This is very interesting. A wizard’s soul normally survives bodily death, and the natural further assumption would be that souls are immortal. But with dementors around, not all souls achieve this happy state, for dementors can apparently destroy souls completely. You can still exist even without your soul, however. Lupin’s words here are open to more than one interpretation. He might merely mean your body can still exist and keep functioning biologically as long as your organs are still intact. According to this reading, the Dementor’s Kiss would leave the victim in something like a permanent vegetative state, in which basic metabolic functions continue but in which there is no substantial mental life at all. Yet if this is what Lupin means, it’s odd that he portrays it as the continued existence of the person but in a state worse than death. If the soul is the source of all conscious mental life, and if all of that disappears after the Dementor’s Kiss, then it would seem more appropriate to say that the person truly is no more, that the empty shell of a body is just that—a body but not a person.
Because Lupin is insistent that a person can continue to exist without a soul, a different picture seems to be suggested. This is speculative, but here’s my guess. A soulless person still has sensations and even thoughts about the passing show. After the Kiss was applied, Barty Crouch Jr. may have still recognized that there were people in the room, but he had no idea who they were or who he was, for he had no substantial memory or sense of self. Accordingly, perhaps we should think of existence after the Dementor’s Kiss as akin to a severe case of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease—perhaps similar to the condition Lockhart found himself in after one of his memory charms backfired.
The Dementor’s Kiss would appear to rule out at least two, if not three, of the remaining conceptions of the soul. If one can be alive without one’s soul, then the soul cannot be the source of life itself, and so the life-source view cannot be correct. And if a victim of the Dementor’s Kiss still has sensations, and even a body in a vegetative state may be somewhat responsive to sensory stimuli, then the sentience view also seems ruled out. Moreover, if the Dementor’s Kiss does allow someone to think, feel, and notice the passing show, albeit lacking memories or a sense of self, then even the Cartesian view seems unlikely. According to the Cartesian view, the soul is that which is responsible for our higher-level functions, our ability to have beliefs and, especially, to understand language. In the interpretation I have suggested, the Kiss might leave those abilities at least partially intact, despite the soul itself being utterly destroyed.
Horcruxes
A central plot element for the Harry Potter story as a whole is Tom Riddle’s quest to defeat death using Horcruxes. Professor Horace Slughorn explains to a young Riddle what happens when a wizard creates a Horcrux: “ ‘Well, you split your soul, you see,’ said Slughorn, ‘and hide part of it in an object outside the body. Then, even if one’s body is attacked or destroyed, one cannot die, for part of the soul remains earthbound and undamaged.’ ”7
Indeed, later, when Voldemort attacks the infant Harry using the Avada Kedavra curse that rebounds then destroys Voldermort’s body, Voldemort himself remains alive, albeit as “less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost.” 8
The young Riddle presses Slughorn further and asks how one splits one’s soul. Slughorn answers, “By an act of evil—the supreme act of evil. By committing murder. Killing rips the soul apart. The wizard intent upon creating a Horcrux would use the damage to his advantage: He would encase the torn portion—.”9 Slughorn does not answer Riddle’s further question about exactly how one encases the soul, other than saying that there is a spell. Riddle then asks, “Can you only split your soul once? Wouldn’t it be better, make you stronger, to have your soul in more pieces, I mean, for instance, isn’t seven the most powerfully magic number, wouldn’t seven—?” 10 Slughorn is horrified that Riddle would apparently think of killing repeatedly to do this, but he also warns against it for another reason. He has already told Riddle that “the soul is supposed to remain intact and whole” and that splitting “it is an act of violation, it is against nature.”11
Two points from Slughorn’s words are worth emphasizing. First, that it requires a supreme act of evil to make the soul such that it can be ripped, and, second, that the soul is thereby damaged or made unstable, and that ripping it more than once presumably increases the damage. This is a point that Hermione makes as well, after she read Secrets of the Darkest Art, which, along with other dark magic books, she summoned from Dumbledore’s office after his death: “ ‘And the more I’ve read about [Horcruxes],’ said Hermione, ‘the more horrible they seem, and the less I can believe that he actually made six. It warns in this book how unstable you make the rest of your soul by ripping it, and that’s just by making one Horcrux!’ ”12
Although both Slughorn and Secrets of the Darkest Art are clear that ripping the soul damages it, it is not immediately obvious how the damage to the soul translates into harm to the living human being. There is, after all, no indication that Voldemort’s mental faculties or magical abilities are in any way diminished. Indeed, Dumbledore warns Harry, “Never forget, though, that while his soul may be damaged beyond repair, his brain and his magical powers remain intact. It will take uncommon skill and power to kill a wizard like Voldemort even without his Horcruxes.” 13
This seems quite clearly to rule out the Cartesian view, according to which the soul is responsible for all higher-level thought. If a Cartesian soul were horribly damaged, then one’s thoughts, skills, and, presumably, magical abilities would be damaged as well, but all of this is left intact in Voldemort. Because Voldemort’s sensory abilities seem unharmed, too, despite his damaged soul, it seems that the sentience view is also excluded.
Rather than applying the Cartesian or sentience views, Rowling adopts the sentimental view of the soul, according to which the soul is associated with that which makes us most human, with our capacity to love and our moral conscience. This was already suggested by the fact that one rips and damages the soul by committing the supremely evil act of murder. If the soul is associated with what makes us deeply human and good, then it at least makes poetic sense that the soul would be damaged by committing the ultimate evil. The key evidence lies in what seemed different about Voldemort after he damaged his soul so badly: not his higher cognitive functions, but his humanity. Dumbledore tells Harry, “Lord Voldemort has seemed to grow less human with the passing years, and the transformation he has undergone seemed to me to be only explicable if his soul was mutilated beyond the realms of what we might call ‘usual evil.’ ”14 Specifically, after ripping his soul and creating Horcruxes, the handsome young Tom Riddle undergoes a significant physical transformation. Few of us look better as we age, but with Riddle/Voldemort, the change is extreme. In Goblet of Fire, when he has completely regained his body in the graveyard, he is described as “whiter than a skull, with wide, livid scarlet eyes and a nose that was flat as a snake’s with slits for nostrils.”15
Voldemort’s change in appearance is Rowling’s metaphor for what was happening to Voldemort on a deep emotional and moral level. Of course, the child Riddle in the orphanage already had a significantly sinister side to him, and there is no evidence that he ever truly loved anyone, but in his early days at Hogwarts he at least had the ability to charm people. He was a leader among his peers, even among older students, and he accomplished this through personality rather than fear. He charmed Professor Slughorn, who predicted that Riddle would become Minister of Magic, and managed to get him to discuss Horcruxes, which was a banned topic at Hogwarts. By the time Riddle begins his reign of terror as Lord Voldemort, however, all indications are that Death Eaters continue to follow him out of fear, rather than because of anything remotely approximating devotion. Even Bellatrix Lestrange, his most devoted follower near the end, seems worshipful of his power but hardly charmed. That capacity, Riddle’s most human attribute, seems to have utterly disappeared after his soul was ripped into seven pieces (eight, if yo
u count Harry as the seventh Horcrux).
Voldemort might have been able to repair his damaged soul, but not by use of a potion or an appropriate incantation (not even with the Elder Wand). Rather, according to Secrets of the Darkest Art, a ripped soul can perhaps be repaired through remorse; as Hermione puts it, “You’ve got to really feel what you’ve done.” 16 In none of the other views of the soul would there be any reason for the particular emotion of remorse to have a special effect on the immaterial soul. But according to the sentimental view, the soul is most closely connected with our deepest emotions and our moral conscience. Our goodness and humanity are damaged by evil actions, but we can go some ways toward restoring that goodness and humanity if we feel genuine remorse. In the climactic scene, Harry in fact suggests to Voldemort that he “be a man” and try to feel some remorse.17 Voldemort, of course, having gone so far beyond even the “usual evil,” feels no inclination toward remorse, and Voldemort is finally killed when his own killing curse, shot from the Elder Wand of which Harry is the master, rebounds off Harry’s Expelliarmus.
A Plausible View?
If Rowling indeed adopts the sentimental conception of the soul, she does so with an interesting twist. The sentimental view is not a philosophical theory developed by theologians or philosophers but rather a distillation of various ways we use the word soul. These ordinary uses of the word could easily be taken as metaphorical and do not necessarily imply that there really is some sort of independent and immaterial entity that explains our deepest emotional commitments and moral conscience. Even materialists can and do use the word soul as a perfectly good metaphor. But within the Harry Potter universe, Rowling clearly also presupposes a metaphysical view: that the soul is independent of the body, is not harmed by normal physical events, and can even survive the destruction of the body. In other words, Rowling takes the metaphysical picture normally associated with the more philosophical views of the soul (especially the sentience view and the Cartesian view) and combines it with the metaphorical picture suggested by the sentimental view.
So, does Rowling offer a theory of the soul that is likely to be true? Probably not, but the issues are contentious. First, many philosophers and scientists plausibly argue that there is no good evidence for the existence of an immaterial substance that is causally responsible for anything above and beyond what the human body does. It would be possible to have such evidence someday: if neuroscientists saw that there were events that happened in brains with no observable physical cause, then this would at least be an indication that the events had an immaterial cause. But we have not seen any such brain events up to now.
Moreover, philosophers have pointed out for centuries that it is difficult to see how an immaterial soul would even be able to interact with a purely material body. If the soul is not made of matter and does not have physical properties, then it is mysterious how it could cause the human body to move or how anything in the material world would have any effect on it. This kind of dualism of mind and body would be outside anything of which we have experience. Dualism is not incoherent, and it is possible that it is correct, but it faces substantial obstacles.18
Finally, Rowling’s combination of an implausible metaphysics with the sentimental view of the soul probably makes the problems worse, rather than better. It is especially implausible that there would be an immaterial part of us that is specifically responsible for only our deepest emotions and moral traits but not for other psychological capacities. These traits may seem linked to us because they are arguably what makes us most human, but from the standpoint of scientific psychology, there is nothing that is so different in kind here. So there seems to be no need to postulate something altogether different from the brain to explain these traits. In addition, as mentioned earlier, within the story the immaterial soul can sometimes remain on earth with a variety of different physical powers or presences, depending on whether the soul is here as a ghost, as something conjured by the Resurrection Stone, or as a bare soul saved from destruction by a Horcrux. If, as we’ve seen, it would be difficult to explain how an immaterial soul could interact at all with the physical world, then it would be even more difficult to explain why the soul would have different physical abilities depending on what magic spell is at work.
Of course, the implausibility of Rowling’s metaphysics is not a strike against her work of fiction. After all, it is also extremely unlikely that there are witches, wizards, and magic in the real world. And Rowling’s picture of the soul does have a way of making vivid what we care about, or what we hope we care about. Besides, talk of souls, Horcruxes, dementors, and magic makes for a terrific story, and that’s reason enough.19
NOTES
1 Originally, the idea may have been different: according to some myths, our souls were split in two, and finding one’s soul mate literally meant finding one’s other half. But such an overtly metaphysical picture is clearly not presupposed in our colloquial uses of the phrase.
2 Deathly Hallows, p. 104.
3 Goblet of Fire, p. 653.
4 Deathly Hallows, p. 698.
5 When Harry “dies” in the Forbidden Forest toward the end of Deathly Hallows, he finds himself with Dumbledore in a place that appears to him as King’s Cross Station. One interpretation is that he is in a way station between death and the afterlife. Even so, Harry learns nothing about what will happen if he decides to die by, say, taking a train. Dumbledore merely says that the train would take him “on.” Moreover, Rowling is deliberately ambiguous about whether this is some real sequence of events in which Harry actually encounters Dumbledore’s postmortem self or whether it’s simply a vision or a dream in Harry’s mind.
6 Prisoner of Azkaban, p. 247.
7 Half-Blood Prince, p. 497.
8 Goblet of Fire, p. 653.
9 Half-Blood Prince, p. 498.
10 Ibid., p. 498.
11 Ibid.
12 Deathly Hallows, p. 103.
13 Half-Blood Prince, p. 509.
14 Ibid., p. 502.
15 Goblet of Fire, p. 643.
16 Deathly Hallows, p. 103.
17 Ibid., p. 741.
18 For more detailed recent arguments of this sort, see Scott Sehon, Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency, and Explanation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), chap. 2; and Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2005), chap. 2.
19 Special thanks to Josephine Sehon and Hayden Sartoris for years of reading and discussing Harry Potter and for useful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
2
SIRIUS BLACK
Man or Dog?
Eric Saidel
Imagine yourself virtually imprisoned, cooped up inside, unable to go outdoors for several months. Now, finally, you get to go outside. You’re free to do anything you want—you can run around, enjoy the fresh air, go to a movie, do whatever you wish. What would you do?
Now suppose you had a tail. Would you do anything different? Would you run around in circles, trying to bite your tail? Neither would I. Oddly enough, this is exactly what Sirius Black does in Order of the Phoenix when he transforms into a dog in order to escort Harry to the Hogwarts Express at the beginning of the school year. And he does it because he’s excited to be outside. Or so J. K. Rowling tells us. This behavior strikes me as so strange that I’d ask Sirius about it if I could. Unfortunately, I can’t, as Sirius is no longer alive.1 So we’ll have to try to answer this question using the tools of philosophy. Fortunately, even though most philosophers are Muggles, we can use the same skills of rational analysis that enabled Albus Dumbledore to discover the twelve uses of dragon’s blood. So, let’s push on.
Chasing his tail wouldn’t be so strange if Sirius were a dog. But he’s not a dog. He’s a man in a dog’s body. Or is he? How can we best describe Sirius: as a man who is sometimes in a dog’s body (and sometimes in a man’s body), as a dog who is sometimes in a man’s body (and sometimes in a dog’s body), or as someone who is sometimes a dog and sometimes a ma
n? If the answer is the last, then what is that “someone” who stays the same while Sirius changes between being a dog and being a man?
Sirius is not the only one who transforms in the Potter series. During the course of the seven books, we come into contact with other Animagi (Peter Pettigrew, Rita Skeeter, Professor McGonagall), as well as werewolves (Remus Lupin and Fenrir Greyback), boggarts, and the frequent use of Polyjuice Potion. 2 Several transformers behave in odd and sometimes illuminating ways.3 For example, a transformed Lupin would attack Harry, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger, and as Mad-Eye Moody, Barty Crouch Jr. is the one of the best Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers Harry ever has, even going beyond the call of duty to teach Harry to resist the Imperius Curse.4 Why do they do these odd things?
This is a question about their identities, about what makes them who they are. It is also a question about the relationship between one’s mind and one’s body. It seems obvious that Padfoot’s body is a dog’s body, but is his mind a dog’s mind or a man’s mind? Let’s see whether we can answer these questions. The path we follow will be full of twists and turns, like a Snitch trying to avoid a Seeker, but if we keep our eye on the gold, we should be able to catch it.
The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles Page 3
