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monster patched together from the flesh of unwitting donors, the robot has assumed a completely human role.148 Its dialogue with human characters and their paternalistic feelings toward the incessantly gabbing machine conspire to evoke smiles at one moment, pity and fear at the next, and so confuse the human and the technological. Having taken on the capacity for human interaction, R2-D2 and C-3PO operate like minds severed from organic bodies and installed in machines. As fleshly sense disappears, body is reduced to the status of an automobile—albeit one capable of absorbing and processing data—whose parts are as interchangeable and as valuable as the springs on a car. Aristotle’s inseparability of body and mind disappears. Watching C-3PO’s parts being tinkered with carries the conviction that body no longer has any integral relation to thought, any more than a car can be said to participate in the experience its driver is having. Thus, separating mind and body, and rejecting the latter as insignificant to humans and irrelevant to thought, blurs a proper distinction between humanity and technology and so advances the theme of humanizing technology, giving it plausibility it wouldn’t otherwise have.

Similarly, humanizing technological puppets makes it easier to think of human beings as something like robots with interchangeable parts. The Empire Strikes Back develops this theme to such an extent that in the closing moments when Luke’s bionic hand replaces the real one he has lost in battle, the new appendage appears not only identical with and equal to the original, but even preferable to the flesh and blood hand. This bionic hand, so the film suggests, can be replaced by any number of similar devices. Luke’s expression of admiration as he flexes his new technological fingers marks a triumph over nature. In contrast, Aristotle lavishes several pages of his Parts of Animals to the wonders of natural, human hands. He emphasizes elsewhere that just as a stick in the hand cannot be the source of movement, neither does a hand move itself; instead, its movement has its source and co-ordination in the soul. In The Empire Strikes Back, flesh does not really matter, and the expression of revulsion toward the stink of real flesh actually assists in encouraging a preference for an odorless, mechanical substance. Nature does everything for the sake of something, says Aristotle, for whom nature is the norm.149 In The Empire Strikes Back, that attitude is reversed. Technology exists not only as a subject; technology becomes the norm.

While body parts can be replaced, that isn’t true of the person. For Aristotle—and, indeed, for an entire tradition in Western philosophy that includes Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, and their modern counterparts such as Etienne Gilson, Peter Geach, and Henry Veatch—each person is unique.150 The primary feature of the person is so obvious that a description of a person might well overlook it: a person is unique and thus irreplaceable. The basis for the individual self is in what Aristotle calls “primary substance.” Each person is thus like a fingerprint—unique to that individual in a world in which all individuals share in having fingerprints. However many parts are interchangeable, persons, as persons, are never interchangeable. Human beings share in a common nature; they continue to beget and replace other human beings—all having in common their humanity, as well as physical features like arms and legs. Yet, while limbs can be lost (and artificially replaced), the uniqueness of the person remains.

Rejecting technology as a substitute for human norms and rejecting the converse—that humans are the equivalent of machines or computers—doesn’t entail a rejection of the value of technology. The Empire Strikes Back attacks the distinctiveness of human beings by encouraging a view of humans in which the inseparability of mind and body no longer exists. Technology is proffered instead as having the potential for becoming human. Where popular culture has given us a Tin Woodsman who longed for a human heart, technology