The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles

by William Irwin;Gregory Bassham

  Mind-Body Distinctions

  When Sirius transforms into a dog, sometimes he acts as if he’s a man, and other times he acts as if he’s a dog. Why does the transformed person sometimes act as if he is his normal self and other times act as if he is the person or the animal he has transformed into? Answering this question requires us to understand just what a transformed person is. Put simply, when Sirius transforms, does he become a dog, or is he still a man?

  Both of these options are too crude. Sirius transformed is not merely a dog: a dog would not do many of the things that Padfoot does (for example, standing on his hind legs, putting his forelegs on Harry’s shoulders, and looking Harry in the eye when Harry goes off to school in Order of the Phoenix). Nor is Padfoot still a man: many of the things Padfoot does (for example, chasing his tail) are more appropriate for a dog than for Sirius. The transformed person isn’t wholly the object he’s transformed into or wholly the person he was before he transformed. Obviously, then, the answer is that Padfoot is part man and part dog.

  Since the time of René Descartes (1596-1650), who is generally considered to be the father of modern philosophy, there has been a natural way to think of how people might be divided: we think of each individual as being made up of two distinct parts—namely, a mind and a body. So perhaps when we say that Padfoot is part Sirius and part dog, we mean that he has the mind of one of them and the body of the other. There are four possibilities here:1. Padfoot has the mind of Sirius and the body of a dog.

  2. Padfoot has the mind of a dog and the body of a dog.

  3. Padfoot has the mind of Sirius and the body of Sirius.

  4. Padfoot has the mind of a dog and the body of Sirius.

  The last two options would seem to be nonstarters: we can tell by looking at Padfoot that he doesn’t have the body of Sirius. He looks nothing like Sirius—or any other man, for that matter. But this dismissal is too superficial: If Padfoot doesn’t have Sirius’s body, then what happens to Sirius’s body when he transforms? Where does it go? It’s all very well for Professor McGonagall to assert that vanished objects go “into non-being, which is to say, everything,” but it seems implausible that Sirius’s body will go into nonbeing when he transforms into Padfoot and then will come out of nonbeing when he transforms back. 5 What’s more plausible is that Sirius’s body itself changes. Before he transforms, it is the physical body of a man, and afterward it is the body of a dog. But it is the same physical stuff, somehow rearranged. That is, if the body has an effect on what Padfoot does, the effect isn’t going to come from his having Sirius’s human body, because even if Padfoot does literally have Sirius’s body, it is physically the body of a dog.6

  What of the other two options? Both are problematic, for similar reasons. Why, if Padfoot has the mind of Sirius, does he chase his tail? And why, if he has the mind of a dog, does he stand on his hind legs at King’s Cross Station? (Mrs. Weasley chastises him, hissing, “For heaven’s sake act more like a dog, Sirius!”7) These are the questions with which we started. Thinking about Padfoot as divided between mind and body doesn’t get us anywhere.

  Whose Reasons?

  Sirius has no reason to chase his tail, but perhaps Padfoot does. When Lupin is human, he has no reason to attack his students, but perhaps when he’s a werewolf, he does have reason to do so. Perhaps it would be helpful to recast our inquiries in terms of reasons. Thus, we might wonder not whether the mind involved is Sirius’s or Padfoot’s, but whether the reasons causing the action are Sirius’s or Padfoot’s. This sort of strategy is a good one: usually, asking specific questions rather than general questions will yield answers that are helpful rather than vague. For that reason, asking questions about reasons, rather than about minds, is likely to provide more interesting answers. Unfortunately, no sooner do I make this suggestion than I start to see problems.

  First, the answer to this question seems to lead us in the wrong direction: if anyone has reason to chase his tail, it’s Padfoot, not Sirius. But, surely, if anything of Sirius is left after he becomes a dog, it would be his reasons for acting. It would be bizarre to say that in transforming, one loses one’s reasons for acting. One transforms presumably as a means of achieving one’s goals, as an expression of one’s reasons. If transforming were to cause you to no longer act to achieve your goals, why would you ever transform?

  We can see this more clearly in considering some of the examples of Polyjuice transformation. We expect the transformed individual to act for his or her reasons, not for those of the being he transformed into. This indeed is what we find. If the shape one takes when one transforms is the source of one’s reasons for acting, then we might have expected Harry and Ron to act to achieve whatever goals Crabbe and Goyle have when Harry and Ron transform in Chamber of Secrets. But they don’t; they act for their own reasons. Similarly, when they transform in Deathly Hallows, Harry transforms into Albert Runcorn, a Death Eater, and Ron transforms into Reginald Cattermole, a man whose wife is on trial for “stealing magic.” Runcorn and Cattermole have no reason to cooperate and every reason to hate each other. As Runcorn, Harry has no reason to remove Moody’s mad eye from Dolores Umbridge’s door or to warn Arthur Weasley that he’s being watched, but Harry does have reason to do these things, and so he, as Runcorn, does them. As Cattermole, Ron has reason to accompany his wife to her hearing, but he doesn’t do this. Ron and Harry act according to their own reasons, not according to the reasons of Runcorn and Cattermole. So why would Padfoot act for doggy reasons, rather than for Sirius’s reasons? Framing the puzzle in terms of reasons moves us no closer to solving it.

  Finally, reasons have nothing to do with Sirius’s tail-chasing behavior. Dogs don’t chase their tails when they’re excited because they have reason to do so; they chase their tails when they’re excited, because, I assume, it’s fun or it feels good. (Perhaps they do so because they think their tails are foreign objects, but Sirius knows better than that!) Similarly, I suspect that Lupin doesn’t acquire a reason to attack Harry, Ron, and Hermione when he transforms. Instead, he would attack them because it’s in his blood to do so. His reasons would lead him to refrain from attacking them. Any solution to our puzzle in terms of reasons will fail to explain Sirius’s and Lupin’s behaviors.

  A Step in the Right Direction

  Let’s reconsider the distinction between mind and body. In the current context, this distinction suggests an explanatory strategy: some of our acts can be explained by talking about our minds, about the mental causes of the action. Other actions can be explained by talking about our bodies, about the physical causes of the action. In this light, perhaps the reason Padfoot chases his tail has to do with his having the body of a dog. Not everything that Padfoot does is explained by talking about his—Sirius’s—mind; some of the things he does are properly explained by talking about his doggy body.

  Consider this alternate history. Suppose that while at Hogwarts, when Sirius had learned that his friend Lupin was a werewolf and so decided to become an Animagus to keep Lupin company when he transformed, Sirius decided to become a bear. (Sirius’s main concerns would have been met had he been a bear: bears are different from humans, so the werewolf bites presumably wouldn’t infect him while transformed, and a bear would have been powerful enough to keep the werewolf in check.) Now, imagine him in Order of the Phoenix, outside for the first time in months. Would he have chased his tail? That seems unlikely. He would have done whatever it is that bears do when they are excited and feeling particularly good. He might have—if Winnie the Pooh is any guide—written a song and indulged in some honey. But as Padfoot, as a dog, he chases his tail. So, perhaps the correct explanation of Padfoot’s behavior is that his body is a dog’s body, and dogs chase their tails when they’re excited.

  Let’s pause for a moment and review the ground we’ve covered. I started by wondering about certain of Padfoot’s behaviors. We might think that transformation is just a really good disguise, that it’s like putting on a costume. In that ca
se, Padfoot would actually be Sirius looking like a dog. These behaviors tell us otherwise: they are behaviors that Sirius would never engage in, no matter what clothing he was wearing. So, we can draw one conclusion already: transformation is not just a really good disguise. Somehow, transformation simply transforms you. But we still wonder, why does Padfoot do these things? One possibility is that the reasons the transformed individual has for acting become the reasons that his chosen embodiment had. In that case, Padfoot would act for a dog’s reasons. But some of the things Padfoot does are things that Sirius—the man, but not the dog—has reason to do. So much for that solution. Another possible solution is that Padfoot is part man and part dog. I rejected this solution earlier because it doesn’t make sense of Padfoot’s humanlike behaviors. But perhaps I was too hasty: if we first adopt the theory that some of the things one does can be explained by one’s body and some by one’s mind, then we can say that dogs—dogs’ bodies—sometimes chase their tails, and because Padfoot has a dog’s body, he chases his tail.

  Let’s push a bit deeper here. This theory brings with it other costs and commitments, some of which we may not like. According to this theory, we’re able to explain the oddities in Padfoot’s behavior because he has a dog’s body. Presumably, Padfoot’s having a dog’s body explains his behavior because for animals the physical body sometimes trumps reason. That seems odd to me. Perhaps you think that some animals, including dogs, don’t reason very well or don’t do things for reasons, so, for them, talk of the reasons for their behavior is misplaced. If that’s what you think, then you think that the things those animals do is best explained by facts about their bodies. But how could this explain Padfoot’s behavior? He has a mind—a human mind—and we think that some of the things he does he performs as a consequence of having this mind (such as standing on his hind legs when saying good-bye to Harry at King’s Cross Station). What is it about having the body of a dog that apparently makes it hard for Sirius to control that body?

  Consider as well what we have to say to fully explain Padfoot’s behavior. Remember, the idea here is that some behavior is caused by one’s mind and some by one’s body. Because Padfoot is a dog, he chases his tail, as dogs do. But why do dogs chase their tails? Presumably, because it feels good. But what could feeling good mean in this case? To whom does it feel good? Does it feel good to Sirius, the human being? I doubt it; Sirius never chases his tail. Does it feel good to Padfoot, the dog? It might. After all, it feels good to other dogs to chase their tails. But Padfoot has a human mind. Isn’t it in the mind that his feeling resides? If so, then this explanation tells us that Padfoot chases his tail in order to cause good feelings in Sirius’s mind. And this is odd because, as we noted, Sirius never chases his own tail (or, for that matter, his own rear end). But if feeling resides in the body, then we have to say that Padfoot’s body has reasons for acting as it does, and Padfoot’s mind (which is Sirius’s mind) has reasons for acting as it does. It’s possible, then, that these reasons could clash. Sirius might end up later saying to Harry, “I didn’t want to chase my tail—I wanted to walk with you—but my body wanted to chase my tail.” This would be quite odd, to say the least.

  A Unified Self

  So, I don’t think this theory—that minds and bodies are distinct and that some of the things one does can be explained by one’s mind and other things by one’s body—is a good explanation for Padfoot’s odd behavior. The problem, I think, stems from the way the theory invites us to think about minds and bodies. I’ve been talking about the relation between Sirius’s mind and his body (as Padfoot) in a way that comes naturally when we adopt this distinction: that the mind directs the body like a captain directing a ship. That is, that they are wholly distinct entities and the mind must somehow bring the body to obey its will. This is what it feels like sometimes. For example, athletes talk of asking their bodies to run faster or jump higher. But even Descartes, the author of this distinction, rejects this way of thinking about the relation between mind and body. “I am not only lodged in my body, like a pilot in his ship. But, besides, . . . I am joined to it very closely and indeed so compounded and intermingled with my body, that I form, as it were, a single whole with it.”8 Even Descartes, that is, rejects the idea that the body and the mind are completely distinct. They are interwoven entities, not distinct, but really a unit, so that details about one have an effect on the other. Think of how you feel when you are sick, or how you felt when you were learning to ride your bike. The physical state of your body has a direct effect on how you think about the world, on the state of your mind. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that your body has a direct effect on who you are.9

  How can this be? Let me draw your attention to a couple of details from Deathly Hallows. First, when Ron, Harry, and Hermione take the Polyjuice Potion and sneak into the Ministry of Magic, Harry is now in the body of Runcorn, a much larger and more physically intimidating man than Harry. He proceeds to act in un-Harry-like ways. He “thunders” with a “powerful voice,” dominating the Atrium and causing the wizards there to freeze. He also punches a wizard with “an enormous fist.” What’s noteworthy here is not that Harry/Runcorn’s body is large and so has the enormous fist and the powerful voice that naturally go with a large man. What’s noteworthy is that these are Harry’s acts, done for Harry’s reasons—remember, Runcorn is in league with the Death Eaters—but the acts are natural only in Runcorn’s body. In his own body, Harry wouldn’t have “thundered” “Stop!” He might have yelled it, but he probably would have chosen some other, more productive action, given that his voice doesn’t convey the same power that Runcorn’s does. Nor would striking the wizard seem to be such an obvious choice. These are the right choices for Harry to make in this situation, given Harry’s reasons and Runcorn’s body. (Contrast this with a detail that, I suggest, Rowling gets wrong: when Harry transforms into Runcorn, he judges “from his well-muscled arms” that he is “powerfully built.”10 My suspicion is that Harry would feel powerfully built; he would have no need to observe his well-muscled arms in order to judge that he is powerfully built. On the other hand, Rowling’s descriptions of Harry’s feelings in other similar situations, such as the natural feeling he has when submerged in the lake after he eats gillyweed, are spot on.)11

  Second, even though Harry has taken Polyjuice Potion before Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour’s wedding, Luna Lovegood is able to recognize him. She sees Harry in “Barny Weasley’s” facial expression. This shouldn’t be possible if there is a distinction between Harry’s mind and Barny’s body. Barny’s facial expressions should be his own; they should be the facial expressions his body makes, even when it’s Harry’s mind that’s causing them. Consider this thought experiment: suppose we were able to hook up your brain to someone else’s body, so that your brain, your thoughts, controlled the other person’s body. Likewise, the sensory inputs that the body receives would be relayed to your brain. Then suppose we tell you (via the other person) a shocking secret, but one that the other person already knew. What will happen? First, you will be surprised, but your host will not be surprised. Second, your host’s face will register the surprise that you feel (not the surprise that your host feels, for she is not surprised). Will that face look like your face, surprised? No; it’s not your face. It will look like your host’s face, surprised. Friends of your host will remark on this: “Why does Mary look surprised? She knew such-and-such already.” They won’t wonder why Mary is making that peculiar expression (your surprised expression), because Mary won’t be making that expression; she’ll be making her normal surprised expression. But when Harry transforms into Barny, Barny’s expression becomes Harry’s. Similarly, when Harry and Ron run into Arthur Weasley while infiltrating the Ministry of Magic, Harry realizes that Ron is not looking his father in the eyes for fear that his father will recognize him if he does so.

  The first scenario is an example of one’s new body affecting how one thinks and acts. The second is an example
of one’s mind affecting how one’s new body looks. I’m suggesting that the mind and the body of the transformed person is a unified whole, not a pairing of discrete elements. Otherwise, we cannot make sense of the behaviors in which the transformed person engages. Does this help with understanding Padfoot’s behaviors? It seems that it does: Padfoot is neither man nor dog, but a combination of the two, so he chases his tail because it feels good, as do other dogs.

  What about Crouch and Moody? One thing we might notice about Animagi and werewolves is that they become different kinds of beings when they transform. It’s no wonder that some of Padfoot’s behaviors are odd. When he behaves like a human, he’s doing odd things for a dog, and when he behaves like a dog, his behavior is odd for a human. When someone uses Polyjuice to transform, however, he or she remains human, and so that person’s body doesn’t engage in such odd behavior. But I’ll bet that some behaviors that didn’t feel right before would feel right after transforming. Think about the transformations we Muggles undergo: activities that felt right before we lost a lot of weight feel odd afterward (and vice versa). Riding a bike feels alien and awkward until one learns how, and then it feels like the most natural thing in the world. We do things that change our bodies, and as a result, we change how we interact with the world. When we change our bodies in this way, we are at root changing who we are. I think at least part of the explanation for Crouch’s behavior when he is Moody is that certain actions just feel right for him. Crouch/Moody is like Padfoot and like the rest of us: an indivisible whole, made up of mind and body, both of which contribute to the identity of the whole.