Lord Haseo said:
You don’t think he can adopt a philosophy of “Use your inner darkness to best your enemies but don’t let it envelope you for too long”? Also what’s to say that Luke didn’t take bits and pieces of philosophy that Dark Siders hold dear and use them to bolster his new philosophy?To me? No. Again, I still see the Dark Side as the malignant tumour on the energy field that life creates. It is not a difference in philosophy; it is the manifestation of the emotions behind bigotry and oppression. Being “A little dark” is akin to being “a little evil.”
We all harbor some amount of taint inside us. Luke would no doubt accept that and try to use his for the betterment of the Galaxy. The nature of these base feelings doesn’t matter so long as the outcome is good.
The Force is not a tool; it is not just a means to an end. It is the very thing that brings life together. Using the corruption of the energy created by life to protect life is hypocritical at best.
This will quickly get into deep epistemological distinctions about good and evil, but to me, since the Force is an energy field created by life, all the processes of life forms feed into this energy field. This includes both the ‘nice’ emotions such as happiness and serenity, but also the ‘ugly’ emotions like fear and anger and apathy. As someone who has dealt with apathy in the past (‘what’s the point, nothing can get better’), often in order to rise out of apathy one must become aware of fear (‘I actually can affect this situation, and the situation is scary’), accepting it in order to rise through that through anger (‘I hate that I’ve let things get so bad’) and into happier emotions. This is what I imagine Luke going through in ROTJ.
My point is that these ‘ugly’ emotions exist in the real world for a reason. They’re not aberrant or unnatural, and to turn them into the equivalent of sin is a very religious, very Jedi, thing to do. The natural state of someone in command of the light and dark sides of the Force would, I expect, be a very serene and happy person on the whole, but it doesn’t mean they couldn’t get mad or fearful. It’s a gradient, not a black and white distinction, and I don’t think that a grey Jedi or the equivalent would use both sides equally. To dip into Eastern religion, someone using the Dark Side would be rather unenlightened, whereas someone using the light would be more enlightened. A good Jedi teaching in an Eastern mold might be that anyone who uses the Force is a Jedi, but the use of the Dark Side momentarily masks this Truth. That is how I choose to interpret Luke’s assertion after he throws aside his lightsaber.