Kevin S. Decker
“Where's the chapter about Han Solo?” After co‐editing three books with good friend and Jedi Master Jason Eberl, and reading over a hundred proposals and dozens of chapters on philosophy and Star Wars, this question became too weighty to ignore. Han Solo – orphan, laconically cool Corellian smuggler, Rebel general, and martyr for the Resistance – is one of the most‐loved characters in the Star Wars universe. His emotional and moral development throughout the original trilogy into a trusted friend, Leia's lover, and a warrior for Rebel values is inspiring. In the sequel trilogy, he's returned to smuggling and reluctantly re‐assumes the mantle of father to Ben Solo, an alienated and ultimately patricidal son, but even death fails to stop him from offering fatherly advice to bring Kylo Ren back to the light side.
In a universe of tyrants, freedom‐fighters, Force‐sensitives, Jedi, and Sith, everybody seems to be peddling a philosophy. But Han Solo is a scoundrel, a skeptic, and a Corellian who seems to want to evade a philosophical life. Aristotle (384–322 BCE), a philosopher's philosopher, thought that doing this was impossible:
If you should do philosophy, you should do philosophy, and if you should not do philosophy, then you should do philosophy…. For if philosophy exists, then positively we are obliged to do philosophy, since it truly exists. But if it does not truly exist, even so we are obliged to investigate how it is that philosophy does not truly exist. But by investigating we would be doing philosophy, since to investigate is the cause of philosophy.1
Is this another time, like making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, where Han Solo achieves what everyone else thought impossible? Even if the answer turns out to be “no,” the question is fun and worth pursuing by looking at the anti‐philosophical ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and Richard Rorty (1931–2007). And best of all, Han finally gets his own chapter in a book on Star Wars and philosophy.
Don’t everybody thank me at once.
Han Solo became the favorite son of Corellia, yet he never knew his mother and, while very young, became a scrumrat in the industrial ghettos of his home planet. While many famous philosophers have also been “single orphans” like Han – Aristotle (384–322 BCE), René Descartes (1596–1650), and David Hume (1711–1776) all lost one parent – the experience of having to fend for himself and protect fellow scrumrats like Qi'ra was definitive for Han's character. Young Han, therefore, has something in common with the 140 million children in our own world reported as having lost one or more parents as of 2019.2 Unlike Han's case, the vast majority of real‐world orphans live with a surviving grandparent or other family members. Others, like Leia, are adopted by a loving family while they are very young. While Luke Skywalker grew up with Uncle Owen's chiding, Aunt Beru's Bantha milk, and a vague sense of having an important father whom Luke would've liked to meet, Han's father, Ovan, abandoned his son after realizing that his career building starships had effectively been meaningless.3 Leia's elite lifestyle and Luke's cloistered youth shielded them from the wide variety of cruelties and indignities that shaped Han's early years on Corellia.
It's a testament to the luck that Han would so often count on that he dodged many of the typical lifelong problems that stem from neglect: “poor impulse control, social withdrawal, problems with coping and regulating emotions, low self‐esteem, pathological behaviors such as tics, tantrums, stealing and self‐punishment, poor intellectual functioning and low academic achievement.”4 Practical education on the streets of Corellia came mainly from the tender mercies of the White Worm criminal gang, for whom we see Han working when we are introduced to him in Solo.
This kind of education falls far below even the standards of a devout skeptic like Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), who claimed, “The more simply we trust to Nature, the more wisely we trust to her. Oh, what a sweet and soft and healthy pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, to rest a well‐made head!”5 Whether ancient, modern, or contemporary, skeptics like Montaigne have claimed either that we can have no knowledge in science and philosophy, or that every argument in these areas can be matched by an equally good one that argues the opposite. Nonetheless, in his essay “Of the education of children,” Montaigne maintained that philosophy should be the cornerstone of a child's education because it teaches the ability to question and analyze instead of merely asking children to memorize information. Montaigne's emphasis on critical thinking skills is laudable, and he's surely correct that young people should be exposed to philosophy well before college.6 But Montaigne was distrustful of adults whose philosophical education as youths had led them to more abstract scholarly pursuits, saying of them,
…your better‐bred sort of men are much more curious in their observation, ’tis true, and discover a great deal more; but then they gloss upon it, and to give the greater weight to what they deliver, and allure your belief, they cannot forbear a little to alter the story; they never represent things to you simply as they are, but rather as they appeared to them, or as they would have them appear to you….7
Where does education for critical thought end, and where begins a person's immersion in a field of specialized thinking – many of which Montaigne suspected of quackery? Montaigne, a man of leisure like so many philosophers, could afford to refrain from the need to problem‐solve difficult ethical or political dilemmas, but in terms of the demands put on impoverished, orphaned street kids simply to survive, Montaigne also speaks from a perspective of class privilege.
Indeed, skepticism about the motives of others and a lack of trust were essential coping mechanisms for young Han. These were tempered by his close relationship with Qi'ra, but their future together was characterized by mutual betrayals – with Han being forced to leave her behind when he joined the Imperial Navy, and Qi'ra never fully revealing the extent of her commitment to the Crimson Dawn syndicate. Even when Han behaved kindly to younger scrumrats, he would deny that his concern with them was a moral one. It becomes clear later that Han enjoys being identified as a scoundrel. In one conversation with Qi'ra, he says, “No one's ever gonna help anyone unless it gets them something … It's that way down here with us … and I figure it's probably the same all the way up there, at the top of the fanciest tower on the fanciest planet in the galaxy.”8 Han's cynicism seems only to have been deepened by the misplaced trust he placed in Tobias Beckett during the Kessel coaxium heist. Beckett had, after all, advised Han to “trust no one.”
Skepticism, anti‐authoritarianism, and a desire to demystify – to strip away pretensions to reveal the true, but often ugly face of reality. These are some of Han's key personality characteristics – along with his charm and nose for a good smuggling job – when we see him in action in A New Hope. But many great thinkers in the philosophical tradition have adopted these stances to stake their own bold claims to truth, knowledge, beauty, and justice. What makes Han any different from them?
Whether he's bemusedly watching Luke Skywalker train with a remote on the Millennium Falcon or bullying C‐3PO into using his godhood to help the Rebels escape being dinner for the Ewoks, Han's skepticism most often manifests itself in efforts to debunk or demystify what others take to be esoteric or sacred. In A New Hope (ANH), he famously chides Luke: “Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other; I've seen a lot of strange stuff. But I've never seen anything to make me believe that there's one all‐powerful Force controlling everything. There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny.”
Although Han's attitude might seem narrow‐minded and arrogant, his views represent the vast majority of those in the galaxy who were not special – or lucky – enough to be born Force‐sensitive. In the hands of the Jedi, what he derides as a “hokey religion” did, in fact, 19 years before in Revenge of the Sith, fail both in detecting the influence of Darth Sidious and in stopping the rise of the Empire. On top of this, Han was undoubtedly on the receiving end of Imperial anti‐Jedi propaganda that pressured the few living Jedi to live clandestine lives on backwaters like Tatooine and Dagobah.9
Han obviously has a prejudice against those he sees as trying to exercise control over others by disingenuous means – an ironic prejudice for a smuggler! In this regard, he bears a likeness to another charismatic, temperamental maverick: Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and his short book, the Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus. Wittgenstein made the bold claim that traditional philosophy – carried out over two thousand years from Plato to Edmund Husserl – was based on a mistake about how philosophical language reveals truth. “Language disguises the thought,” he writes, “so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.”10
Conversely, with his Tractatus, Wittgenstein believed he'd established a method for “seeing the world rightly.”11 But thinking through this method would require as much brash cleverness as piloting through the dangerous and uncharted Kessel Run. Taking a traditional metaphysical question like “Is the Good more or less identical to the Beautiful?” as an example, Wittgenstein argued that “most propositions and questions” like this one “are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness.”12
Because he thought that the only meaningful use of language is found in its ability to “picture” or “model” reality, Wittgenstein argued that “the only strictly meaningful propositions are those of natural science,” a method that cured the understanding reader of “the temptation to utter philosophical propositions.”13 He's certainly not the only twentieth‐century philosopher to affirm that philosophy, understood properly, leads us back to – and ends at – truths discovered by science.14
Wittgenstein's demystifying attack on what previous thinkers believed the object or aim of philosophy to be can be loosely compared to Han's occasional effort to take naïve youngsters like Luke or “Big Deal” Finn to task. On board the Millennium Falcon on the way to Alderaan, not only does he criticize Obi‐Wan's devotion to the Jedi and the Force, he tells Luke that “ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.” This is in stark contrast to Obi‐Wan's remark in support of the lightsaber as a classy weapon reflecting a noble, lost tradition: “Not as clumsy or random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.”
Han, ever the pragmatist, also prefers direct confrontations to subterfuge – usually because his attempts to keep operations covert so often go wrong. In ANH, he confesses that he “prefer[s] a straight fight to all this sneakin’ around!” And in The Force Awakens (TFA), when he plans to take the Falcon out of the Rathtar‐infested Eravana's hangar at lightspeed, Rey asks him if such a thing is even possible: “I never ask that question ’till after I've done it […] This is not how I thought this day would go.” A more cautious, philosophical mind might ask if these attitudes are arrogance or justified confidence? I go with confidence – Solo seldom loses his gambles, unless he puts trust in con men like Beckett or – more unfortunately – his own son on Starkiller Base.
And what about the mature Han Solo of the sequel films? He continues to avoid philosophy like a boss. In TFA, an awestruck Rey asks Han if the Jedi were real. He replies, “I used to wonder about that myself. Thought it was a bunch of mumbo jumbo. A magical power holding together good and evil, the dark side and the light. Crazy thing is … it's true. The Force, the Jedi. All of it. It's all true.” This hopeful but measured reply says much in its careful phrasing: “It's all true,” he says, but in the context of Han's distancing himself from Leia and the Resistance, in refraining from trying to find Luke in exile, and in returning to his career home in smuggling, Han's also saying, “And still I choose to live my life as if it all doesn't affect me.”
Han's a rule‐breaker from birth, another thing that might be attributable to his status as an orphan and to his gang upbringing. But what can we make out of a philosopher who wants to cure people of doing philosophy? Wittgenstein suggests that if you are reading this book, then you may be the kind of person who gets a certain sort of itch when deep questions get brought up. When that happens, he gives this advice:
One can defend commonsense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense; not be restating the views of common sense. A philosopher is not a man out of his senses, a man who doesn't see what everybody else sees…. We therefore have to look round for the source of his puzzlement. And we find that there is puzzlement and mental discomfort … when our curiosity about certain facts is not satisfied or when we can't find a law of nature fitting in with all our experience …15
As we’ve seen, hard scientific facts are essential truths to Wittgenstein in the Tractatus. If something in our experience – like how the Force works – continues to puzzle us, there are two possibilities. Either we have not yet found the law of nature that explains it (midi‐chlorians?) or the questions that move us may simply be senseless ones, like “Is the Good more or less identical to the Beautiful?” These questions may be interesting, but not addressable or solvable using the tools of philosophy. In his more reflective moments, Han might've agreed with the cryptic final line of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Without a doubt, though, Solo would've added: “Boring conversation anyway.”
For those of us who grew up watching the original Star Wars trilogy in theaters and who took to Han Solo as a Hollywood hero, there's no feature of his (aside from possibly his wit) more influential than his anti‐authoritarianism.16 In the Legends novel Han Solo at Star's End, he admits that his wanderlust means he cannot help but continue to run afoul of galactic authorities:
I could always hit the beach, he thought. Find a nice place somewhere, go native. It's a big galaxy. But he shook his head. No use fooling himself. If he were grounded, he might as well be dead. What could one planet, any planet, offer someone who had knocked around among the stars? The need for the boundless provinces of space was now a part of him.17
After a short period of unfulfilling service to the Empire, he considers it to be more of a nuisance than an enemy to an honest smuggler like himself. In Brian Daley's Legends novels, Han and Chewie nip at the heels of the Corporate Sector Authority (CSA). And in both ANH and The Empire Strikes Back, he's a reluctant Rebel who's more interested in clearing his debt to Jabba than in cosmic justice.
Why would a pragmatic guy like Han also be anti‐authoritarian? For a smuggler concerned with profit margins, surely it's better to “play ball” with the CSA, the Empire, and the Rebellion. Perhaps Han, like Benicio del Toro's DJ in The Last Jedi (TLJ), woke up one day to the realization, “It's all a machine, partner. Live free, don't join.” One answer to “don't join” is to encourage political anarchism, where society would be organized so that voluntary and cooperative action between individuals would take the place of government force or compulsion. I suspect, though, that Han would think anarchism is bad for business. And anarchism requires agreeing to theories that claim to correctly represent human nature as fundamentally good when humans are out from under the thumb of governments like the Empire. This is a regression back into the philosophizing that Wittgenstein found so dubious.
Another answer, according to Cornel West, is to consider the ideas of early American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and his contemporary, the “poet of democracy” Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Tying Emerson to Wittgenstein's demystifying project in the Tractatus, West explains:
Emerson's suspicion of philosophy was not simply that it bewitched thinkers by means of language but, more important, that it had deep anti‐democratic consequences. For Emerson, reason, formal thought, foundations, certainty were not only far removed from the dynamism of human experiences; they also were human creations that appear as detached abstractions which command their creators and thereby constrain their creators' freedom. This consequence is both anti‐libertarian and anti‐democratic in that human potential and participation are suppressed in the name of philosophic truth and knowledge.18
It took people like Emerson and Whitman, desiring an American “creative democracy” – one that would throw off the inheritances of European philosophy that Wittgenstein claimed were a source of “puzzlement” – to see that philosophy could itself be an obstacle to the equality and freedom desired by Americans. They thought that the desire to prove that foundations for knowledge exist, or that reason is the ultimate problem‐solver, can erect idols whose authority has pernicious effects just like the old authorities of church and state, challenged and sometimes overthrown in the previous century in the European Enlightenment.
A tale that recounts how this replacement could happen (and what to do about it) that could be appealing to someone like Han can be found in Pragmatism as Anti‐Authoritarianism, by the American neo‐pragmatist scholar Richard Rorty. Rorty sees the elevation of reason in the Enlightenment to show that “‘Philosophy’ became, for the intellectuals, a substitute for religion. It was the area of culture where one touched bottom….”19 Although the Enlightenment was a major cultural force for the secular rethinking of moribund church–state alliances in the eighteenth century, it did not go far enough. The philosophers' love affair with concepts like eternity, infinity, and the sublime took on new forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By contrast, Rorty makes a controversial suggestion, “… that we build our philosophical reflections around our political hopes: around the project of fashioning institutions and customs that will make human life, finite and mortal life, more beautiful.”20 We can imagine that Han shared these interests too, in envisioning a future with Qi'ra off Corellia, a dream dashed by an unpredictable quirk of fate at the Imperial checkpoint.
As Rorty's suggestion indicates, evading philosophy by doing more philosophy solves nothing. In this vein, pragmatists like Rorty are not interested in solutions, but instead – like Wittgenstein – investigate therapies for the urge to make philosophy into a quasi‐religion by pursuing the absolute foundations of beauty, truth, and justice. In this vein, he writes, “[P]ragmatists keep trying to find ways of making anti‐philosophical points in non‐philosophical language.”21 For Rorty, this involves criticizing the philosophical tradition for over‐valuing knowing over doing and for encouraging contemplative lives of withdrawal from society; he also draws moral and political lessons from literature rather than the philosophical tradition, and encourages his fellow political liberals to look to the values of solidarity that arose from the rise of American organized labor rather than what he sees as the divisiveness of “high theory” in identity politics.22
So, whether it's “liberation from the primal father,” giving up hope of “union with something beyond the human,” or dethroning philosophers' pretensions to knowledge of ultimate reality, Rorty sees the purpose of pragmatists, following in the steps of Emerson and Whitman, as creating a society in which no one has an unfair advantage because of the place that a mere philosophical theory situates them in society.23 If you are a free spirit like Han or Chewbacca, you also would not be forced to be one of those with a seat at the “table of conversation” about shared hopes and dreams in such a society. Just do not “shut them up or shut them down”!
It will not escape the eye of the discerning Star Wars fan that the sequel trilogy's enmeshment with identity politics – resulting in the reprehensible anti‐feminist, anti‐diversity casting “Fandom Menace” movement – is one of the reasons why TLJ and The Rise of Skywalker suffered from significant fan disinterest and received tepid reviews.24 The Star Wars universe is an international treasure, and it's very unfortunate that it was politicized in this way. The investment that directors Rian Johnson and J.J. Abrams made in claiming that women and marginalized people can also be part of grand narratives was a smart idea. Perhaps the problem was, as Rorty's pragmatism as anti‐authoritarianism might have it, that the challenges raised to the grand narratives of the “Skywalker Saga” and “bringing balance to the Force” in these films were not forceful enough. As the success of the Disney+ television series has shown, drawing attention to the lives of the “everyday” inhabitants of the Star Wars universe helps break the spell that belief in the authority of grand narratives weaves. These simple people trying to make their way in the universe – and who need no therapy for philosophy, luckily for them – are epitomized by the adventures of our favorite scoundrel, Han Solo.
In any case, there's no point in telling Han how much you love him. He knows.