Star Wars and Philosophy

Unless you train your body to obey your mental commands, Plato teaches, you won’t be able to have within yourself the necessary power to drive you forward on the road to even greater mental control over other things.

is merely an irony that Dooku exercises his deception by telling an important truth, while Obi-Wan later conveys a deeper truth by lying to Luke about the death of his father.44 Dooku, as it turns out, is not morally ambiguous at all: he’s simply a subtle instrument of evil. The movies thus miss the opportunity to teach an important moral lesson: sincere people can honestly disagree about the correct moral course.

We have, then, a conflict between people with different views of what is needed to advance the good, neither of whom is in a position to convince the other of his point of view. The dispute is a conflict of visions, based partially on a conflict in knowledge. Each man acts reasonably given the information he has, relying most on those whom he trusts. Each is thus acting out of good intentions, yet one must have unwittingly become a tool of evil. Without further information, such conflicts can’t be resolved, and so one of them must be horribly mistaken. In such scenarios lie great moral tragedies.
To be a great tragedy, however, each side must be acting out of good will, but one unwittingly aids evil.

arrogance in his own knowledge and in that of his leaders leaves unquestioned his misguided assumptions.

While Williams’s position is appealing, it is ultimately based on a kind of moral selfishness: I will never get my hands dirty, though the heavens may fall. Undoubtedly, both you and Lando give up something important if you act as morality requires: you each give up a sense of moral purity. But ultimately, that sense is a kind of moral vanity: it is the view that my moral sensibilities are worth more than the lives of the others.

His love for them eventually leads him to commit himself to a greater good and to express a moral regard for oppressed people everywhere.

“No! Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.” So long as there is effort, that very effort divides the mind against itself. When “I” try, the mind is divided between “I” and trying. With effort there is division between the actor and what’s acted upon. This division is a psychological fabrication that fragments the whole into parts, thus removing one from original mind.

the Tao is to unlearn and to undo. Yoda says to Luke, “You must unlearn what you have learned!” In Chinese this directive is called “Wu Wei,” which literally means “no action”; but a better translation would be effortless action or ego-less spontaneity.

is the clinging of ego, of not realizing the oneness of life. Anger and hate follow. Sakyamuni Buddha said that he taught one thing and one thing only, how to be free from suffering. This freedom is the letting go of clinging to the ego.

The ignorance of egotism produces the negative karma of suffering. When one is constricted by one’s ego, the emotions characteristic of the Dark Side are generated.