Star Wars and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series) - Kevin Decker [56]
Ultimately, at the end of our present age, all that will remain of the earth is a synthetic ball of parts and wires, glass and steel—all uniform and very unnatural—like a Death Star residing in the cold dark reaches of space. Indeed, this is precisely the problem of technology we find in Star Wars. True, it may at first glance appear that progress is defined by the ascent of technology—a view advanced, for example, by Han Solo—but on closer analysis, the path of technological enframing is precisely what distorts our vision of the Force.
Heidegger on Technology
In philosophizing about the present age, Heidegger wants to understand what exactly went wrong with our culture, how we ended up with all these atom bombs and world wars and nuclear waste. So, acting as a kind of philosophical detective, he traces the modern crisis back to the earliest stages of thought, when “thinking” just began. And it began, he claims, in ancient Greece, particularly with the Presocratic philosophers, like Parmenides and Heraclitus, who started asking about the nature of the universe. Their basic question can be put a number of different ways: “What is being?” or “What does ‘being’ mean?” or “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Similarly, we can imagine ancient Jedi first philosophizing about the nature of the Force, which eventually leads to the discovery and use of its Dark Side.
The Presocratics’ response to being was pure “astonishment,” which was appropriate. Indeed, we too should be blown away by the sheer being of being; and in our astonishment we should not attempt to divide up reality into scientific parts, but to marvel at being—to marvel that there is a universe at all—through poetry, just as the Presocratics did, and just as the Jedi marvel at the Force. This was a noble beginning to thought; but today, according to Heidegger, the question of being doesn’t really even come up on the screen anymore. As Heidegger puts it in Being and Time, “The question has today been forgotten.”75 Moreover, Heidegger doesn’t mean a little “memory-loss,” but a much deeper sense of forgetfulness. We actually forget about our own existence—a kind of ontological amnesia.76 And if the question of being (or the Force) does happen to arise, we are always quick to dismiss it as a meaningless garble. Consider, for example, the many non-Jedi, like Han Solo and Admiral Motti, who simply don’t recognize the power of the Force. What the Jedi call the Force, Han refers to as “a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.” And Motti condescendingly mocks Vader’s “sad devotion to that ancient religion.”
So why exactly did we forget the question of being? The answer, in a word, is technology, and especially, for Heidegger, modern technology. Historically speaking, technology was at its best in the age of the ancient Greeks, who conceived it as art and as craft. But gradually technology was corrupted. In order to explain this historical transition, Heidegger distinguishes between two kinds of technological experience: the “ready-tohand” and the “present-at-hand.” The ready-to-hand is our primitive tool-use relation: we experience tools and the external environment as natural extensions of our bodies. In Heidegger’s terminology we are “attuned” to our world through our basic “equipment”—we are “at home” in the world. As we’ll see, the Jedi use technology—such as the lightsaber—in just this way. This is “authentic” existence, our authentic “being-in-the-world,” being at one with the world. As such, we “care” for nature in this mode. We care for our homes, for each other, and above all for the earth, and thereby allow nature to reveal its own internal natural forms on its own terms. We care for being, in general, just as a nerfherder cares for his nerfs. As Heidegger puts it, “Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.”77
The “present-at-hand,