When Anakin Skywalker Goes Blind
C.S. Lewis, Subjective Morality and Anakin's fall in Star Wars: Episode III
It’s May 5th, so in the Star Wars super fan community, we say…Happy Revenge of the Fifth! Get it? Last week I went to see Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in theaters with my wife and daughter. It was a blast. Episode III was a transformative movie for me as a teen in 2005. When you’re a moody, quasi-goth teenager, Anakin’s fall to the dark side feels like a biopic about yourself.
In the movie, Anakin says something to Obi-Wan right before their duel on Mustafar. He says, “I see through the lies of the Jedi, I do not fear the dark side as you do.” Let’s do a deep dive on this bit of dialogue.
Anakin in this moment is like every 16-year-old on planet Earth. They hit a certain age and think they’ve tapped into some new wisdom about how the world works. They are able to see hypocrisy in some of their parents’ teachings, and they see that the world is more complicated and often cruel than they’d been told.
Their cynicism takes the form of faux enlightenment.
The fall of Anakin Skywalker is very much the same kind of thing. He gets told by Chancellor Palpatine (A Sith Lord?!) that the Jedi and Sith are essentially the same, and that the Jedi hypocritically seek power while wearing ‘service of others’ like a costume. It’s as if Anakin had never heard this before. He has received secret knowledge, a forbidden truth that the Jedi don’t want him to know.
You can just go on and on with the moody teenager parallels.
BTW here is a good video from Geeky Stoics on this topic
So Anakin says he sees “through the lies of the Jedi”, begging the question….what does he see now?
Whatever he sees on the other side of the Jedi’s supposed lies is a world in which killing younglings and murdering your friends is an acceptable way to get what you want.
Obi-Wan later says to Anakin, “Then you are lost!”
Indeed. C.S. Lewis says something at the very end of The Abolition of Man which drew me back to this dialogue of Anakin Skywalker. It’s a series of essays by the legendary author and Christian apologist about the perils of doing away with objective value. By that, I mean, he does not think it’s correct to say “to each his own” when it comes to reviewing a series of paintings.
Personal taste and preference do not, in Lewis’s view, override actual artistry on the merits. Some art is better than other art, objectively.
Lewis writes, “You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.”
What’s on the other side of the lens by which you’ve interpreted the world?
Say you’re part of a religion whose doctrine suggests that every person in the world with brown eyes was put on the planet as direct representatives of the Creator. These individuals are considered to be higher beings, both enlightened and burdened with the task of leading everyone else who lacks brown eyes like a shepherd would lead a flock of sheep.
Taken in the best possible interpretation, a shepherd protects his flock and lovingly cares for them. He does not exploit, cheat, harm, or seek to mislead.
Of course, this is not real. This religion of brown-eyed dominion is false. But for the people who believed it and saw the world through that lens, their view of their fellow man was loving, gentle, and stewardly. The distortion through which they understood the world was shaping them to be good and righteous by all available understandings of the word “shepherd”.
On the other side of the glass, they saw people who needed their service and themselves as having a duty to serve. This strikes me as good, overall.
So then a Sith comes along and tells a brown-eyed shepherd of men that it is all a lie. They now see through the lies of this false religion, and for the first time in this person’s life, their fellow man is not a lost lamb of any kind. Now they see sheep mixed with wolves mixed with puppies mixed with tigers.
Now, there will be violence, ill will, distrust, fear, anger, and resentment.
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. - Matthew 7:15-17
C.S. Lewis was a master of analogy to make his points, so hopefully I’m not way off base here in the picture I’ve painted. My point is, some lenses through which we interpret the world are better than others. Not every lens calls on us to care for the plants and animals, or forgive our fellow man when they fall short of how we’d like to be treated.
Let’s return to the framework of Star Wars and Anakin’s fall. Now that Skywalker “sees through the lies of the Jedi”, what does he see? I say, judge a tree by its fruit. The Jedi Order bore a handful of rotten apples. The Sith’s entire tree is rancid. There is no redeeming byproduct.
Lewis’s full passage reads, “You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. “You cannot go on 'seeing through' things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.”
Anakin Skywalker, by the time he reaches Mustafar and faces off with Obi-Wan Kenobi, sees nothing at all. He is blind, his eyes cut out by his own hand.
Well said
While reading, Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House" came to mind. That a concrete behemoth office building is reviled by most and a Victorian mansion is admired by more, is not merely a matter of taste. One is a horror and the other is a beauty. Not that the masses are the only test of beauty, of course; they can be wrong sometimes.