Umut Eldem
The scene is set: you've crash‐landed in a swamp on Dagobah and a weird but wise creature is telling you to unearth your X‐wing from the treacherous depths of gunk and goo. You need to do something you thought was impossible for your entire life: to somehow “connect” with your spacecraft and lift it, not with a machine, not with the help of your friends, but solely by using “the Force.” You've had little to no experience with the Force: perhaps you've lifted a rock or two, but nothing of this size. You concentrate, sense the ship jiggling under the swamp, but you can't for the life of you raise it. It's just too big, too heavy. You're trying, but you just don't believe you can do it. Failed you have, and here's why.
We're all fondly familiar with this scene: Luke exclaims that it's one thing to raise stones by using the Force but raising an X‐wing is “impossible.” Yoda immediately objects: the difference between a ship and a stone is “only in your mind.” Yoda's objection suggests that there's something more fundamental in nature than the different weights of a rock and a spaceship; to move either by using the Force is essentially the same task.
How are things interconnected through the Force? What must we learn (or unlearn) to get that ship to move? What kind of ontology does all this presuppose? “Ontology” means the philosophical study of being, the most basic ways in which things exist and how they're interrelated. Hopefully, with a little help from Georg W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), we can get that X‐wing out of the swamp without even touching it. Or at least we can understand how such a thing could be possible, given the ontology in the Star Wars films.
Hegel's philosophy provides a helpful framework for discussing the Force as described by Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back: that is, created by life as the energy that binds the rock to the tree and the land to the X‐wing, and everything in between. Chapters in previous Star Wars and Philosophy books have taken on Hegel's philosophy. James Lawler emphasizes the Christian overtones found both in Hegel and in Star Wars, whereas Brian Cameron offers a more political reading of the ideas of recognition and the master–slave dialectic in Hegel's seminal work, The Phenomenology of Spirit.1 This chapter will focus on how Hegel's philosophy might help us understand the Force using his concepts of “force” and Geist.
In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel discusses how human beings have come to know things, including themselves. He gives us an account of humanity's quest for knowledge that is both philosophical and historical. Beginning with sense perception, each chapter presents a more complicated and detailed analysis of different forms of knowledge, from consciousness to self‐consciousness and then to reason, religion, and ultimately Absolute Knowledge, which is knowledge of Geist (translated as “spirit” in the title of the book). The Phenomenology of Spirit serves as an introduction to Hegel's philosophical system, which continues with logic, philosophy of nature, and ethical and political philosophy.
One chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit, “Force and the Understanding,” is infamously complicated and dense. Hegel tries to work out how our knowledge of particular things and the relations between them presupposes what he calls “force.” As he sees it, force is an essential part of matter, rather than something external to it. This is why, for Yoda, size and weight don't matter so long as a Jedi can manipulate this essential aspect of matter.
Understanding the main problem here requires us to take a small step back … just 25 hundred years back to Greece. In those days, philosophers before Socrates (470–399 BCE) looked at the world in terms of a great diversity, a multiplicity of things and events. They wondered whether there was something – a principle, a force, an idea – that would explain the diversity in the objects and events that happened around them. They looked for a unifying principle (arche) that would explain why the world is the way it is. An arche would be primal, the first source, the structure guiding cause and effect, providing the basis for all causal explanations. If we could just grasp the underlying principle of reality, we'd be able to explain all things and creatures and their interactions. But these philosophers differed on what the arche was: Thales (624–583 BCE) thought this first principle was water, Anaximenes (586–526 BCE) thought it was air, Democritus (ca 460–ca 370 BCE) thought it was atoms, and so on. They believed that if there's something that permeates every single being, that ties them together, then having knowledge about that thing must be the key to all other kinds of knowledge in the universe. Sound familiar?
This idea has been influential throughout the history of philosophy, and Hegel learned this lesson incredibly well. His entire philosophy is dedicated to bringing forth a conceptual framework that provides the arche for modern social, philosophical, and scientific thought. Hegel calls this elementary unity and unfolding of all things Geist, the principle that ultimately grounds and explains both nature and society. Geist is the unfolding of reality itself; it manifests itself through everything and everyone. The key to understanding everything is Geist.
Yoda points out that the Force is everywhere, “it surrounds us and binds us … between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere … even between the land and the ship.” The Force is intrinsic to individual beings, so if you could understand the Force, you could begin to understand how other beings co‐exist and relate to each other. In Star Wars, the Force is the most primary principle, or arche. Its functions are both ontological (it's primal being) and epistemological (it allows us to have knowledge beyond what's observable). Through it, we can explain many historical and political as well as physical events.
Understanding the Force is key to understanding everything else. For Hegel, understanding force is like catching a thread or stumbling upon a road to what he calls “Absolute Knowledge,” the understanding of Geist. Similarly, the Force calls forth to Force‐sensitives: offering past wisdom and visions of the future. It warns, guides, and tempts those under its sway.
All the major heroes in the Skywalker saga have some connection to the Force, and their fates and endeavors are closely tied to that relation. Luke and Rey discover who they are through their adventures guided by the Force. Anakin turns to the dark side through his fear, induced by a vision, of losing his wife in childbirth. Han Solo and Leia struggle with Ben's sensitivity to the Force. The Force is thus more than just a “force of nature.” It also has an ethical dimension: it can influence people by providing intuitive guidance, and in turn can be influenced by their actions, as we can understand from the call to “bring balance to the Force.” But how do these different aspects of the Force relate to each other, and how can Hegel's philosophy help us understand the connection between these various aspects?
A good way to understand a philosophical position is to understand what kind of an idea it responds to. After the pre‐Socratics and their quest for an arche, a different kind of ontology started to gain traction among philosophers. Aristotle led the charge in claiming that things were primary, whereas relations were secondary. For instance, understanding what a dejarik table is requires understanding what it's made of and what shape it has; it doesn't require understanding where it's situated, who uses it, and so on. Ontology became the study of the being of objects and individuals, rather than the dynamic interconnections and processes between them. According to this ontology, particular things have properties that inhere in a substratum (a “substance”) which remains unchanged.
According to Aristotle's ontology, to understand what a thing is, we need to understand its essential properties. Wetness, for instance, is an essential property of water. This has also been called an intrinsic property of water, which means the wetness of water belongs to it solely by virtue of water's existence: water doesn't owe its wetness to any other thing. Not all properties are intrinsic: if I pour water on my lightsaber, the fact that it's now wet is the result of something other than the lightsaber itself, since lightsabers aren't themselves wet.
Kenneth Westphal, a Hegel scholar, points out an ambiguity in what “intrinsic” means here.2 “Intrinsic” has been used in two different ways. One use implies that an intrinsic property belongs solely to a substance, that it's “non‐relational,” but another use says that a property is essential to a substance, so that without that property, that substance would cease to be what it is. For instance, we wouldn't call what Luke and Rey are able to lift with the Force a “rock” if it lacked rigidity. Rigidity for a rock is both a “non‐relational” property (since it does not owe its rigidity to something other than itself) and an essential property (since without it, it wouldn't be a rock). But these two meanings have been confused, so many philosophers have been accustomed to think that relational properties can't essentially belong to a substance. This leads to an “atomistic” thrust to this traditional ontology: we tend to “think of individuals as basic and relations as derivative.”3
However, we can conceive of an essential property which is also relational: “Force is the unconditioned universal which is equally in itself what it is for an Other; or which contains the difference within itself.”4 Michael Inwood's commentary is helpful in deciphering what Hegel means here. He gives the example of a balloon. Any balloon filled with air “retains its size and shape owing to the interplay between the air pressure within the balloon […] and the elasticity of the material from which the balloon is made.”5 Understanding this particular thing requires us to understand the same force from two different directions: contraction and expansion. This force belongs to all balloons essentially; we can't make sense of what a balloon is without examining these forces.
Unsurprisingly, Hegel doesn't philosophize at length about balloons; instead, he's drawing on his knowledge of gravity and magnetism. Remember Newton: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Newton showed that gravity is a bifurcated force since objects with mass attract each other reciprocally: each of them exerts a force in the opposite direction. Magnetism is also bifurcated since a magnet has positive and negative directions of one and the same force. Force differentiates itself into two opposites, which together form a unity. Hegel's ontology suggests that relations of force are essential to particular things, an idea that seems suitable for understanding the Force in Star Wars.
The existence of dark and light sides of the Force already suggests a unity that also includes difference, just as Rey and Ben discover themselves to be “a dyad in the Force” in The Rise of Skywalker. This unity allows us to comprehend the Force, as we can only understand force by its vector, its directionality. Hegel suggests that this is how we understand how entities interact with each other: everything from planetary motions to electricity, from car crashes to a game of basketball, exhibits this bifurcated structure inherent to the forces involved.
As Westphal shows, Hegel is influenced by Newton's physics, and gravity is clearly a relational property that's also essential to all matter.6 Gravity is involved both within a single substance and between different substances. Things are made of atoms and each atom creates its own gravitational field, which holds the atoms of different things together. When atoms come together, they form a stronger gravitational field. Every atom in the universe exerts some force and is also the recipient of a similar force.
According to Hegel, we must accept a relational ontology to make sense of the network of cause and effect. This is because we know particular things only through our cause‐and‐effect observations of, and interactions with, them. For this to work, a particular thing can't be isolated unto itself: we must presume that forces and relations are essential to matter. Hegel's ontology also presupposes that relations among things are prior to the individual beings to which relations are essential. However, one significant difficulty awaits us: since Hegel's ideas are supposed to apply not only to nature but also to society, how do we move from physical force (such as gravity or magnetism) to a conception of social force?
Unlike gravity, in Star Wars the Force's influence is apparent in relations between living creatures; it also has an ethical dimension. Can Hegel's philosophy provide a parallel account for physical force and social reality? Fortunately, this is specifically what Hegel's philosophy aims to do: to find analogies, intricate connections, and syntheses between the natural and social orders within our world.
The Force both constitutes the Star Wars universe and explains why it exists the way that it does. It explains life, the ability of the Jedi and Sith to move objects from a distance, and even what happens after our favorite characters die. The same goes for characters' social and ethical lives: a wrongful action can be explained by a temptation from the dark side of the Force, whereas a noble action can be explained by guidance from the light side. The Force doesn't fully determine individuals' choices and actions, though. Hegel was well aware of this: the existence of Geist doesn't preclude the possibility of free will. In fact, just the opposite: Geist provides the natural and social background for freedom to flourish.
We've already mentioned two different aspects of the Force: a physical one akin to telekinesis, the ability to move objects from a distance, as well as a perceptive use involving heightened awareness of one's surroundings, including sensing the presence of those with a special connection with the Force. Finally, we must mention a social and historical aspect, in which we can differentiate the dark and light sides.7
The Force is primarily about connection, both between people and between people and things. When Darth Vader feels his son learning the ways of the Force, he senses a “disturbance.” Similarly, Luke senses the presence of his father in Darth Vader. In later films, connections seem to span not only space but time (Anakin is afraid of a possible future in which Padmé dies in childbirth), and in the sequel trilogy the “dyad” of Ben and Rey enables them to have face‐to‐face conversations across the galaxy.
Stephen Houlgate's poignant interpretation of Hegel's Geist is useful for a social interpretation of the Force in Star Wars.8 Houlgate's is a religious interpretation, but with an emphasis on the importance of the feeling of love. For Houlgate, Hegel's Geist is natural and is social reality becoming aware of itself through the lives of human beings. All our attempts at knowledge, understanding, and awareness make up the adventures of Geist and its quest to reach self‐understanding. Philosophy is the love of wisdom, so we try to learn and understand because we love this adventure itself. We want to become part of this endeavor.
Love is also the essential connection we feel toward other people that determines who we are and who we're to become. It's both essential and relational to our being. We can see immediately how something like gravitational or magnetic force is akin to love: love brings people together. It has the power to move us, so it explains a lot of what we do. Its effect is weakened by mental and emotional distance. It's what we must follow if we seek peace and harmony in the world. In a sense, we're magnetic beings, attracting and repelling each other until an equilibrium can be reached. It's through love that we understand ourselves not as isolated beings, but collectively, as a system with various parts interacting with each other through centuries and generations.
What about the Force in Star Wars? It's clear that there's a religious aspect to it, but given its intimate connection with human affairs, at least the light side can be understood in terms of love. Love is what explains Darth Vader's final act of sacrifice, as well as Rey and Ben overcoming their differences. The connections between matter are transposed into connections between people since, as Yoda explains, the Force is something we “feel.”
The key lesson from Hegel is that our relations to other people, other things, the universe itself, all make our individuality possible. We're not isolated particulars. Our relations matter to us essentially: they shape us, determine who we are and who we shall become. This understanding of the individual is central if we wish to understand the journey of Luke, Anakin, and Rey. The Skywalker saga is a tale that brings all these disparate aspects of natural and social reality together.
Accordingly, a hero is a person who's less concerned with their own well‐being and more concerned with the safety of others in the face of immediate danger to their own community. The hero becomes aware of this interconnection of all things and knows that they'll be remembered by the community for which they sacrifice themselves. Of course, we shouldn't all seek to sacrifice ourselves for the communities to which we belong: our aim and our resolve must be accurate, it must seek to bring about the greater good, it must seek justice and harmony.
Finally, we're ready to bring that X‐wing out of the swamp. Hopefully, Hegel's philosophy has brought us closer to Yoda, who has a deep understanding of reality thanks to his extensive knowledge of the Force and how it binds everything and everyone together. As we all know, through this knowledge Yoda can move the X‐wing as well as lead the Jedi Council and move us, the audience, as one of the most iconic characters in cinematic history. Yoda can do this because he was written, performed by, and interacted with, people who grasped and loved the Geist of their times. And it seems that this love will be reciprocated for many generations to come, as we continue to explore all the possibilities that the Star Wars universe has to offer.