12 Ibid., p. 591.
13 Hermione argues that Harry has never really been to the Department of Mysteries and so can’t know for sure what it looks like; that this turn of events is “just so unlikely”; that there is absolutely “no proof ” for any of Harry’s speculations; that Voldemort might be preying on Harry’s well-known (though noble) tendency to save people and act the hero.
14 Order of the Phoenix, p. 740.
15 The following points are drawn from or inspired by Augustine, Confessions, Book XI.
16 Concerning what Gadamer calls “tradition,” see Truth and Method, pp. 277-305.
17 We depend on others for what language we speak, on books and teachers for much of what we learn, on parents and grandparents for family history, on mentors for their already acquired wisdom and skill, and on previous discoveries for the technological advances we make.
18 In addition to Augustine and Gadamer, we can also add here Michael Polanyi’s work in the epistemology of the sciences, especially his discussions of tradition, apprenticeship, and tacit knowing in Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
19 Goblet of Fire, p. 597.
13
JUST IN YOUR HEAD?
J. K. Rowling on Separating Reality from Illusion
John Granger with Gregory Bassham
There are many ways to unlock the hidden mysteries of the Harry Potter books, but in this chapter we’ll consider one key in particular.1 It comes right near the end of J. K. Rowling’s seven-part series, and Rowling herself says that she “waited seventeen years” to use two lines in particular. So, if there is a key to find, this is a good place to look. “Yes, that’s right,” she said. “All this time I’ve worked to be able to write those two phrases; writing Harry entering the forest and Harry having that dialog.”2 So, what are those two lines, and what is their philosophical significance?
Tell Me One Last Thing
After Harry sacrifices himself and awakens in the limbo King’s Cross, in his last moments of conversation with Albus Dumbledore he asks, “Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”3
Rowling’s remarkable claim is that she’s been writing the 4,100-plus-page series to arrive at just this point, so that Harry could hear these two phrases: “Of course it is happening inside your head,” and “why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” These lines are among the most philosophically interesting in the entire series as well, so they provide the ideal chance to explore both their significance to the story and their deeper import.
What Is Real?
Harry’s question is a profoundly philosophical one; questions about what is real lie at the heart of the philosophical quest. The branch of philosophy called metaphysics asks just these questions. Do souls exist or God or numbers? These are metaphysical questions, for they deal with the issue of what is ultimately real. The goal of metaphysics is to break free from mere appearances and capture the reality, to replace opinions with knowledge. Metaphysics asks what is real, whereas the branch of philosophy called epistemology is about how we can come to know what is real, so that we’re not confusing what is unreal or illusory with what is genuine reality.
It’s only natural that Harry should wonder how real his experience was, for we all can be deceived by experiences that seem real but aren’t. All of us are vulnerable to wishful thinking, biased perspectives, and other sorts of flawed judgment that can mislead us into mistaking appearance for reality. Perhaps this is why the famous atheist A. J. Ayer, after having a vivid near-death experience near the end of his life, remained unmoved afterward, choosing to chalk it up as a hallucination, rather than as a genuine experience of a transcendent reality. Harry, too, wonders whether his experience is real or simply made up.
Long before Dumbledore and Harry explored a dark and particularly creepy cave together, Plato (428-348 B.C.E.) offered an image of a cave that has stood as an example of what philosophy is all about. Plato asks us to picture men chained inside a cave all of their lives, able to see only flickering images on the wall cast by a fire behind them. Understandably, they take those shadows to be reality, rather than imperfect reflections of real things. But one day a man is released from his chains and makes his way out of the cave. At first, he’s blinded by the dazzling light, but eventually he’s able to see the world as it really is. He realizes that all of his life, he’s been mistaking mere appearances for realities, wavering images on a cave wall for the real world. Wanting to share his wonderful revelation with his fellows, the prisoner returns to the cave but is greeted with hostile skepticism by the captives. Plato was convinced that our entire earthly pilgrimage takes place in a world of appearances and that ultimate reality comes later. The philosopher’s job is to raise people’s sights to these deeper realities, helping people stop confusing shadows and appearances for authentic reality.
Even before Plato, philosophers grappled with questions of what is real and how we come to know reality. So, Harry’s question of what is real is at root a philosophical query, and the distinction he raises between “real” and “in the head” provides a useful starting point for our discussion.
Going Mental
We can easily distinguish things that exist only in our heads from things that exist both in our heads and in the external world. Hermione Granger, for example, as a fictional character exists in our heads but not in reality; likewise Sherlock Holmes, Santa Claus, unicorns, and centaurs. Emma Watson, Oxford, and King’s Cross Station, on the other hand, aren’t mere ideas in our minds but actual persons, places, and things that exist in reality. Although we might have the idea of Oxford in our minds, Oxford itself has an objective, independent reality that purely fictional ideas do not. So, although the idea of a thing and the thing itself may both exist, to say of something that it exists in the head often means “in the head alone” and so not in external reality. Harry’s question isn’t straightforwardly silly or stupid, in other words. He was concerned that his dialogue with Dumbledore had merely been a dream or a hallucination, a shadowy image on the cave wall.
Dumbledore’s reply, then, is telling. He doesn’t deny that Harry’s experience has been in his head, but he insists that this doesn’t mean that it isn’t real. Harry’s question, in other words, is based on a false choice: either in the head or real. Harry has taken the two options to be exhaustive and mutually exclusive. The truth of one means the falsehood of the other. But Dumbledore assures him that they aren’t inconsistent at all. Mental experiences can also be “real.”
A number of philosophers through the centuries have had a similar insight, which is what makes Dumbledore’s claim so philosophically fascinating. Let’s consider a few of these examples from the history of philosophy. Plato’s idea has already been mentioned, so let’s start with him. He was a rationalist, who thought all knowledge is rooted in reason, rather than in sense perception. Why? Because reason puts us in touch with what Plato believed is ultimately real: the forms. Consider broomsticks. In Harry’s world we see various and sundry broomsticks, but what makes them broomsticks at all, according to what Plato says, is that they resemble, imperfectly, the ideal Platonic form or abstract essence of what a broomstick is. Our senses only put us in touch with imperfect copies, not with the Platonic ideal. Reason is how we get in touch with what’s ultimately real. If Plato were to hear a disgruntled philosophy student complaining about having to leave class and go into the “real world,” he might suggest that we’re never more in touch with the real world than when we’re thinking philosophically.
Plato is not the only Western philosopher to claim that true reality can be known only through reason. The great French rationalist philosopher René
Descartes (1596-1650) argued that the essences of both material things and minds cannot be known by sense experience but only by rational analysis. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argued that physical objects such as rocks, chairs, and trees are mental constructs that result from the interaction of our shaping and categorizing minds with external reality. “Absolute idealists” such as G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) and neo-Hegelians such as F. H. Bradley (1846-1924) went even further than Kant in stressing the ultimacy of mind and spiritual values.
Similar views are found in some strands of British empiricism. For empiricists, sense experience, not reason, is the source of all human knowledge. The British empiricist George Berkeley (1685-1753) is famous for his “immaterialist” view that physical objects don’t exist at all but are merely ideas in the minds of God and other perceivers. Berkeley believed that for external things like clouds and mountains, “to be is to be perceived.” So, all of what we experience as external reality is, in a sense, “in the head” but is no less real as a consequence. Two centuries later, the British empiricist John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) defended a “phenomenalist” account of human knowing, according to which all talk of material reality can be cashed out as talk of actual or possible sensory experiences.
Such views are also found in a variety of Eastern philosophical traditions, including some schools of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. For example, Yogacara Buddhists believe that everything humans experience as “real” is fabricated by consciousness and thus is sunya, empty, and lacking in any definite nature or essence.
Whether the mind creates reality, in whole or in part, or puts us in touch with an already existing reality or corresponds in some sense with an independent reality, philosophers from a broad spectrum of views would agree with Dumbledore’s point that what’s real and what’s in the head aren’t necessarily at odds.
Rowling as an Inkling
Now let’s explore a suggestive possibility that Rowling may have had in mind when she wrote this exchange between Harry and Dumbledore. It doesn’t presuppose that she was staking out well-defined territory among the murky thickets of metaphysics, but it does potentially shed light on questions of what reality is like and how we can come to know it.
This interpretation depends on taking seriously Rowling’s claim that she was heavily influenced by C. S. Lewis and his fellow Inklings, such as J. R. R. Tolkien. The Inklings were a group of Oxford dons and their friends who met regularly to discuss one another’s writings and other matters, often at the Eagle and Child, an Oxford pub. Among the Inklings were Owen Barfield, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Lewis’s brother Warnie, and other well-known Oxford figures.
Rowling has spoken of her debt to Lewis in particular, attributing her decision to write seven books to Lewis’s seven-part Chronicles of Narnia, which she loved as a child. To be sure, the Potter books are quite different from the Narnia books; nowhere is Rowling nearly so obvious in promoting a particular religious message. To the extent that she does, I have argued that it’s through symbol and form, implicit more than explicit, and not at all heavy-handed. Still, she has admitted that what helped inspire the stories was her personal struggle to hold onto faith, and she claims to be a Christian whose religious convictions, if known, would have made much of the storyline predictable. So it wouldn’t be surprising to find indicators of such influences within the stories.
What could account for the fit between the content of our minds and the real world? Why are our best philosophical insights windows into reality? How is it that reason is so successful in putting us in touch with the truth?
For an intriguing possibility, consider this quote from Lewis, in which he laid out a big lesson he learned from his friend Barfield. Lewis said that Barfieldconvinced me that the [materialistic] positions we had hitherto held left no room for any satisfactory theory of knowledge. We had been, in the technical sense of the term, “realists”; that is, we accepted as rock-bottom reality the universe revealed by the senses. But at the same time we continued to make, for certain phenomena of consciousness, all the claims that really went with a theistic or idealistic view. We maintained that abstract thought (if obedient to logical rules) gave indisputable truth, that our moral judgment was “valid,” and our aesthetic experience not merely pleasing but “valuable”. . . . Barfield convinced me that it was inconsistent. If thought were a purely subjective event, these claims for it would have to be abandoned.... I was therefore compelled to give up realism.... I must admit that mind was no late-come epiphenomenon; that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos.4
Some readers might recognize here the germ of the argument Lewis would later develop in his 1947 book, Miracles, his so-called argument from reason.5 It was on this very topic that Lewis had his famous debate with the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001), a debate that required Lewis to amend the chapter.6 Alvin Plantinga, a leading Christian philosopher, has recently offered an argument from reason against naturalism that owes much to Lewis.7 The basic idea of the argument is that for us to retain confidence in the deliverances of reason, we must be warranted in thinking that rationality is more than merely subjective. Rather, rationality must somehow be able to put us in touch with external reality. If the reasons we hold various views are merely because those convictions were formed through a naturalistic process according to the laws of nature, there’s not necessarily any good basis for taking our conclusions as reliably true.
It’s not my aim to assess this argument here but to mention it as a line of reasoning that might have influenced Rowling. It might provide some insight into the overlap between reality and what’s in our head. Note the way that Lewis thought of reality as “mental” and our logic as participation in a larger structure of rationality within the universe. As a Christian, he was inclined to cash this out as participation in the divine logos, by which a Christian means Christ himself. Jesus, as depicted in John 1:1, is the incarnation of the divine logos, the word from which we derive our word logic.
Some early Greek philosophers conceived of logos as the impersonal animating principle that upholds reality. Later, Greek and Roman Stoic philosophers saw logos as the divine reason that pervades and providentially guides the cosmos. When John the evangelist came along and announced that Jesus was the incarnation of the logos, he was espousing something radical. His point, expressed in language that would have been understood in that context, was that there is indeed a divine logos, by which reality takes its shape and is held in existence. But the logos is no mere animating principle or impersonal force but a person, God the son. According to this view, human reason and logic, our capacity to engage in critical reflection and rational thought, are possible and reliable because through the right use of our minds, we are participating in the divine logos. As Rowling has remarked in an interview, it wasn’t a coincidence that Harry’s fateful encounter with Dumbledore was at “King’s Cross.”
Lewis’s point about the divine logos raises another suggestive possibility for making sense of Dumbledore’s connection between what’s real and what’s in the head. The suggestion is about both metaphysics and epistemology. How our minds work inexplicably seems intimately related to the way the world is; if we’re going to avoid various skeptical hypotheses, something has to account for the conspicuous overlap between external reality and the functioning of human rationality. As so often happens with philosophy, what at first seems an obvious connection yields on reflection a picture that may illustrate some of life’s bigger mysteries.
Harry’s Near-Death Experience
Dumbledore’s remark that things can be real even if they occur only in one’s head happens as part of Harry’s near-death experience in King’s Cross. Nowhere is the difference between “what’s real” and “what’s in the head” posed more starkly than in near-death experiences. It’s worth exploring such experiences as an additional clue to Rowling’s meaning.8
The current interest
in near-death experiences (NDEs) began with the publication, in 1975, of Raymond Moody’s best-selling book Life after Life.9 In that book, Moody documented the experiences of more than a hundred people who had been declared clinically dead or had come close to death and had then been revived.
Since Moody’s book appeared, an enormous amount of research has been done on NDEs. For the most part, this research has supported Moody’s findings. Studies have found that NDEs are relatively common (about 10 to 20 percent of people who survive cardiac arrest report lucid, structured NDEs); that they tend to be basically similar in people of all ages, backgrounds, and cultures; and that they often have many of the characteristic features Moody describes.10 Based on the studies to date, researchers have identified the following core features of NDEs:1. Feelings of peace and serenity
2. A buzzing or ringing noise
3. Separation from the body
4. An experience of moving rapidly down a dark tunnel
5. Meeting and being welcomed by others (usually departed friends or family)
6. Encountering a welcoming and loving “being of light”
The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles Page 20
