turtles

in the sea
Got the Star Wars DVD box set for Christmas and have been watching them now for the first time since I was about 15 or so...only problem is after reading all this endless Cold Rationalism stuff I just keep thinking that the Force is pretty much the total opposite of CR..."Trust your feelings, Luke" and all that. Now, I never really read much significance into the whole Force thing when I was younger--it was just pleasant psycho-bable to go along with a cool movie--but now I find it's really getting under my skin. It's...just...so...stupid. It's just seems like such disgustingly squishy philosophy.

I mean, I still find it entertaining as a fun SF action movie (who doesn't like light-saber battles?), but I really used to love those movies when I was a kid. Oh well, another childhood favorite lost to the cold light of adult perceptions. Damn you K-punk! ;)
 

john eden

male pale and stale
It's quite an interesting observation because one of the things I chucked at Mark during the Badiou/Teachers/whatever flare up was Taoism - which is apparently one of the things The Force was based on.

Personally I have a lot of time for Lao Tzu. Hence all the stuff about recognising that the irrational and the rational are both natural parts of what it is to be human.
 

luka

Well-known member
dave me old son,ask yourslef this question
how does a cold ratioalist choose a lover?
and start to enjoy star wars again.
 

luka

Well-known member
it's sad but i'm still giggling to myself about that image

i'm thinking tape measures and questionnaires
 

turtles

in the sea
hohoho...don't worry I haven't gone completely over to the dark side (though to be fair I'm sure K-punk would reject both light and dark sides of the Force). In fact the main reason I wanted the Star Wars box set was becuase I figured that they would be good movies to watch when stoned with a bunch of my buddies. And I was right!

But nevertheless, there I was in my most un-rational post-BC Hydro haze, and all of a sudden I start thinking about Cold Rationalism and what it is that Yoda is actually saying...which is a pretty fucked up state to be in, let me assure you...

So yeah, I'm not saying that emotions should never be used/relied upon, I'm just uncomfortable with the privileging of emotion as some sort of transcendental key to the universe rather than just another normal brain process that affects the way we think.
 

puretokyo

Mercury Blues
For a really enjoyable in-depth look at the nature of The Force and the Light, Dark and Grey paths, have a bash at the recent Star Wars games, Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2. Fucking great stuff. I finally appreciate Star Wars... or at least the ideas if not the plots.
 

sus

Well-known member
In fact, it's precisely the "coldness" of the Jedi's approach that alienates Anakin. "Trust your feelings" has gotten Disneyfied, but it's based on taoist ideas that are perfectly in accord with a clear-eyed apprehension.

It's easy to project various meanings onto SW's use of "feelings," to mix it up with emotion-driven reasoning. But note that this "getting carried away with your emotions" is precisely what leads people down the path to the dark side. Clearly "trust your feelings" =/= "follow your emotions."

The best way I can explain it is that "listen to your feelings" is about situational awareness and not overthinking your response. It's about letting that response it flow naturally from your context sensitivity. Think of it like Gary Klein's research into firefighter intuition, e.g. this case study:

It is a simple house fire in a one-story house in a residential neighborhood. The fire is in the back, in the kitchen area. The lieutenant leads his hose crew into the building, to the back, to spray water on the fire, but the fire just roars back at them. “Odd,” he thinks. The water should have more of an impact. They try dousing it again, and get the same results. They retreat a few steps to regroup. Then the lieutenant starts to feel as if something is not right. He doesn’t have any clues; he just doesn’t feel right about being in that house, so he orders his men out of the building—a perfectly standard building with nothing out of the ordinary. As soon as his men leave the building, the floor where they had been standing collapses. Had they still been inside, they would have plunged into the fire below.

What happens with the "bad" kind of "feelings"-driven acting and reasoning is that it's fundamentally desire-driven. The emotional needs and desires and fears of the individual cloud his judgment.

This "feelings vs cold rationality" framing of op exactly misses the point, which is that there's a detached, non-verbal way of using perception and the experience intuition without their being mucked up by emotions. "Cold [verbal, explicit, logical] Spock rationality" and "associative emotional reasoning" are both impoverished ways of operating in the world (see e.g. Bourdieu on habitus, or William James in Principles of Psychology, or the associationist school more generally, for why logical/verbal reasoning falls short—why we need and constantly employ associative intuition). The Jedi philosophy of force usage is "best of both worlds" in what is usually seen as a System 1 vs System 2 tradeoff.
 

sus

Well-known member
The LessWrong Rationalists, of course—the closest thing on the web to Vulcans—have been slowly figuring this out the past couple decades, which is why they're all into woo and eastern mysticism and meditation now. It's probably an overcorrection but when they eventually reach a synthesis, it'll be a banger.
 

version

Well-known member
One of the things often pointed out about the Jedi is that their claim "Only a Sith deals in absolutes," is itself an absolute.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
What's interesting here is that Frank Herbert was, like Lukas, strongly influenced by Joseph Campbell, but in the figure of Paul Atreides he created a sort of anti-Skywalker over a decade before the first Star Wars film came out, since it is by doing the exact opposite of trusting his instincts - that is, using his rational intellect to suppress his instincts - that Paul survives the ordeal of the Gom Jabbar and embarks on his career as an eventually rather reluctant warrior-messiah.
 
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sus

Well-known member
One of the things often pointed out about the Jedi is that their claim "Only a Sith deals in absolutes," is itself an absolute.

This is a well-known problem in philosophy actually! It pops up with the logical positivists' verifiability principle, or the post-modernists contention that all claims are Or Socrates's "I know that I know nothing." Or the postmodernist contention that all positions are relative itself being relative.

Not sure what to make of it, just noting that it pops up
 

sus

Well-known member
What's interesting here is that Frank Herbert was, like Lukas, strongly influenced by Joseph Campbell, but in the figure of Paul Atreides he created a sort of anti-Skywalker over a decade before the first Star Wars film came out, since it is by doing the exact opposite of trusting his instincts - that is, using his rational intellect to suppress his instincts - that Paul survives the ordeal of the Gom Jabbar and embarks on his career as an eventually rather reluctant warrior-messiah.
Tea! Did you read my post?? The Jedi Way as I formulate it would explicitly advocate for overcoming one's personal desires (i.e. to remove one's hand) in service of the situational demands (passing the test).
 

version

Well-known member
This is a well-known problem in philosophy actually! It pops up with the logical positivists' verifiability principle, or the post-modernists contention that all claims are Or Socrates's "I know that I know nothing." Or the postmodernist contention that all positions are relative itself being relative.

Not sure what to make of it, just noting that it pops up

Yeah, the end of grand narratives is a grand narrative.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Tea! Did you read my post?? The Jedi Way as I formulate it would explicitly advocate for overcoming one's personal desires (i.e. to remove one's hand) in service of the situational demands (passing the test).
Well you can formulate it however you like, but I'd say Star Wars was fairly Disneyfied from the get-go.
 
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sus

Well-known member
Well you can formulate it however you like, but I'd say Star Wars was fairly Disneyfied from the get-go.
That's not true Lucas is an auteur in the European tradition, this is clear from his early work. He is a poptimist not a corporate pop fabrication.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
That's not true Lucas is an auteur in the European tradition, this is clear from his early work. He is a poptimist not a corporate pop fabrication.

I don't know if I've ever mentioned it, but I love winding up Star Wars fans by pointing out that the original film that kicked off the franchise is an exceptionally poor rework of Hidden Fortress ( pedantically: 隠し砦の三悪人 )

for some reason they get angry but fortunately their glow stick has never been a match for my fist
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
@william_kent true: hidden fortress, but I do think the Star Wars re-genre-ization (mildly intoxicated at the moment) is a pretty historically successful one. Like how early westerns (40's Ford, Hawks, etc) inspired Kurosawa with Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, and how those in return re-inspired American (Magnificent Seven) and Italian (Fistful of Dollars) westerns - all of which eras/genres had great films in them.

So yeah Star Wars is a rework of Hidden Fortress - but not a poor one, I'd argue.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Which is a better film, i.e. more artfully composed? Probably Hidden Fortress (been a while since I've seen it, but I did see a 35mm screening of it in some hollywood film preservation society theater I forget the name of). But that said, Star Wars is a defining feat of hollywood magic (a sort of magic which is at best emulated by other countries, I maintain), and of sci-fi epics.
 
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