The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles

by William Irwin;Gregory Bassham

  Harry must undergo a death and a rebirth in order to achieve the full integrity that is necessary for his healing and renewal. When Harry was attacked as a child and the killing curse rebounded, a piece of Voldermort’s soul attached itself to Harry, thus allowing Harry insight into Voldermort’s mind, giving him the ability to speak Parseltongue, and making the Sorting Hat think he might do well in Slytherin. Voldermort’s attack left an indelible mark on Harry’s forehead that linked him to Voldemort’s mind. At times, this bordered on possession, as in the climactic scene in Order of the Phoenix when Voldermort speaks through Harry:And then Harry’s scar burst open. He knew he was dead: it was pain beyond imagining, pain past endurance—

  He was gone from the hall, he was locked in the coils of a creature with red eyes, so tightly bound that Harry did not know where his body ended and the creature’s began. They were fused together, bound by pain, and there was no escape—

  And when the creature spoke, it used Harry’s mouth, so that in his agony he felt his jaw move . . .

  “Kill me now, Dumbledore . . .”7

  To overcome this horrifying link with the Dark Lord, Harry needed the piece of Voldemort’s soul that was inside him to die, as occurs near the end of Deathly Hallows, when Harry allows Voldemort to perform the killing curse on him. All is explained in the following conversation, as Dumbledore reassures Harry that Harry is not, as he initially believed, dead:“I let him kill me,” said Harry. “Didn’t I?”

  “You did,” said Dumbledore, nodding. “Go on!”

  “So the part of his soul that was in me . . .”

  Dumbledore nodded still more enthusiastically, urging Harry onward, a broad smile of encouragement on his face.

  “. . . has it gone?”

  “Oh yes!” said Dumbledore. “Yes, he destroyed it. Your soul is whole, and completely your own, Harry.”8

  A little later on in the conversation, Dumbledore elaborates,“You were the seventh Horcrux, Harry, the Horcrux he never meant to make. He had rendered his soul so unstable that it broke apart when he committed those acts of unspeakable evil, the murder of your parents, the attempted killing of a child.

  “But what escaped from that room was even less than he knew. He left more than his body behind. He left part of himself latched to you, the would-be victim who had survived.”9

  To become whole once again, Harry must die to release the Voldemort link.

  While this dramatic case of dying and rising involves Harry ridding himself of that which is fundamentally foreign to his true identity or core values, there is a sense, in every book, in which Harry undergoes a process of remorse and regenerating with respect to his own feelings and faults. So, for example, in Order of the Phoenix, his mistrust of Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley needs to be redressed.

  But before he knew it, Harry was shouting.

  “SO YOU HAVEN’T BEEN IN THE MEETINGS, BIG DEAL! YOU’VE STILL BEEN HERE, HAVEN’T YOU? YOU’VE STILL BEEN TOGETHER! ME, I’VE BEEN STUCK AT THE DURSLEYS’ FOR A MONTH! AND I’VE HANDLED MORE THAN YOU TWO’VE EVER MANAGED AND DUMBLEDORE KNOWS IT—WHO SAVED THE SORCERER’S STONE? WHO GOT RID OF RIDDLE? WHO SAVED BOTH YOUR SKINS FROM THE DEMENTORS?”

  Every bitter and resentful thought that Harry had had in the past month was pouring out of him; his frustration at the lack of news, the hurt that they had all been together without him, his fury at being followed and not told about it: All the feelings he was half-ashamed of finally burst their boundaries.10

  Harry has to renounce his temper and his rash decisions, and there is a recurring sense in which love has a role in solidifying his continuous development, his rebirth, as it were. So, for example, when he and Ginny Weasley kiss after a long separation, this is described in terms of Harry’s sense of reality:“There’s the silver lining I’ve been looking for,” she whispered, and then she was kissing him as she had never kissed him before, and Harry was kissing her back, and it was blissful oblivion, better than firewhisky; she was the only real thing in the world, Ginny, the feel of her, one hand at her back and one in her long, sweet-smelling hair.11

  Harry’s love for others and their love for him is the foundation for his maturation and his protection from Voldemort. As Dumbledore observes, “That power [of love] also saved you from possession by Voldemort, because he could not bear to reside in a body so full of the force he detests.”12

  The Inversion of Voldemort

  As Voldemort, Tom Riddle displays almost the exact opposite pattern of development as do Harry and Dumbledore. Rather than feeling remorse, repentance, and renewal, with each murder Voldemort more deeply takes ownership of his identity as a murderer and a tyrant, one who sees his life as infinitely more important and interesting than the lives around him. Voldemort’s pursuit of eternal life—in a sort of perverse inversion of the Christian ideal of life through dying-to-self—leads him to a form of self-division in which he divides his soul into seven (unwittingly eight) parts.

  “[T]he 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 [Secrets of the Darkest Art] how unstable you make the rest of your soul by ripping it, and that’s just by making one Horcrux!”

  Harry remembered what Dumbledore had said about Voldemort moving beyond “usual evil.”

  “Isn’t there any way of putting yourself back together?” Ron asked.

  “Yes,” said Hermione with a hollow smile, “but it would be excrutiatingly painful.”

  “Why? How do you do it?” asked Harry.

  “Remorse,” said Hermione. “You’ve got to really feel what you’ve done. There’s a footnote. Apparently the pain of it can destroy you. I can’t see Voldemort attempting it somehow, can you?”13

  The Horcrux embodiments of Voldemort’s soul become the repositories of vile malice. Each must be destroyed to finally defeat the Dark Lord.

  Notice the inversion here. Remorse and rebirth serve to foster a deeper, more natural life for Harry and Dumbledore, whereas Voldemort’s pursuit of evil makes him increasingly unnatural. For example, friendship between Harry and his mates and his interaction with Dumbledore often involve eating (or, really, feasting), games, and affectionate exchanges of gifts. With Voldemort, there is no feasting but (most perversely) the drinking of blood. Rather than Voldemort’s action leading to fullness of life, his evil acts threaten his natural embodiment. When he tried to kill the infant Harry, his evil act seemed to vaporize him, turning him into a mist, a disembodied being.

  He pointed the wand very carefully into the boy’s face . . .

  “Avada Kedavra!”

  And then he broke: He was nothing, nothing but pain and terror, and he must hide himself, not here in the rubble of the ruined house, where the child was trapped and screaming, but far away . . . far away.14

  Until Voldemort can become re-embodied, his “life” is parasitic on the blood and the limbs of others. (He needs Harry’s blood and Wormtail’s hand to regenerate a full-grown body.) In the final volume, Voldemort’s body does not seem to be natural; his face is snakelike, and he is able to fly without the aid of a broomstick or other magical means. The contrast with the world of Dumbledore and Harry and his friends could not be more radical, with its real eating and authentic, affectionate touch. At the end of the book, this culminates for Harry and his immediate friends, Ron, Ginny, and Hermione, in romantic love and child-rearing. There is a stark contrast here between the natural world of remorse and regeneration and Voldemort’s efforts to hold on to his life at the cost of others’.

  The contrast between Voldemort’s hideous seeking of immortality by killing or maiming others and his refusing the natural course of regeneration and integration through remorse is almost the complete opposite of Harry’s and Dumbledore’s willing acceptance of moral, spiritual, and physical death for the sake of love and goodness. As becomes especially apparent in Deathly Hallows, physical death in Rowling’s world is not the worst thing f
or a soul or even the end of the soul. On the grave of Harry’s parents, we read that “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” At first, Harry is horrified that this is “a Death Eater idea,” but Hermione explains that the reference is to living beyond or after death. Death itself might be a passage to something more:Seeing that Harry and Ron looked thoroughly confused, Hermione hurried on, “Look, if I picked up a sword right now, Ron, and ran you through with it, I wouldn’t damage your soul at all.”

  “Which would be a real comfort to me, I’m sure,” said Ron. Harry laughed.

  “It should be, actually! But my point is that whatever happens to your body, your soul will survive, untouched,” said Hermione.15

  The death of Voldemort is desperate, unmourned, and ultimately pathetic (“Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality”), whereas Dumbledore’s death is integral to Voldemort’s defeat.16 Moreover, all of those who bravely died in fighting Voldemort (including Dobby, Fred Weasley, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, and Colin Creevey) were duly honored and lovingly grieved.

  The Integrity Objection

  One of the recurring objections to the idea that moral reform involves a radical regeneration akin to the dying and rising phoenix is that it undermines the integrity of personal identity. If you did some wrong, it is always and forever the case that it was you who did the wrong. No amount of renunciation can alter that fact. To imagine that you are somehow a new person after the grieving and the repentance invites a kind of self-deception. Imagine that I harm you wrongly and claim that this act was done by the “Bad Charles,” but I am now the “New Charlie,” a fresh new person who has little sympathy with that old form of myself. This “rebirth” seems to threaten any kind of integrity I have with my identity over time.

  This critique of the regeneration model was advanced by the Freudian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882-1960).17 She held that personal maturity and continuity require that one keep a solid commitment to the fact that a reformed person is the self-same person who did the wrong in the past. An alcoholic, for example, usually still thinks of himself as an alcoholic even after he has reformed and been sober for decades. The integrity objection thus strongly opposes the regeneration model.

  There is some force to this objection. The regeneration model can be abused. If one assumes that the regeneration can be so radical that there is no continuity at all between oneself as reformed and the person who did the wrong, self-deception seems to be at work. A case in which I casually split myself into a good and a bad self would seem more like a joke than genuine reform. Clearly, the regeneration model can be pushed too far. But without a real break from the past, involving a genuine renunciation that comes very close to a kind of dying, one’s renewal or reconciliation will be incomplete. It may be that people addicted to alcohol will think of themselves as alcoholics their whole lives, but in renouncing alcohol abuse they thereby no longer see themselves as drinkers or drunks. Think of someone who gives up smoking. Doesn’t making a shift away from smoking require that one no longer thinks of oneself as a smoker but as a different sort of person? The price of not undertaking a robust renunciation of wrongdoing or past mistakes can be high. Consider the case of Severus Snape.

  As revealed in Deathly Hallows, Snape truly loved Harry’s mother, Lily Evans. When he was a boy, he was attracted to her from afar. She was the one person at Hogwarts who stood up to James Potter and other bullies when they menaced Snape. Snape, however, made the disastrous mistake of calling her a Mudblood, an insulting name for Muggle-born witches. He later made the even more tragic error of inadvertently giving Voldemort the information he needed to find and kill Harry. Snape does feel deep remorse for these acts, but he is unable to publicly confess his feelings and thus achieve a full integration through remorse and renewal.

  Snape owes a life debt to Harry’s father, who saved him from Lupin when Lupin was transformed into a werewolf. Snape can be true to this life debt by protecting Harry (which he does on more than one occasion), but he is unable to openly come clean with Harry about his bond with Lily or his debt to James. He nurses resentment toward Harry and is unable to fully detach himself from his past. His motives are at times completely honorable, or as honorable as one’s motives can be when one is a spy for the Order who also has to pretend to be a faithful Death Eater.

  Snape is not an integrated person in the spirit of Melanie Klein; he is impaired because he can’t bring himself to fully renounce his past wrongs and move beyond them. In an ideal case of reconciliation, there might have to be a miracle: the actual restoration to life of James and Lily. But short of that, the best reconciliation available might have been for Snape’s true loyalty to Lily (and Dumbledore) to have been acknowledged and honored during his lifetime. This might also have been impossible, however, because Snape apparently needed to retain his cover as Voldemort’s servant as long as possible. Short of that, Snape still receives honor in a way that is deep and enduring: Harry names one of his children after Snape. The name given Harry’s son is the last word spoken by Dumbledore before he dies: Severus.

  The Fantasy Objection

  Consider briefly a second objection: Rowling has produced a masterpiece partly because she has invented a possible world quite remote from ours. In our world, spells are not cast, people cannot survive the death of their bodies, portraits of dead headmasters do not talk to students, and so on. If all of that is fantastic (literally, a matter of fantasy), why not think that the regeneration model is a matter of fantasy as well? Real ethics and serious models of moral reform need to be fashioned on the basis of realistic narratives, not of imaginary worlds.

  As it happens, I have argued elsewhere against some of the philosophical systems that rule out the possibility of life after death.18 I have also argued that our world is one in which there can be genuine enchantment, spells of sorts.19 Contemporary ethicists don’t address the practices of blessing and cursing, but this is regrettable, given the many ways people can affect one another on subliminal levels. Yet even if we bracket all of this and assume there is no afterlife and no magic at all in our world, note that Rowling does not treat ethics as a matter of fantasy. All of the values we share of loyalty, friendship, romantic love, fairness, our opposition to enslavement (free the house-elves!), and the role of remorse, forgiveness, and reform are very much in play in both Rowling’s fiction and our own Muggle world. In the name of realism, the fantasy objection would dismiss Rowling’s genuine insights about the perils of cruelty, the wrongful pursuit of purity (purebloods), love, and so on. Such “realism” is more a matter of failing to engage the imagination than of falling into the imaginary.

  Fawkes’s Secret

  As we noted at the outset, the role of the phoenix in the Harry Potter books may simply be part of the magical background to Dumbledore’s and Harry’s lives. Fawkes, after all, mourns his master with “a stricken lament of terrible beauty” and then leaves Hogwarts for good.20 But it could be that he leaves Hogwarts after the death of Dumbledore because we now have enough wisdom to grasp the message that the phoenix has left behind: that sometimes spiritual or actual death may have to be endured for there to be a regeneration of life, reconciliation, and a triumph of good over evil. Fawkes, after all, did not save Dumbledore when he was poisoned. Perhaps it was impossible, even though the tears of a phoenix can cure terrible wounds. Fawkes did not shield Dumbledore from the Avada Kedavra curse from Snape, nor did Fawkes intervene to prevent Dumbledore’s fall from the roof.

  We have reason to believe that Fawkes could know the mind of his master, and that Fawkes was probably well aware of Dumbledore’s willful sacrifice of himself. Yes, perhaps Fawkes and the pattern of regeneration were a mere coincidence in Rowling’s masterpiece, but maybe Fawkes himself was fully aware of the necessity of dying and rising, remorse and regeneration. Fawkes may have left Hogwarts at the end of Half-Blood Prince, but he may also have left behind the most important lesson that any of us can learn. Cases of wrongdoing, betrayal, and vic
e that lead to the rupture of friendships and community need to be healed by a kind of death and rebirth, in which one emerges from the flames of remorseful confession as a new person with radically new desires and intentions, ready to rejoin relationships and community.21

  NOTES

  1 See, for example, Charles Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  2 Deathly Hallows, pp. 656-657.

  3 Ibid., pp. 719-720.

  4 Ibid., pp. 715-716.

  5 Ibid., p. 721. For Socrates’ views on the philosopher’s cheerful acceptance of death, see Plato’s Phaedo, 64a-68a.

  6 Deathly Hallows, p. 749.

  7 Order of the Phoenix, pp. 815-816.

  8 Deathly Hallows, p. 708.