Star Wars and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series) - Kevin Decker [39]
In the Platonic tradition evil has its ultimate source in matter, and this goes for moral evil as well as natural evil, since all moral evil originates in excessive attachment to the body. The good person isn’t a slave to the body and its passions, and so she isn’t excessively afraid of death. Obi-Wan’s last lesson for Luke comes when he allows himself to be killed by Darth Vader—thereby freeing himself from the confines of the body—rather than have Luke watch him attack in order to kill. Obi-Wan warns Vader, “You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Obi-Wan’s death allows him to be released from the limitations of bodily existence. In addition, Obi-Wan will have a power that Vader can’t imagine—since Vader thinks, like his master the Emperor, that real power comes with the ability to manipulate one’s physical surroundings, particularly through the threat of death. For Yoda, Obi-Wan, and Plato, true power is spiritual power—having control of one’s own self. The Emperor, by contrast, teaches his disciples to use the Force and channel bodily passions such as fear, anger, and hate in order to acquire power over nature and bodily death. As Anakin confesses to Padmé after taking his first steps toward the Dark Side, “I should be [all-powerful]. Someday I will be . . . I will even learn to stop people from dying.” By contrast, Yoda teaches that “a Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack” and he accepts the reality of bodily death: “Twilight is upon me, and soon night must fall. That is the way of things . . . the way of the Force.”
“One All-Powerful Force Controlling Everything”
Many people don’t accept the Platonic view that God couldn’t have made a physical universe without evil because it conflicts with their belief that God is the omnipotent (all-powerful) creator of the universe. On the other hand, the presence of evil in the world is often cited as evidence that there is no God, at least not a perfectly good and all-powerful one. As Han Solo says to Luke in A New Hope, “Kid, 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 that there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything.”
One of the most important religious philosophers to have grappled with the question of the origin of evil is the fourth-century Christian philosopher, St. Augustine. Although Augustine was raised as a “traditional” Christian, he did not fully accept the traditional form of the Christian faith until around thirty years of age. In fact, Augustine spent much of his earlier life as a member of a gnostic Christian sect known as the Manichees.
The Manichees accept two Platonic ideas about evil: evil finds its primary locus in bodily existence and evil is a necessary feature of the universe. Thus, like Plato, the Manichees are dualists about the existence of good and evil: both good and evil have always existed in the universe—goodness doesn’t come from evil and evil doesn’t originate from something good. However, whereas Plato traces the origin of evil to the universe’s being material, the Manichees locate it in the will of a single person.
The Manichees see the whole history of the universe as one long, cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil. Each of these forces has a kind of divinity associated with it: a good God of light and spirit, and an evil God of darkness and flesh. Personifying evil is one way of explaining why there is moral evil in the universe. Star Wars is replete with examples of such personifications: Darth Vader, the Emperor, Darth Maul, the Emperor’s Royal Guards, and so on. The Manichees think “the evil that men do” can ultimately be traced back to the evil God, a mastermind of all evil who is evil by his very nature; we might say that such a person is