ST The Pointlessness of Jedi Philosophy

From its title to many of its anchoring sequences, this movie was clearly trying to tackle the significance of Jedi. Along the way, we got a few interesting insights and speeches. Trying to add them together, though, I am increasingly convinced that they just made an incoherent mess.

Take, for instance, Luke's speech about the nature of the Force. One of the best sequences in the movie. But it already laid out the Force as a tension between supposed opposites. So the idea of duality is implicit. Great. Luke even goes on to say that the Jedi Order was arrogant to have thought it could control this or lay sole claim to it. Again, sure. But then what is the Dark Side? It can't be trying to harness the power of the Force to one's own ends, since he just said that's what the Jedi were guilty of. Nor is it simply the other half of dualities in nature (eg death as opposed to life), because we already outlined how the light side of the Force covers that aspect. So then. . .? I'm not really understanding what this is, or why it is there or what it's doing at all? What initially sounded sort of poetic instead just sort of cracks up under the slightest scrutiny. "What is the Dark Side?" really should be the most basic of questions, and there's no answer. He talks vaguely about why it exists without ever actually outlining what it is.

The second most egregious moment is Yoda's renunciation of the whole Jedi dogma. Never mind that I can't make sense of it from a character standpoint. What does it imply for what we should understand about who the Jedi were? Rey already knows everything that any Jedi should? Really? With no training? Has their ever been any philosophy in history that advocated acting exactly as one would as if one had never encountered it in the first place? What does being a Jedi even mean at that point?

Did other people feel likewise? Is their some stunning defense that weaves this all together in a way I'm not seeing?

 

I think when Yoda said Rey already knew everything in the books, he was just coyly referring to the fact that unbeknownst to Luke, Rey had the books with her.

As to the rest, I make it a point not to think too deeply about force philosophy. It falls apart almost instantly. That’s why I prefer ANH and ESB on this issue. They barely touch on anything philosophical so there’s nothing to dissect. Who can’t roll with, “in my experience there’s no such thing as luck,” or “do or do not. There is no try”? But damn once you go down the path of “only the sith deal in absolutes” it’s just a big fat mess.

I found TLJ to be pretty much totally incoherent on force philosophy. Why must the Jedi end while dark side force users rule the galaxy? Yeah fine the Jedi don’t have a monopoly... so that means it’s Luke’s job to make sure Order 66 is completed and there’s no one left to fight the bad guys that run the whole show? It makes no sense and I don’t think it’s meant to make sense. We’re supposed to smile and nod and let the movie keep rolling without giving it a second thought.

 

Agreed. One of the faults of the PT was that Lucas disappeared a bit up his own backside with "Force" philosophising. IMO, Star Wars is at its best when it uses that stuff as backdrop to the story, which is actually about the characters and relationships and the driving narrative, rather than the story itself.

 

The dark side is the other half of the duality of nature. It's death, violence, destruction, cold, evil, fear, etc.

He doesn't renunciate the Jedi dogma. He says stop looking towards the past and future and focus on the present moment. He also says that, yes, the Jedi make mistakes, but it is these mistakes that make them stronger.

As for Rey he says that she already has everything she needs from that library. This means two things - that she took the books, and that she already had everything those books say within her soul already (as we all do).

Luke's reasoning is that:

a) the light can survive without the Jedi, and
b) the Jedi mistakes can sometimes create darkness itself

 

What do you mean the other half? He described the [Light Side] of the Force as the tension between life and death, or peace and violence. So how can the Dark Side be just one side of that while still being the opposite of it? If she can see the Light Side there she shouldn't recognize the Dark as something distinct.

More broadly, as a message, that doesn't really make sense. The issue was never whether or not the Jedi "made mistakes." Luke had a number of specific critiques of the Jedi that either are or are not true. If they were true, then he shouldn't still be encouraging people to become Jedi. Except he afterwards does, even though Yoda apparently agrees with his critiques of Jedi philosophy, despite having never said so at any point while alive.

I think Ashoka has the right of it here. It's intentional gobbledy-gook. A philosophical MacGuffin.

 

Yes I understand that those are the reasons written by RJ to explain Luke. I don’t see how that even approaches rational, because:

a) dark siders rule the galaxy, and
b) dark siders rule the galaxy.

 

No he describes the Force as that, not just the light side. The dark side is part of the Force, not the opposite.

The issues absolutely is that the Jedi made mistakes. These critiques are made because of his own experience with failure (the fall of Ben Solo), and that's why he is conflicted in this movie thinking the Jedi should end.

He doesn't agree with Luke's critique. He says while the Jedi make mistakes it's this that makes them stronger.

 

They don't rule the galaxy when Luke leaves. When they return he tells them he can't stop them on his own (for many reasons I've stated in other threads). R2 shows him the Leia message and he realises he should maybe consider the Jedi returning.

 

I don't think that reading makes sense. Rey goes through her entire dialogue about light/dark, life/death, peace/violence. Then, afterwards she encounters the rotting hole and asks "What's that?" as if she's unfamiliar with it. If she had already comprehended the Dark Side as part of some larger understanding of the Force, she wouldn't have asked this way. So we're left to conclude that her description was of the Light Side, as distinct from whatever the Dark Side is since that was a new experience for her.

 

The "light side of the Force" is not really a thing. Neither is the dark side. There is only THE FORCE, which no mortal mind can fully comprehend. Light and Dark are metaphors used to describe aspects of the whole, to try to give it some sort of context. Same with the Living vs Cosmic/Unifying Force, or the Will of the Force as referenced in the PT. Somewhere along the line these went from being appreciated as poetical terms to being treated like power sets on a D&D spreadsheet. I blame West End Games, and the EU.

I wouldn't say Yoda abandoned all Jedi dogma, but he does seem to have finally come around to a truth that he should have embraced sooner, considering how much time he supposedly spent with Qui-Gon: people are more important than orthodoxy.

ETA:

Well...yeah. I mean, the concept of a "hyperdrive" is ridiculous, too. In the end, these are just stories about people, and the more they are filtered into some attempt to make the GFFA a fully pragmatic paracosm, the less interesting they become, IMO.

 

I understand why you would think that, but it's not correct based upon what we know from other canon sources.

In the symbol on the floor of the Jedi Temple where Rey is being trained by Luke there is a Jedi, in meditation, balancing light and dark. This is the tension that Rey describes.

The dark side 'blowhole', is basically a nexus of the dark side, like the dark side cave on Dagobah.

 

When it gets too much into faux-philosophy star wars tends to lose me. Its best when they just touch on it and imply that there's something deeper there, without too much navel-gazing. That drug the Matrix Sequels to a crawl, and existentialism is a REAL philosophy.

 

How are you concluding that the image is representing the light and dark sides of the force, as opposed to the light and dark moments of life?

Further, Luke explains the Dark Side nexus by saying something about a strong Light Side presence requiring a strong Dark Side one. Fine. So was she originally tapping into a strong Light Side nexus? Then why did it include aspects that you call Dark? Was she tapping into neither? Why has she never been confused or surprised by strong expressions of the Light Side in the same way that she was the Dark?

Moreover, why are the hints about Rey being "dark" disconnected from anything she ever actually does? Not that I want to see her slaughtering the Sand People on Not Tatooine, mind you. But it's a bit odd that they're trying ot convince us of her great evil in a way that's totally disconnected from her even doing something that we could characterize as unfriendly. Let alone truly bad. What is even going on with these films?

 

Personally, TLJ (and TFA) made a huge mistake of canonizing the Light Side and then assume that Balance must be Light and Dark as equals. That never works considering it only takes two Sith to rule the galaxy despite having two or more Jedi.

They should have paid attention to Lucas' idea of the Dark Side:

Have no idea what Luke is mumble jumbling about in TLJ. Ending the Jedi Order without purging Snoke and Kylo Ren is like killing the galaxy's best hope of defeating evil before the evil is completely defeat, allowing them to rise again thus dooming the galaxy to another reign of tyranny.

 

Thanks for making that point. Up until recently, I had been under the misunderstanding that the conception of Lucas' GFFA is a manichean one. I learned otherwise from someone who pointed out that Lucas makes this very point in the ANH documentary (special edition, I think). In other words, the Force is in balance when there is no dark side (no cancer, in other words); and this is what happens at the end of ROTJ when Anakin ends Sidious and himself and cleanses the Force (and the galaxy).

Basically, JJ and RJ appear - intentionally or ignorantly - to have seized the wrong end of the stick.

 

Wocky you're overcomplicating it. The Dark Side of the Force is fear, aggression, violence, death, etc. It's half of the tension that Rey senses. The Dark side can also manifest itself in places which is what the blowhole is and what the dark side cave is. Her vision clearly senses the island as representing the Force, she then senses the tension between light and dark, and then a nexus of the dark side. I think that the symbol is explained as such in one of the books.

Rey's shadowself manifests itself differently from Luke's. Her fear is being alone in the world and this is renforced when she goes to the dark side cave where she is essentially told she is alone. She is then tempted by the dark side and her shadow self when she is offered family by Kylo.

 

I believe that is a misquote from George, replacing 'Sith' with 'dark side'. Never the less it isn't what George currently thinks considering TCW contradicts it and his notes have been used for the ST. Balance is the balance between light and dark. Imbalance is caused when either grows too strong, as happened with the Sith.

 

Indeed, and now that I think about it, Luke is a complete idiot in TLJ. Just because PT Jedi weren't perfect and failed to anticipate Darth Sidious' rise to power doesn't mean that they deserved to wiped out in Order 66. They had a thousand years of peace and naturally, their senses got dulled by their success that they didn't know how to deal with the next rising evil. Luke should have been training Jedi to be prepared for that inevitable conflict and being an improvement over the old order. And not give up when one of his students decides to go full evil.

In TCW Mortis Arc, the whole balance thing was deconstructed when it becomes clear that the Son is causing all the imbalance and the balance solution ended in tragedy with all three dying. I even heard that the Force Priestesses said that Father was wrong in a deleted scene.

Additionally, Yoda confronts his Dark Side and acknowledges it will always exists. But through his training, he subdued it and rendered it powerless, not give it equal share of his soul.

And really, we don't know what notes have ST crew been using. Remember that Lucas wanted Luke and Rey to properly train as a Jedi teacher and student. And not what we got in TLJ.

 

The Mortis arc works as a metaphor, and it actually turns out the father was correct in a roundabout way.

The priestess doesn't mention the Father if I recall correctly.

Yoda's confrontation with his shadow self shows the conflict of internal balance and the struggle of the shadow self.

Pablo said they are working from George's notes of the Force.

We don't know that's what George would have done.

 

Personally I always felt the most interesting idea for Luke was the "Grey Jedi", the idea that his failure with traditional Jedi teaching and his experience with Vader tells him that "once you start down the dark path" is a questionable idea. By stigmatising the darkside the Jedi left themselves(and especially those training) unable to deal with it, negative feelings were buried rather than addressed and that led to the potential for becoming lost in them.

I'm no expert on Chinese philosophy but this seems to be rather similar to Taoism and Yin/Yang which the force was originally based upon where positive and negative forces are actually complimentary.

 

Yet the Father tells the Son not to embrace the Dark Side despite him embodying it. Both the Daughter and the Father insists on Balance while the Son keeps subverting it. The balance was not restored until the Son dies.

Yoda's confrontation shows us that the balance is lopsided to the Light. His inner balance is him with a very tiny, powerless Dark Side.

We have no idea what those notes are regardless, but we do know that all the imbalance comes from the Dark Side. Always the Dark Side. For it is the imbalance itself even if the Sith aren't around (the Son is no Sith after all).

 

Yeah, Han Solo was right the first time: "I used to wonder about that myself. Thought it was a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. A magical power holding together good and evil..." And then he should have added "It's whatever the screenwriter or author needs for his or her story or plot"

 

The Mortis arc is only a broad strokes metaphor. It is internally inconsostent - the Son falling to the dark side while being the dark side is itself inconsostent. Anakin destroys the imbalanced dark side. Whatever the case 'balance' isn't the destruction of the dark side - that was established by George and is the case is canon.

You're misinterpreting the Yoda arc. Yoda is, for one, dealing with internal balance, but the broad strokes can be applied. He doesn't destroy his dark side but integrated the dark side. Therefore the dark side isn't imbalance since it can't be destroyed.

It comes from the dark side in that it grows because of the Sith. When the Sith are destroyed the balance is restored, but the dark side remains, as it must as it is part of everything.

 

Ehh Grey Jedi is a strange term because it implies being an anti hero, which is an unhealthy state.

If you mean a Jedi that has a healthy relationship with the dark side then Yoda, Qui-Gon, etc are already that.

 

As has been pointed out, you missed that Yoda was simply referring to Rey already having those texts.

Disagree. His conclusion makes perfect sense & is almost inescapable. In just a few decades THREE Jedi have turned to the Dark Side & wreaked chaos & death on the galaxy. The Jedi Order had become a finishing school for evil psychopaths. It's too dangerous to allow that cycle to continue. Luke would've learned about Dooku & his father's history. Then Ben Solo happened. That's 3 strikes. To continue the Jedi Order would've been totally irresponsible. It would be like one country having nuclear weapons for their own protection. One gets stolen & used to kill a lot of innocent people. Then it happens again, only worse. Then it happens again. After that the only solution becomes clear: total nuclear disarmament & the extinction of those types of weapons. It's an understandable but flawed solution, since the likes of Palpatine & Snoke can always rise (or in that analogy, a rival nation will develop nukes). That's what Luke accepts in the end. That the Light is always needed to balance & stand opposed to the Darkness. No matter the risk.