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“Are you allowed to love? I thought that was forbidden for a Jedi.” Anakin replies: “Attachment is forbidden. Possession is forbidden. Compassion, which I would define as unconditional love, is central to a Jedi’s life. So you might say we are encouraged to love.” But such compassion without attachment, without possession and being-possessed, is a superficial, abstracted, intellectualized form of love. Attachment and possession are forbidden because such connections to particular things and people lead to fear for them and fear of losing them. And fear leads to the Dark Side. Therefore, the love of the Jedi Knight must be a detached love—if it can indeed be called love with its willingness to sacrifice friends and loved ones for the perceived higher good. Anakin rejects this detached love of the Stoic sage, as does Luke in The Empire Strikes Back when he spurns Yoda’s declaration that his training is more important than the life of Han and Leia. Giving an ironic twist to the deeper unity of the light with the dark, the Emperor echoes Yoda’s counsel in Return of the Jedi, when the Dark Lord tells Luke that his faith in his friends is his great weakness. The Jedi fears what the Sith Lord despises, the power over the ego wielded by human love.121

Anakin’s eventual declaration of love in Attack of the Clones, in the most sexually seductive scene in the whole of Star Wars, is worthy of Shakespeare: “I’m haunted by the kiss you should never have given me. My heart is beating, hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in my very soul, tormenting me. What can I do? I will do anything you ask.” Such passionate, personal love indeed leads Anakin to the Dark Side. He kills indiscriminately out of rage against his mother’s murder. From the beginning of their relationship, Anakin and Padmé sense that their dark, secret love will ruin them.

With such an understanding of the background story, we finally come to appreciate why Luke recognizes the good in his father. It’s because Anakin doesn’t fear to go where love takes him, both when his love of Padmé takes him into the darkness and when his love of Luke brings him back again. We understand that his destiny, subtly and beautifully orchestrated by the will of the Force and the magic of George Lucas’s art, has all along been to love. By loving in a way that’s truly unconditional, without fear of the darkness into which his love leads him, he fulfills his destiny, destroys the Emperor, and so brings balance to the Force.

Part IV

“There’s Always a Bigger Fish”

Truth, Faith, and a Galactic Society

13

“What Is Thy Bidding, My Master?”: Star Wars and the Hegelian Struggle for Recognition

BRIAN K. CAMERON

Star Wars, as the name suggests, is about struggle and conflict, hope and renewal, war and death. On the one side, there are the Rebels, whose struggle for freedom from Imperial domination and fear motivate their supporters and give life to the movement. On the other side, there is the Emperor and his minions who, driven by what philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) refers to as the “will to power,” willingly sacrifice entire planets and their populations in a ruthless attempt to achieve their goals. Art really does imitate life or, at the very least, it illuminates an important feature of it—namely, the exercise of a certain kind of power.

It isn’t difficult to explain how this kind of power arises; fear is the mechanism that accounts for its existence and strength. It is fear of losing his sister that moves Luke to do the Emperor’s bidding and strike down his father. It is fear that motivates the Senate to form the clone army that ultimately brings about its own demise. And, it’s the fear of losing his mother that sends the young Anakin Skywalker down the path to the Dark Side and prompts the ancient Jedi Master, Yoda, to voice the mantra of his religion: “Fear leads to anger . . . anger leads to hate . . . hate leads to suffering.”

Fear illuminates the path to slavery and suffering, the path that leads to the Dark Side. At the same time, though,