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Yoda, though separated from the technological action, speaks for many of the values expressed in the film, and his views give a clue to the basis for this preference. His initial, physically repugnant appearance soon becomes a kind of corroboration for his status as a guru. He has something of the Eastern mystic about him. His isolation appears to be a backdrop for a life of ascetic contemplation, rather than a sign of alienated withdrawal. Yoda is seen finally as an embodiment of unselfish goodness and thus a perfect mentor, under whose guidance Luke achieves a heightened consciousness. But there is something more to Yoda’s isolation; he seems to live in a world devoid of human emotion. Yoda warns Luke against the self-destructiveness of hate, but nowhere does he advocate love. The fruit of Yoda’s training bears this out; though Luke shows loyalty (a quality he has demonstrated before becoming Yoda’s pupil), nowhere does he come to the sort of compassionate insight one might expect from an enlightened mind.

Yoda’s is a life without joy. World weary, perpetually exhausted, he takes no pleasure in reflecting that he has been training Jedi Knights for eight hundred years. Apparently, none of that has given any cause for celebration; he shows no inclination for song or delight in any form. His spirit of renunciation—“You must unlearn what you have learned”—implies a rejection of emotion and comes close to the sort of Buddhist injunction, “Give, sympathize, control,” familiar to modern readers of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or in its more recent and popular Zen manifestations.147 Such an implicitly dualistic attitude has closer affinities with the legacy of the Puritan suspicion of life embodied in flesh, a view filtered through to the modern world via American Transcendentalism, than it shares with the sense of a unity of mind and body as well as the unity of being, as it does in Aristotle or in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Aristotle takes a holistic approach in conceiving of the relation of body and soul (or mind). In his philosophy, matter and form are indivisible, except for purposes of analysis. Unlike Plato, he doesn’t depreciate matter (or flesh) or denigrate it as a source of trouble or pain. Instead, Aristotle argues that matter joined with form actualizes being, and being is good. Aristotle would have no trouble answering the question posed by an agonized Hamlet, “To be or not to be?” Without matter, form cannot be individualized, that is, there can be no individual beings without it, while matter without form doesn’t even exist.

The same split between mind and matter in Lucas’s film is a familiar feature in much of the thinking about science going at least as far back as Francis Bacon (1521-1626). Science and technology, in this post-Renaissance view, emphasize discovery as a source of power over nature rather than as a discovery of truths about nature and man’s relation to the rest of the universe. Seeking power over nature easily becomes a kind of combat, with man pitting himself against the material universe. Yoda’s teaching Luke to levitate a rock while standing on one hand demonstrates more than training in concentration; perhaps it even shows the same will to overcome matter and gravity that appears in the modern impulse to balance massive skyscrapers on slender fingers of steel and concrete.

More importantly, it’s in keeping with the spirit of nature as an obstacle to be overcome that the robots exhibit mind overcoming the limitations of flesh, and the comic re-building of C- 3PO after having been blown apart by an enemy shot only dramatizes the implied insignificance of the relation of body to mind. In the same scene where C-3PO is reconstructed, the body becomes a series of interchangeable parts. Even as C-3PO comically scolds Chewbacca for getting its head on backwards, the robot evokes pity, as if it were a human patient in an operating room.

Clearly lacking real flesh and life, lacking even that artificial life of a Frankenstein