Star Wars and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series) - Kevin Decker [100]
Yoda’s primary lesson is that in order to use the Force, one must look beyond appearances. Palpatine embodies the negative side of this lesson, with his kindly face and hidden lust for power. Yoda, powerful and enlightened beyond what his wizened exterior would suggest, embodies the positive.155
Truth and the Marketplace
Truth, then, is less obvious than it initially seems. People aren’t always what they appear, and words that sound honest can be colored by hidden meanings. But this hardly explains or solves the paradox of the lying Jedi and honest Sith, particularly not in the case of Obi-Wan Kenobi, whom we first meet as a wise desert hermit and mentor figure. Why would such a person lie to Luke? From one perspective, this is a terrible act—a betrayal of young Luke’s trust, a way to manipulate him into joining the battle on the Jedi’s team. When Obi-Wan’s lie is exposed, Luke is shattered to the point of very nearly choosing death. But from another perspective, Obi-Wan wasn’t trying to manipulate Luke, but to protect him.
“You can’t handle the truth!” Jack Nicholson shouts at the climax of A Few Good Men. Not all truths are pretty or easy to face. And just as some forms of entertainment are too intense for young children, some truths are simply too much to handle for people at an early stage in their emotional and intellectual development. The Greek philosopher Socrates (470-399 B.C.) compares the seeking of truth to shopping in a marketplace: an inexperienced shopper, who can’t tell good merchandise from bad, may find herself swindled into buying food that’s spoiled, unwholesome, or even poisoned—or, like Luke’s Uncle Owen, buying a droid with a bad motivator.156 Nietzsche makes the uncomfortable point that we only actually want truths that are pleasant or that help us, and we’re quite tolerant of lies that do us no harm.157
The Luke that Obi-Wan meets on Tatooine is young and sheltered. He knows nothing more complex than his aunt and uncle’s farm, and sees the Jedi as perfect, shining heroes out of legend, not real people with frailties and human weakness. Obi-Wan feels that this Luke isn’t ready for the ugly truth about his father. As Socrates would put it, he doesn’t yet have the wisdom to keep that knowledge from poisoning him. Most likely, if Luke hadn’t rushed off to face Vader half-trained, he would’ve eventually learned the complete story in a gentler way. But for the time being, Obi-Wan offers the young Jedi a version of the truth that he could handle.
“Unexpected This Is, and Unfortunate”
If Obi-Wan uses a lie to protect, the Sith use truth as a weapon. Vader tells Luke the truth about his parentage at the worst possible time, and in a way that inflicts as much pain as humanly possible: truth without compassion is brutality. In Attack of the Clones, Yoda’s renegade apprentice Count Dooku picks a similarly bad situation in which to tell young Obi-Wan that a Sith has infiltrated the Senate. Dooku even echoes Vader’s dialogue as he invites the Jedi to join him, knowing that he’ll either be believed and gain an ally, or disbelieved, in which case telling the truth actually covers it up.158
Neither Vader nor Dooku is telling the truth because he wants to increase anyone’s knowledge or understanding, or lead them toward a more authentic life. Instead, they both use truth in an attempt to break a Jedi’s faith in something they know and trust—in Obi-Wan’s case, the Senate, and in Luke’s case, Obi-Wan himself—and in doing so to make them question their loyalty. This, of course, works better in the case of the vulnerable,