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A Technological Galaxy: Heidegger and the Philosophy of Technology in Star Wars

JEROLD J. ABRAMS

 

 

 

 

In the Dark Age of the Empire the light of the Force has all but gone out of the world, and the few remaining Jedi look to misty ages of an ancient past for guidance in their struggle against the forces of evil. Obi-Wan refers to the lightsaber as “an elegant weapon for a more civilized age” and describes the Jedi Knights as “guardians of peace and justice in the old Republic. Before the dark times, before the Empire.”

The same view of history is echoed in the writings of the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976): rather than making progress, our greatest days are, in fact, behind us; and history is actually getting worse.⁷³ A corruption has set in, like the Fall in the Garden of Eden; only here, in Heidegger and Star Wars, our sin is technology, or, more specifically, what Heidegger calls “enframing.”⁷⁴ This is the process of reorganizing all the various elements of nature, trees and rocks, rivers and animals, carving them up and placing them into so many artificial “frames,” all to be used up as “resources.”

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,” by contrast, is the opposite: we experience ourselves as the “lords of beings,” who are detached from the environment by way of high-tech tools. Not so much in our various machine products (like AT-AT walkers, X-wing fighters, and hologram generators)—but more in our basic attitude toward the universe. The “essence of technology,” according to Heidegger, is really a new way of seeing. In the present-at-hand we experience nature as a set of detached objects, as though we’ve put on some new and super-powerful goggles that allow us to see far deeper into the hidden layers of nature. And, of course, the more we can see, the more we can control. In fact, nowadays we can grind up or reprogram just about anything: with hydroelectric dams and deforestation, unlimited surveillance and nanotechnology. But in so doing, we are, in fact, “challenging” nature to reveal itself to us as something “for us,” something which serves our instrumental needs, and not as being in itself. Rather than caring for being and allowing it to reveal itself on its own terms, we challenge it to reveal itself on our terms.

So, in effect, while we’re forcing nature to reveal a side to us, simultaneously, with regard to being as being, it’s “covered up,” as Heidegger puts it, and it “shows itself only in a distorted way,”⁷⁸ just as the Emperor appears distorted in Return of the Jedi and Revenge of the Sith. Heidegger calls this process of distortion “enframing.” Here everything natural, everything good, is pounded into an artificial frame, everything is looked at with a cold hard gaze, objectified and detached—all material for the sterile stare of white-jacketed lab men or gray-suited Imperial officers. Each part of nature is sliced clean from the whole and examined under a thousand microscopes, prodded with lasers and high-tech pitchforks—all to squeeze out maximal output, maximal efficiency, and total control. This is “The Age of the World Picture,” as Heidegger puts it, when nature is placed inside a frame for us to objectify as a mere representation of our own instrumental will. Think of how the lush planet of Alderaan is “enframed” within the Death Star’s main viewscreen just prior to its destruction.

Once we have set upon this path of enframing, all that will be left of the earth are masses of “standing reserve.” This means reality converted by technology into mere stuff, always standing by, always ready to be used up. Forests become “lumber,” and rivers become “hydro-electric power.” Nature thus appears only as a set of lifeless objects always ready for quick use. But a further problem arises: in boxing-up the earth, we gradually lose sight of the natural order of things. Out of sight, out of mind—our new technological vision clouds our old understanding of the world. And slowly but surely, we begin to forget the question of being.

In his later years, Heidegger reflected on these phenomena of progressive enframing and increasing forgetfulness, but with an apparent sense of despair. There’s nothing we can do to stop the massive machine of enframing; it’s completely out of our hands. Perhaps we once could, but now it’s impossible. We simply cannot save ourselves. As Heidegger says, “Only a god can save us.”⁷⁹

“An Elegant Weapon”: The Lightsaber as Ready-To-Hand

We find the same Heideggerian saga of technology in Star Wars. Here the natural ready-to-hand is corrupted by the present-at-hand relation and the will to enframe all things. Moreover, in the wake of the path of enframing by the Empire, masses of standing reserve are generated. And as a consequence of this enframing and standing reserve, a certain forgetting occurs, particularly evident in Vader’s own forgetfulness of himself. Ultimately, this forgetting is so deep, the standing reserve so massive, and the path of enframing so aggressive, that in the end only a god can save us . . . or, in this case, only the Jedi Knight Luke Skywalker.

Luke’s adventure begins on Tatooine. Following his runaway droid R2-D2, Luke encounters Obi-Wan Kenobi, who has, in fact, been waiting a long time to give Luke something very special: “Your father’s lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster . . . An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.” On board the Millennium Falcon, Luke starts his (very Heideggerian) training. He must learn to think of his lightsaber not as some external and value-neutral object that’s present to him, but as a natural part of his body, an extension of his very being. In other words, he must make the transition from the “present-at-hand” to the “ready-to-hand.” And, more importantly, he must conceive both himself and his lightsaber as dynamic and fluid extensions of the Force itself. Luke practices his swordsmanship with a training remote (a small floating sphere), which hovers around him, stinging him with laser beams. Failing at first to defend himself, Obi-Wan suggests Luke wear a helmet with the blast-shield down so he cannot see at all, which Luke can hardly understand. But Obi-Wan instructs him: “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.” Effectively, Luke is warned not to use the present-at-hand, but to feel the moment: “Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him.” Luke re-engages the training remote and immediately succeeds. “You know, I did feel something,” Luke tells Obi-Wan. He has begun to learn that the Force is not at all a visual experience, but one of feeling, as though an energy field were flowing through him, connecting him to all things.

In the words of Yoda, Luke is beginning to “unlearn what he has learned”—and indeed, a lesson that will prove valuable later on, when Luke must battle a much greater artificial sphere: the Death Star. “Use the Force, Luke,” he hears Obi-Wan’s voice speaking through the Force—“Let go, Luke.” Quickly approaching his final target, and remembering his early training with the remote, Luke turns off his computer-controlled targeting system (much to the worry of his team), effectively blinding himself again. Aiming only through the Force, he fires a perfect shot into the Death Star’s core, blowing it to pieces.

Yoda as Being-in-the-Dagobah System

As great as this accomplishment is, however, Luke is not yet a Jedi Knight. He must continue his training under a new Jedi master, Yoda, who lives in the Dagobah system. Yoda appears as an organic extension of his natural environment, perhaps the best example of Heideggerian “attunement” in Star Wars. Yoda’s “being-in-the-world” is one entirely based in the “ready-to-hand.” With no technology to speak of, Yoda has only some basic equipment for cooking and living in his natural environment—and his dwelling is made of earth and mud. As a “beingin-the-world” (a being connected with his environment), Yoda lives as one with his surroundings, in perfect harmony with nature. Emerald green like the lush marshes all around him, he’s similarly filled with the natural light of the Force. He’s “at home” in the world, and nothing on Dagobah is “covered over”; his existence here is authentic.

Indeed, the contrast with the hard lines and right angles of the Galactic Republic is made quite explicit when Luke descends on Dagobah, covered in technology: his X-wing fighter, his high-tech uniform, his companion R2-D2, and even his food all appear very synthetic. Amused at the absurdity, Yoda asks Luke directly, “How you get so big, eating food of this kind?” None of this sort of thing is essential to Yoda—and still less is it essential for Luke’s own Jedi training in the swamp. Although Yoda apparently cannot help himself from stealing Luke’s little light pen: “Mine! Or I will help you not”—probably because it reminds him of the old days of the Republic and of his own lightsaber, an essential piece of Jedi technology that Yoda no longer wears on his person.

Only a few feet tall, long-eared and green, hobbling along on tridactyl feet with the aid of his Gimer stick,⁸⁰ Yoda seems harmless . . . even ridiculous. And Luke cannot, for the life of him, imagine that this pesky little creature is a great Jedi warrior (not that wars make one great, as Yoda later notes). From Luke’s still-clouded perspective of things, Yoda is simply too small to be a Jedi, just as Luke’s X-wing fighter is simply too large to retrieve from the swamp. Luke is still very young, though, and not yet well-trained in the ways of the Force—“Too much of his father in him,” as Luke’s perceptive Aunt Beru foresees. But before he leaves Dagobah, Luke will learn a great many things—and beginning precisely here, with his own inverted view of the world. Yoda tells Luke:

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Mm? Mmmm . . . And well you should not. For my ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us . . . You must feel the Force around you. Here, between you . . . me . . . the tree . . . the rock . . . everywhere! Yes, even between the land and the ship!

This description of the Force also closely resembles Heidegger’s conception of being. Like the Force, being is everywhere, all around us. It binds all the elements of the universe together: it’s that which undergirds the rocks just as surely as starfighters. Yet, in being everywhere, the Force, or being, is equally nowhere. For being everywhere at once, it isn’t easily locatable, which makes it so easy to forget. But we must learn to experience it through the art of the ready-to-hand and above all through meditation, as Yoda advises Luke on Dagobah. Similarly, Qui-Gon tells young Anakin that when he learns to quiet his mind and meditate, the Force will speak to him. For Heidegger, too, we must meditate on being in order for it to speak to us. For just as there is a voice of the Force, so too is there a voice of being. As Heidegger puts it, “For, strictly, it is language that speaks. Man first speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal.”⁸¹ And language, according to Heidegger, is speaking as being: “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.”⁸²

Enframing and the Eye of the Empire

Powerful as the Light Side of the Force may be, however, the Dark Side is also very strong. And those who follow its path are the Dark Lords of the Sith. Rather than emphasizing the importance of a passive and quiet, contemplative mind, the Sith are trained in aggression and technical thinking, control and domination. In a word, they’re trained in the mode of the present-at-hand, rather than the illumined ready-to-hand. Instead of feeling the Force, the Sith are trained visually to control nature as a set of external objects. All of reality, on this view, is ready to be subordinated and controlled, and all for the sole purpose of increasing their power over nature. Filled with anger, filled with fear, the Dark Side of the Force—taken to its logical limit—is precisely what gives rise to the darkest phenomenon of reality: enframing.⁸³

Perhaps nowhere in Star Wars is this combination of the present-at-hand and enframing more evident than in the Death Star. Resembling a “small moon,” the Death Star is, in fact, a space station. But on even closer inspection, it actually resembles a massive artificial eyeball (much like the gigantic eye in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings). It has a windowed iris and a distinct pupil, out of which Darth Vader and the Emperor watch—and the entire structure rotates to observe its territory within a massive solar socket of space. Moreover, under this present-at-hand gaze, the Empire steadily builds masses of standing reserve, most evident in the droid army and the clone factory on the ocean planet Kamino. These clones are enframed “internally” through genetic engineering, to decrease their autonomy and increase their collective thought. While later they are enframed “externally” as they are sheathed in the hard white armor and helmets of the Imperial stormtroopers. One should note here, however, that the standing reserve is not all on the Empire’s side. Both sides use masses of droids and spacecraft. And the Republic (before it becomes the Empire) uses the clone army to fight the Separatists in Attack of the Clones.

On the other hand, the massive rise of enframing and standing reserve is hardly being directed by Yoda and Mace Windu, or even through the Light Side of the Force. Rather the Dark Side has stealthily gained control of the process of enframing without the Jedi knowing it. As Count Dooku confidently informs Obi-Wan, “The Dark Side of the Force has clouded their [the Jedis’] vision, my friend.” The void of darkness is slowly but surely spreading, and extinguishing the Jedis’ power to use the Force. And this applies equally to young Anakin Skywalker, the soon-to-be Darth Vader. With not a little concern about Anakin’s fear of losing his mother, Yoda warns, “Clouded this boy’s future is.” In Heidegger’s terms, this clouding of the Force by the Dark Side is precisely the covering up of being by enframing. Heidegger says, “[Being] can be covered up to such a degree that it is forgotten and the question about it and its meaning altogether omitted.”⁸⁴ In Anakin’s case, at the very height of his own enframing, this clouding will indeed become “forgetting,” as Luke rightly points out.

The Enframing of Anakin Skywalker

Anakin and his mother Shmi are slaves, both owned by Watto, a Toydarian junk dealer. And Anakin knows it’s wrong. Even as a little boy, he’s well aware that Watto subordinates his personhood—evident in his first meeting with Padmé. “You’re a slave?” she asks him. “I’m a person, and my name is Anakin!” he responds. As a slave, Anakin works on all manner of machines and is actually quite gifted in his work. He even brags to Qui-Gon that he can help fix their ship’s hyperdrive, and also takes considerable pride in showing Padmé his newest creation, a protocol droid for his mother—C-3PO. But despite all his talents, Anakin’s powers have already been wrongly honed in the service of control. He lives in a world of high-tech tools and so many enframed things which themselves require tools. Indeed, at a very basic level, Anakin himself is Watto’s own living tool, which is precisely how Aristotle defines a “slave” in the Politics.⁸⁵

These distortions of slavery and the immersion in technology are the initial steps of a descent that will later spiral downward and out of control with the death of Anakin’s mother at the hands of the vulgar and nomadic Sand People. Infuriated at his powerlessness to keep Shmi alive, as her poor tortured body goes limp in his arms, Anakin, aflame with rage, proceeds to slaughter the entire community of Sand People (including the women and children). Trying to console him, Padmé clumsily explains that Shmi’s death was not his fault: “You’re not all-powerful.” But furious, Anakin insists, “Well I should be. Someday I will be. I will be the most powerful Jedi ever.” At this point, Anakin’s early technological skills and interests become obsessions for control and manipulation. Perhaps once he wanted to free the slaves (as he told Qui-Gon he had dreamed) and be the “shepherd of being”—as Heidegger means “shepherd” in the sense not only of “caring for,” but also “setting free.” But now he is on the path to becoming the “lord of beings” in the form of Lord Vader.

His rage has permanently unbalanced him, and this is nowhere more evident than in his futile charging attack on Count Dooku against Obi-Wan’s desperate warning. Ultimately, Yoda rescues Anakin and Obi-Wan from the powerful Sith Lord, but Anakin has lost his arm to Dooku’s lightsaber. Severed from his natural ready-to-hand relation, his natural being-in-the-world is now robotically mediated through an artificial hand attached to a cyborg arm. As a result of his thoughtless fury, Anakin has now shifted from the ready-to-hand (a natural hand-link to the Force and humanity) to the present-at-hand (the artificial hand-link to the Dark Side).

And this is only the beginning. His next step toward becoming fully enframed is brought about by Obi-Wan himself, Anakin’s teacher. Following a violent battle of lightsabers between the two, Anakin is left severely maimed and his biological body is no longer capable of sustaining itself on its own. After an extensive robotic rebuilding of his body, Anakin now wears a full suit of black armor and a helmet with a mask covering his entire face. His senses are now all artificially mediated through technology, while he is fed through an internal tube in his helmet. Virtually everything vital has been replaced: his spine, his internal organs—his entire experience of the world is completely mediated by artifice. Even his voice is translated through a computer; while his breathing is controlled by an internal ventilator: “He’s more machine now than man. Twisted and evil.” And this new machine of a man is a terribly imposing figure, to say the least. Only later are we given a rare voyeuristic look into the layers of Vader’s enframing. In The Empire Strikes Back an Imperial officer accidentally witnesses Vader privately “dressing.” We even see his pale human skin (kept private from the light) and his awful mutilated skull—but only for a second as a quick robotic arm plunges down his helmet. Freshly closed to the world, Vader now commands the officer, only to turn away as the top of his demonic black nest closes down all around him.

Ultimately, this same process of descent into enframing happens to Luke as well, whose hand is severed by Vader and replaced with a robotic hand. And even later, Vader loses his hand again to Luke’s lightsaber. But upon cutting off Vader’s robotic hand, Luke notices his own robotic hand (covered by a black glove similar to Vader’s). Luke now understands Yoda’s earlier concern—he may yet follow the same path:

YODA: A Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware of the Dark Side. Anger . . . fear . . . aggression. The Dark Side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice.

LUKE: Vader. Is the Dark Side stronger?

YODA: No . . . no . . . no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.

We hear the same worry from Obi-Wan: “Vader was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force.” Indeed, the Dark Side’s powers are incredibly intense, as Vader tries to explain to Luke: “You don’t know the power of the Dark Side.” In the end, however, Luke does not succumb. And his own artificial enframing remains relatively minimal compared to Vader’s.

Only a Jedi Can Save Us: Forgetting and Recollecting

Vader’s enframing is, to be sure, all but complete. His being-in-the-world is so artificially mediated, so incredibly distorted, that he no longer fully understands what it is he’s doing—or why. No longer human, he has entirely lost touch with himself. It’s true that Vader may not have forgotten the question of being in general, as Heidegger conceives it. But clearly he has forgotten something. He has, at the very least, forgotten the man he used to be. And beyond that, in a very Heideggerian sense, he has equally forgotten his own original being-in-the-world—indeed he has even forgotten his own name. Luke makes exactly this point to Vader, when he calls him by his original name, “Anakin Skywalker.” Vader (irritated) scolds Luke: “That name no longer has any meaning for me.” But Luke persists: “It is the name of your true self. You’ve only forgotten.” And he has forgotten precisely because of his detachment from the being of the Force and his horrible descent into the darkness of enframing.

And now, at the end of the saga, it would indeed appear, with Vader’s almost complete forgetfulness, that only a god can save him.⁸⁶ Only there is conspicuous absence of God or gods in the Star Wars galaxy—although “angels” apparently reside in deep space and the Ewoks mistake Threepio for a god. Nevertheless, Vader is ultimately saved by the semi-divine power of the Force and through the actions of Luke. Inspired by Luke’s dedication to him, Vader begins to remember. He returns to himself and becomes Anakin Skywalker once again. Now with his “own eyes” he vanquishes the Emperor and turns his back on the Dark Side of the Force. But while his soul is saved, his body/machine is badly broken and he succumbs to death—although not before asking Luke to take off his horrible mask and “uncover” his true being from the shroud of artifice. The layers of enframing are at last peeled back to reveal the man. His spirits recharged, Luke has not come this far to watch his father die in the Death Star (only moments from destruction). “I’ve got to save you,” he declares. But Anakin knows all too well, “You already have, Luke.”⁸⁷