of the “personhood” of R2-D2 and C-3PO, see Chapter 10 in this volume.

  149 Aristotle, Physics, 199b10.

  150 See Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (New York: Scribner’s, 1937); Peter Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge, 1969); Henry Veatch, Rational Man (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962).

  151 The big exception would appear to be the speech he gives to the Senate in Attack of the Clones, which certainly seems to contradict the facts. I’ll discuss this shortly.

  152 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (1873), in The Portable Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 43.r />
  153 Ibid.

  154 For the story of Milarepa and Marpa, see http://www.cosmicharmony.com/Av/Milarepa/Milarepa.htm.

  155 For further philosophical analysis of Yoda’s character, see Chapter 2 in this volume.

  156 See Plato, Protagoras.

  157 Nietzsche, op. cit.

  158 In other words, hiding it in plain sight. For an interesting exploration of this idea, see Wendy Doniger, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).