The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles

by William Irwin;Gregory Bassham

  7. An instantaneous life review

  8. A barrier or a border marking a separation of earthly existence from “the other side”

  9. Reluctance to come back to one’s body

  Studies have shown that these elements tend to occur in this order, and that the first few features occur more commonly than the others.11

  Are near-death experiences “real” in the sense of being genuinely paranormal glimpses of a postmortem world? Skeptics point to two major problems with this interpretation.

  First, as the leading NDE researcher Susan Blackmore notes, NDEs are by no means always the same. Some people have terrifying, hell-like experiences.12 Only a small percentage of NDEers report seeing a light, meeting others, or experiencing a panoramic life review. Some NDEers report having a grayish, transparent “astral” body, while others do not. Children often report being met by living playmates (or even animals), rather than by deceased relatives or a Being of Light. And people of different religious backgrounds often report meeting religious figures or receiving messages that are unique to their own religious traditions.13

  Second, even if NDEs are often consistent in basic details, this doesn’t mean the experiences are genuinely paranormal. As Blackmore argues, it might only mean that we have similar brains that react in similar ways to the physical and psychological stresses of dying. For instance, she notes, lack of oxygen to the brain can produce many of the same effects as NDEs, including loud ringing or buzzing noises, sensations of floating, out-of-body experiences, and bright lights.

  Do such objections demonstrate conclusively that NDEs are not “real”? No, as Rowling’s tale of Harry’s near-death experience in King’s Cross shows very well.14

  Suppose a child has an NDE in which her pet dog, Sparky, greets and welcomes her to “the other side.” Sparky is still living, so the child must simply be hallucinating, right? Not necessarily. For the experience might be “real” in the sense of being a genuine divinely created vision of the “other side.” The vision could be “true” (real) in the sense of being an authentic supernatural revelation (not unlike Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus). In other words, in asking whether an NDE is real, we aren’t necessarily asking whether it is a genuine out-of-body experience of another world. An NDE can be real (i.e., genuinely supernatural and revelatory) even if it takes place entirely inside the head of the person having the experience.

  It is this ambiguity of the term real that Dumbledore is playing on when he tells Harry that an experience isn’t necessarily “unreal” just because it’s happening inside one’s head. Elsewhere, I have defended an iconographic reading of the Potter books that sees Harry as a symbol of the “noetic” or spiritual faculty of the soul.15 In this reading, the way-station King’s Cross is a real “place,” namely, logos-land or heaven. (Hence, for example, Harry’s ability to create objects there and his apparent semi-omniscience.) Yet in asking whether Harry’s experience is real or not, the crucial question isn’t where Dumbledore and Harry are meeting, but whether it’s really Dumbledore who is speaking to Harry.16 After all, in the wizarding world, wizards can “channel” themselves through their portraits, “imprint” their former selves in ghostly form, possess other minds, and probe other wizards’ thoughts through Legilimency. So, why shouldn’t Dumbledore really be present to Harry’s mind even if Harry, felled by Voldemort’s killing curse, hasn’t left his body but is still lying semiconscious on the forest floor?17

  The American poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Our faith comes in moments.... Yet there is a depth in those moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.”18 In the same way, perhaps, Rowling is saying, Don’t be dismissive of hints and glimpses of the divine just because they occur “in your head.” If love really is the most powerful force in the universe, as Rowling thinks, where else would it speak to us, if not in our heads?

  NOTES

  1 See John Granger’s most recent books on Harry: Harry Potter’s Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventure (New York: Penguin Books, 2009); How Harry Cast His Spell: The Meaning behind the Mania for J. K. Rowling’s Bestselling Books, 3rd ed. (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2008); The Deathly Hallows Lectures: The Hogwarts Professor Explains the Final Harry Potter Adventure (Allentown, PA: Zossima Press, 2008); and Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader (Wayne, PA: Zossima Press, 2007).

  2 J. K. Rowling interview with Pais, February 9, 2008, www.snitchseeker.com/harry-potter-news/entire-spanish-j-k-rowling-interview-54113/.

  3 Deathly Hallows, p. 723.

  4 C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955), pp. 208-209.

  5 C. S. Lewis, Miracles (London: Fontana Books, 1960), chap. 3.

  6 In recent years, Victor Reppert has argued forcefully for a philosophically sophisticated formulation of Lewis’s argument. See his C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003).

  7 Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 12.

  8 Some of the language in the following few paragraphs is adapted from Gregory Bassham, William Irwin, Henry Nardone, and James M. Wallace, Critical Thinking: A Student’s Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005).

  9 Raymond A. Moody, Life after Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1975).

  10 “Scientists to Study ‘White Light’ Near-Death Experiences,” Fox News, September 15, 2008, www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,422744,00.html.

  11 Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences (Buffalo: NY: Prometheus Press, 1993), pp. 25-26.

  12 Ibid., pp. 98-102. An editorial in the British medical journal the Lancet reported that “of male survivors of cardiac arrest, 80 percent had dreams of violence, death, and aggression, such as being run over by a wheelchair, violent accidents, and shooting their way out of the hospital only to be killed by a nurse.” Quoted in James Rachels and Stuart Rachels, Problems from Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009), p. 46.

  13 Blackmore, Dying to Live, pp. 17, 25-27, 126, 181.

  14 In describing Harry’s encounter with Dumbledore in the way-station King’s Cross as a “near-death experience,” I don’t mean to imply that Harry has died and is experiencing a “life after life.” As Dumbledore makes clear, Harry is not dead but could choose to die if he wishes.

  15 See The Deathly Hallows Lectures, especially chapter 5, “The Seeing Eye,” for a fuller explication of my views here. Harry’s “traveling” to the Kingdom of Heaven within his head after his sacrificial death explains Dumbledore’s parting words. Harry has asked whether what he has experienced is real in strictly empirical terms, that is, “is this place a place of objective measure and quantities or is it a place of only subjective and personal perception not grounded in such quantities?” Dumbledore’s response, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” explodes the false dilemma of empirical epistemology by linking, rather than separating, “the real” and “in your head.” This logos creative principle is the “power beyond the reach of any magic” in children’s tales about which Dumbledore says, “Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing.”Dumbledore’s answer to Harry requires an epistemological and metaphysical conjunction in the divine word or logos. Rowling, as with the other symbolist writers of English tradition, offers this conjunction in story form to give her readers an imaginative experience of this reality that is “bigger inside than outside.” The tradition points, too, as Queen Lucy says at the end of Lewis’s The Last Battle, to the incarnate logos that as a newborn made a stable hold “something inside it that was bigger than the whole world.” Separating reality from illusion in a world simultaneously logos-created and logos-known, the “whole universe being mental,” is only possible in Christ.

  16 In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis imagines a kind of he
avenly ante-chamber that he calls the Valley of the Shadow of Life. Significantly, characters in Lewis’s story experience various “places” in the afterlife quite differently, dependent on the state of their souls. Since hell is, as one character in the book remarks, “a state of mind,” precisely the same ambiguity of “real” versus “in the head” occurs in Lewis’s tale as in Deathly Hallows. It’s possible that Rowling’s King’s Cross scene is modeled in part on Lewis’s description of the afterlife in The Great Divorce.

  17 In a recent interview, Rowling notes that “it is Harry’s image we see [in the King’s Cross scene], not necessarily what is really there.” “Webchat with J. K. Rowling,” July 30, 2007, available at www.bloomsbury.com/harrypotter/default.aspx?sec=3.

  18 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 261.

  14

  A PENSIEVE FOR YOUR THOUGHTS?

  Harry Potter and the Magic of Memory

  Amy Kind

  I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.

  —Albus Dumbledore1

  Of all of the magical instruments available in the wizarding world, the Pensieve is one of the most intriguing. As important as the Deluminator was for Ron Weasley and the Sword of Gryffindor was for Harry, I’d have been hoping for the Pensieve had Dumbledore singled me out when writing his last will and testament.

  Although it’s not much to look at—just a shallow basin covered with runes and symbols—the Pensieve allows you to offload your memories from your mind as easily as you offload data from your hard drive. It must be wonderfully liberating to be able to literally get something off your mind, at least for a time—to keep from obsessing over what you should have said or done, to stop endlessly replaying a moment of embarrassment, or simply to gain some distance from a particularly disturbing experience. And it must be wonderfully illuminating to be able to review your own memories from an external perspective at your leisure in the clear light of a new day. As Dumbledore explains to Harry, when you review thoughts and memories in the Pensieve, it becomes easier to spot the patterns and links among them.

  Yet it’s not only the Pensieve’s potential for improving peace and clarity of mind that makes it so special. Even folks like Muggles and Squibs who don’t have magical powers can achieve something similar through meditation or medication. Rather, the real intrigue of the Pensieve lies in its philosophical implications for the boundaries of mind, memory, and the self. We typically view an individual’s memory as a fundamental part of her own identity, and philosophers have even attempted to understand a person’s continuing existence through time in terms of memory and mind. But our understanding of what—and where—the mind is gets called into question if thoughts can be easily extracted from it, tampered with, stored elsewhere, and even discarded. And whose mind is it, once thoughts are shared with someone else?

  “A Swirling, Silvery Mass”

  The powers of mind and memory are mysterious enough even without the magical possibilities opened up by the wizarding world. While I was watching the movie In Bruges recently, it drove me crazy that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember why the actor playing the main character, Ken, looked so familiar to me. Much later, the answer finally popped into my head. It was Brendan Gleeson, the same actor who plays Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody in the Harry Potter films. Often it’s when we stop thinking about something that we finally figure it out. Why can we remember all sorts of useless information, while the things that we want to remember slip through the cracks, no matter how hard we try to recall them? Why does memory work in such quirky ways?

  Science has solved many of the mysteries of memory, but it’s staggering how much we still don’t understand. In fact, we don’t really understand the mind itself—either what it is or how it’s related to the brain. Severus Snape is right on target when he tells Harry that “the mind is a complex and many-layered thing, Potter . . . or at least, most minds are.”2

  Philosophers who study the mind have long been divided into two camps. The materialists, in the tradition of the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), believe that everything that exists must be a physical thing, made of matter and existing in space. Certain inhabitants of the wizarding world, such as Nearly Headless Nick and other ghosts, might seem to pose a problem for materialism. But the materialist can accept the existence of ghosts as long as they’re made of matter—perhaps not solid matter, but some kind of matter nonetheless.3 Likewise for the mind. Materialists typically claim that the mind is a material thing and that there is no distinction between the mind and the brain. Some of the descriptions in the Harry Potter books point in the direction of materialism. Consider, for example, the descriptions of thoughts clinging to wands like strands of hair and leaking out of dying wizards like oozing blood.

  Dualists, in the tradition of the great French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), believe that in addition to material substances, there are also immaterial substances—things that have no spatial extension or location. According to the dualist view, the brain, which is made of matter, falls into the first category, whereas the mind, which isn’t made of matter, falls into the second. The common idea that the mind could, theoretically at least, exist without the body, presupposes this dualist view. Harry considers this possibility when he finds himself in what seems like King’s Cross Station after Voldemort tries to kill him in the Forbidden Forest. Although he ultimately concludes that he must still have his body “because he was lying, definitely lying, on some surface,” he initially thinks that he might exist only as disembodied thought.4 The dualist recognizes that there are close connections between the brain and the mind; Descartes himself claimed that “I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship.... I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit.”5 But this intermingling of mind and body doesn’t change the fact that for the dualist, they’re fundamentally different kinds of things.

  Many of us have conflicting intuitions that pull us sometimes toward dualism, sometimes toward materialism. On the one hand, it’s hard to understand what it would mean for something to be completely immaterial. On the other hand, thoughts do seem to be more ephemeral and intangible than other material objects such as tables and chairs. J. K. Rowling herself seems caught up in this same tension; her description of Harry’s impression of the contents of the Pensieve when he first comes across it in Dumbledore’s office provides a beautifully compelling expression of the push and pull between these two views of the mind and the desire to find some middle ground between them: “It was a bright, whitish silver, and it was moving ceaselessly; the surface of it became ruffled like water beneath wind, and then, like clouds, separated and swirled smoothly. It looked like light made liquid—or like wind made solid—Harry couldn’t make up his mind.”6

  The Hallows of the Mind

  Whether we’re dualists or materialists, however, there’s a strong inclination to think of a mind as self-contained. Someone might transcribe her innermost secrets in a journal or a blog, but assuming that she’s not engaged in dark magic, these transcriptions serve simply as records of her memories. That’s what makes Tom Riddle’s diary so unusual, even in the wizarding world. As Dumbledore says to Harry,“Well, although I did not see the Riddle who came out of the diary, what you described to me was a phenomenon I had never witnessed. A mere memory starting to act and think for itself? A mere memory, sapping the life out of the girl into whose hands it had fallen? No, something much more sinister had lived inside that book . . . a fragment of soul, I was almost sure of it. The diary had been a Horcrux.”7

  We leave Post-it notes scattered around the house to help us remember things, and we key all sorts of important information into our BlackBerrys. But no matter how dependent someone is on a PDA, the device is still a memory aid, not
a memory repository. We don’t consider our diaries and iPhone contact lists to be similar to the Pensieve.

  Recently, however, some philosophers have questioned this traditional way of looking at the limits of the mind. In their article “The Extended Mind,” Andy Clark and David Chalmers reject the claim that the mind is framed by the boundaries of skull and skin.8 Although their article was written more than a decade ago in the pre-BlackBerry age of the Filofax, even then it was easy to find interesting cases of cognitive reliance on external objects. Most of us can do long division only with the aid of pen and paper, and when playing Scrabble, we do far better at coming up with seven-letter words by physically reshuffling the letter tiles in our trays.9 Although it’s natural to see these external objects as playing the role of “environmental supports,” Clark and Chalmers suggest that they often function in more than simply a supporting role. Often, our use of external objects can be seen not only as a kind of action but as a part of thought.10

  Clark and Chalmers propose the radical view that our mental lives need not be solely internal. Rather, the mind extends into the world. We already accept that the body can extend beyond its natural limits. For example, it’s not at all farfetched to suppose that a prosthetic leg becomes part of an amputee’s body, not merely an artificial accessory to it. More controversially, consider a wizard who has a particularly strong relationship with his wand, as Harry does to his eleven-inch wand made of holly with a phoenix feather core. Harry is so in sync with his wand that he might view it literally as an extension of his own body.11 We might even see Rita Skeeter’s relationship with her Quick-Quotes Quill the same way. And certainly, Moody’s magic eye and Peter Pettigrew’s silver hand have become parts of their bodies. Similarly, an external object might become a mental prosthesis, extending the mind beyond its natural limits.