Star Wars and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series) - Kevin Decker [9]
In demonstrating why human beings act freely when they commit evil, and aren’t caused to do so by God’s will or eternal foreknowledge, Augustine contends that desire is the foundation of all evil that results from a person’s disordered will: “Each evil man is the cause of his own evildoing.”12 Augustine describes a person as having an “inordinate desire” when he focuses too much on “temporal” things. Good persons live by “turning their love away from those things which cannot be possessed without the risk of losing them.” While evil persons “try to remove obstacles so that they may safely rest in their enjoyment of these things, and so live a life full of evil and crime, which would be better named death.”13 This description certainly fits Anakin, who is unable to turn his love away from his mother and from Padmé, both of whom he loses. When he expresses his frustration at being unable to save his mother from the Sand People, he vows to become “the most powerful Jedi ever” and to “learn to stop people from dying.” George Lucas, the man who knows the most about Anakin’s psychology, notes:
The problem that Anakin has in this whole thing is he has a hard time letting go of things. As he sought more and more power to try to change people’s fate so that they’re the way he wants them, that greed goes from trying to save the one you love to realizing you can control the universe.14
It is Anakin’s desire to control things that are ultimately outside of his control, in defiance of the natural order of the universe established by the will of the Force, which leads to his moral downfall. And this desire stems from Anakin himself: “What each man chooses to pursue and to love lies in his own will.”15 On this view, it doesn’t matter whether Anakin has the possibility to act as he wills. Even if something prevents Anakin from, say, marrying Padmé on Naboo—imagine that their ship blows up on the way there—he has already freely willed to violate the Jedi Code and is morally responsible for that volition. So, despite the appearance that Anakin has no alternative possibilities with regards to being the Chosen One and destroying the Emperor, he’s nonetheless free in his choosing to ally himself with the Dark Side, because that choice stems from his own will, his own inordinate desires.
“This One a Long Time Have I Watched”
Luke, like his father, carries the burden of future expectation on his shoulders. While Anakin is the child of prophecy, Luke is both the new and last hope for restoring freedom to the galaxy. But to restore galactic freedom, Luke must first exercise his individual freedom. As he discovers in the cave on Dagobah, Luke has the same potential to allow inordinate desire to control his will and turn him to the Dark Side. Both Vader and the Emperor attempt to tap into Luke’s desire to destroy, and each try to turn that desire to their own advantage. But, ultimately, only Luke can give into that inordinate desire; only he can turn his own will to the Dark Side: “After all, what cause of the will could there be, except the will itself?”16
And while both Yoda and Obi-Wan have put great faith in Luke from the time he was born, even they can only watch Luke’s life unfold and help train him as a Jedi. Despite their good intentions, neither has the power to bend Luke’s will, as we see in The Empire Strikes Back when they plead with him not to leave Dagobah before his training is completed. Luke is much like his father, as he’s inclined to allow inordinate desire to control his will. But he’s also like Han Solo, because he’s not wholly subject to the will of the Force. When he asks Obi-Wan if the Force “controls your actions,” Obi-Wan responds, “Partially, but it also obeys your commands.” In a deleted scene from Attack of the Clones,