Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts

by David Baggett

  Magic, Science, and Harry Potter

  The likelihood that the Harry Potter books offer readers a helpful lens through which to consider the ethics of technological adaptation depends on the closeness of the analogy between the magic we encounter in the books on the one hand, and applied science as it has developed in the real world (and presumably in the books) on the other. A close look at the magic of Harry’s world will show how it resembles both the (real) historical practice of “natural magic” and applied science generally.

  Magic traces its origins back to the ancient world, but it is less widely recognized that the origins of science are similarly ancient. Many believe—wrongly—that science is solely a feature of the modern world, that it had no precursors, and that it eliminated by replacing wholesale a raft of superstitions about the world maintained by pre-modern folk. In fact, magic and what we would nowadays call “science” interacted constructively for many centuries. What we mean when we use the word “magic” reflects hindsight. We look at the past from a perspective conditioned by the triumph of modern science. According to Lynn Thorndike’s massive, eight-volume History of Magic and Experimental Science (the real-world analogue of Harry’s History of Magic), rather than insisting that modern science replaced magic after the seventeenth century, it is more accurate to say that it largely absorbed it. Today, “magic” refers to elements that were not fully absorbed, such as astrology. While not all of the assumptions, aims, and methods of magic were absorbed into modern science, some clearly were.

  In the history of the real world, not all magic is alike. Besides “black” or “demonic” magic, there is also a long tradition of “natural” magic, which depends not on enlisting the aid of spirits whose knowledge of nature’s secrets is presumed to exceed that of mere mortals, but rather on the mastery of various natural principles or “correspondences.” The important point here is that both modern science and this natural magic tradition are methods of investigating natural processes, the aim of which is, in each case, not simply explanation or understanding for its own sake, but more importantly prediction and control of the natural world, ultimately with a view to the betterment of the human condition. Moreover, both natural magicians and modern scientists pursue these aims through a combination of experimentation and mathematical analysis of natural events. It’s not so much that magic was shown to be false, but rather that “natural philosophers” (the old name for scientists, before “scientist” was coined in the nineteenth century) abandoned the comparatively fruitless search for hidden (or “occult”) properties of matter in favor of the relatively more promising mechanical explanations of early modern science. Whereas the content of early modern scientific explanations, limited as they were to the mechanics of particles (“atoms” and later “molecules”) in motion, sharply contrasted with the natural magic tradition, the overall practical aim remained the same, namely, to predict and control the course of nature.

  Among the various branches of natural magic that flourished before, during, and for a short while after the rise of modern science, alchemy was especially popular, owing largely to the influence of Paracelsus (who died in 1541), a bust of whom appears in a hallway at Hogwarts (OP, p. 281). The practice of alchemy, like that of every form of natural magic (including astrology), oscillated between mysticism and practical or “applied” research. Prior to Paracelsus, practical alchemy was preoccupied with the effort to transfigure base metals into gold. The “philosopher’s stone” was the hoped-for ingredient that would not only “heal” base (or “sick”) metals by transfiguring them, but also prolong the life of anyone who ingested it. (Hence British editions of the first book in the series bear the title, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.) Paracelsus expanded the scope of alchemy to include the successful development of metallic medicines for curing illnesses against which more conventional Renaissance treatments were ineffective. In this way, his work was a clear precursor to modern chemical research.

  The rise of modern science produced the modern world—the world of Muggles. But in Rowling’s books, alongside this world (the world of our experience), and in a close, symbiotic relationship with it, a world of magic persists. Far from being obliterated or absorbed, the practice of magic simply went underground, concealed from the Muggle world. Rowling depicts a community of witches and wizards existing comfortably, albeit secretively, alongside the modern world. Rowling’s witches and wizards are free to use machines and other fruits of modern science, but their preferred means of negotiating and manipulating the world are the natural powers associated with magic. In Harry Potter’s world, magic is as effective and pervasive a means of negotiating and manipulating one’s surroundings as applied science has become in ours.

  By the late 1800s, the fruits of modern science were transforming Western society at all levels, as a steady stream of new gadgets worked their way into every corner of life. Today, most Westerners are almost completely dependent on such machinery, most of which runs on electricity. Just as technology textures our lives, magic likewise textures the lives of witches and wizards in Harry’s world. Rowling offers her readers many examples of this, most memorably on the occasion of Harry’s first visit to the Weasley home, where he observes Mrs. Weasley flick her wand at the sink, whereupon her dishes begin “to clean themselves, clinking gently in the background” (CS, p. 34). Harry gazes at her shelves, which bulge with such books as “Charm Your Own Cheese, Enchantment in Baking, and One Minute Feasts—It’s Magic!” (CS, p. 34).

  Most of the magic in Rowling’s books (and all the approved magic) closely resembles natural magic. As one would expect at a school founded by natural magicians, the primary emphasis of the curriculum at Hogwarts is practical, emphasizing the use of magical powers to achieve specific effects, such as levitation or transfiguration. Magic is a tool, and like any tool is judged by its utility. Thus Hermione Granger criticizes Fred and George’s gadgetry as magic “of no real use to anyone” (OP, p. 369), while Professor Snape commends Occlumency as an obscure but “highly useful” branch of magic (OP, p. 520).

  Rowling’s characters also take for granted another assumption common to both the natural magic tradition and modern science, namely, that the results they achieve stem from the successful manipulation of fundamentally natural processes. Hermione wants to know how Fred and George’s “headless hats” work. She assumes that they represent nothing more than a clever manipulation of natural, albeit hidden forces. It’s hard to mistake the spirit behind her attempt at an explanation: “I mean, obviously, it’s some kind of Invisibility Spell, but it’s rather clever to have extended the field of invisibility beyond the boundaries of the charmed object… . I’d imagine the charm wouldn’t have a very long life though… .” (OP, p. 540). Hermione seeks an explanation in terms of underlying regularities or natural laws, just as a natural magician would—or a modern scientist. In the same spirit, Arthur Weasley indulges his personal and professional fascination with Muggle technology, frequently proclaiming his admiration for fresh examples of Muggle ingenuity, such as the automatic ticket machines he and Harry encounter on the London underground en route to Harry’s hearing in Order of the Phoenix (OP, p. 125). Ron explains to Harry that the Weasleys’ shed is full of Muggle artifacts, which his father experiments on—taking them apart, enchanting them, then putting them back together to observe the effects, as in the case of the Weasleys’ celebrated flying car (CS, p. 31).

  The character who perhaps best reflects the tradition of natural magic, and shows thereby how little separates it from modern science, is the Potions master, Severus Snape. His opening remarks to the first-year students in Sorcerer’s Stone are particularly revealing:

  You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion-making. As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don’t expect you to understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins,
bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses… . I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death. (SS, pp. 136-37)

  The link between potions and Renaissance alchemy is clear from the questions Snape proceeds to pose to the class, about the results of adding “powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood,” the difference between “monkshood and wolf-bane,” and other such arcana from One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi (SS, pp. 137-38). Harry’s first potions lesson is a lab session in which the aspiring witches and wizards attempt to produce a potion to cure boils.

  Further reinforcing the analogy between the magic in the books and modern science, and looking ahead to the second part of this chapter, the indiscriminate use of magic in Harry’s world creates problems closely analogous to the problems created by the improper use of applied science in our world. It is as a result of magic that the Giants are an endangered species (OP, p. 427), and what Giants hate most about witches and wizards is their magic (OP, p. 431). To cope with such problems, various regulatory agencies exist, such as the “Improper Use of Magic Office,” the “Broom Regulatory Control,” the “Apparition Test Center,” and the “Department of Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.” The message is clear: notwithstanding its benefits, the indiscriminate use of magic, like the indiscriminate use of applied science, has negative consequences.

  Interlude: Fantasy and Moral Epistemology

  There is a greater practical point to this analogy between magic and applied science than might at first appear. For if the analogy is as close as we have suggested, then ethical truths that apply to one case should apply also to the other.

  What is the connection between this observation and Rowling’s books? These books are, as several authors in this volume have noted, ethically “loaded.” They speak insistently to the issues with which writers on ethics have traditionally been concerned: good and evil; friendship and loss; choice and character. These are books that, uncharacteristically in contemporary fiction, instruct their readers about how to live.

  Unsurprisingly, many of the central issues faced by the characters in Rowling’s books have to do with the proper exercise of magical powers. The choice between the magic taught at Hogwarts and the Dark Arts is only the most obvious example. The worldwide magical community also regulates its members’ behavior through a complex set of customary and legal requirements, from proper dueling behaviors to school rules to the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery. And implicit judgment is passed on characters for their use or misuse even of unregulated magic. There is no rule against spending one’s life gazing into the Mirror of Erised.51 But Dumbledore makes clear to Harry that this is a danger to be guarded against—the danger of a wasted life.

  It is a great strength of Rowling’s work that she does not treat these issues as unique to the situation of her characters, belonging to a social context entirely unlike our own. Her books would have much less appeal if they did not speak to circumstances in which we find ourselves. Rowling’s characters worry about how to use magical power because magical power is the primary medium of their existence. They are human beings whose lives are shot through with magic, as ours are shot through with applied science. Rowling’s characters worry about magic, in short, in exactly the same way we worry about activities such as gardening or driving or family planning.

  Rowling’s books offer us, among many gifts, an ethics of magic. And the analogy elaborated in the first part of this chapter leads us to expect that the ethics of magic in Harry’s world will also be appropriate, properly translated, for ours.

  Rowling’s Ethics of Magic

  So then, what is Rowling’s ethics of magic? To find out, let’s look first at what characterizes Rowling’s bad characters and their use of magic, and then try to read off of this “essence of bad magic” a corresponding “essence of good magic.”

  While Sirius Black rightly notes that “the world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters” (OP, p. 302), nevertheless, Rowling clearly regards Voldemort and his Death Eaters, and practitioners of the Dark Arts generally, as paradigms of evil. We may look, then, to these people and the powers of which they avail themselves—the Dark Arts—to get a picture of what bad magic is like.

  The Dark Arts are a broad category, comprising everything from various species of dangerous creatures (doxies, boggarts, dementors), to paraphernalia like the shrunken heads in the shops of Knockturn Alley and the vials of blood in Grimmauld Place, to the three curses called “unforgivable.”

  The curses are the best example with which to begin, both because of the clear connections between them and human action, and because they are highlighted in the text as especially horrible. What do the Unforgiveable Curses do? Briefly, they dominate susceptible others, and dominate them completely. Each term in this analysis is necessary, so let’s look at them in turn.

  The Unforgivable Curses dominate susceptible others. One of them kills, another tortures, and a third strips the victim of his or her will, rendering him or her a tool of the person who speaks the curse. Although Voldemort and his Death Eaters generally use these curses on people, and this is clearly the use that the magical community is most concerned to prevent, it is possible to use them also on other creatures susceptible to these forms of domination: anything living, in the case of Avada Kedavra; anything capable of suffering, in the case of the Cruciatus curse; anything capable of self-direction, in the case of the Imperius curse. Barty Crouch Jr., disguised as Mad-Eye Moody, uses them on spiders in one of his lessons at Hogwarts.

  It is worth asking whether a good teacher (in the ethical sense) would have done this much. The students wonder aloud, on their way back from this lesson, whether there would be “trouble with the Ministry if they knew …” (GF, p. 220). Through the end of Order of the Phoenix, the only persons to attempt one of these curses, other than people in league with Voldemort, were Dolores Umbridge (a paradigm of evil in her own way) and Harry, trying to hurt Bellatrix Lestrange in repayment for her murder of Sirius. And Harry can’t get the curse right, because (as Bellatrix tells him) “you need to mean [it]” (OP, p. 810). It appears one must desire to dominate in the way characteristic of these curses in order to use them effectively, and thus no good witch or wizard could successfully perform them, even on a spider. Dumbledore could not perform them—at least, while remaining himself. As Lestrange says to Harry, “you need to really want to cause pain—to enjoy it …” (OP, p. 810). Her words shed light on Barty Crouch Jr.’s remark to his students that “Avada Kedavra’s a curse that needs a powerful bit of magic behind it—you could all get your wands out now and point them at me and say the words, and I doubt I’d get so much as a nosebleed” (GF, p. 217). It appears no use of the Unforgivable Curses is acceptable—that only the corrupt can perform them. We will return to this point in a moment.

  It is not adequate to say simply that the Unforgivable Curses dominate susceptible others, because all curses do that to some extent, and Rowling’s books do not encourage us to think of the hexes the Hogwarts students use on one another when dueling (Petrificus Totalus, Tarantella, and so on) as necessarily problematic. It certainly is a form of domination to freeze people stiff or to remove their control over their legs. The domination that characterizes the Unforgivable Curses is of another order, though. It is complete. Death is a clear case of complete domination, so it is obvious how Avada Kedavra fits the criterion. So too with the Imperius curse. By this curse, one person masters another, so that the victim becomes a mere tool, no longer an independent agent. What of the Cruciatus curse? It too meets the criterion. As a number of philosophers who have written about torture have noted, the goal of torture is to pull to pieces the person being tortured, sometimes in order to turn him or her into a tool, but always to remove him or her as a potentially opposing force. The domination intended is complete.52

  Behind any attempt to reduce ethical reality to a set of rules you’ll find one or more practical aims served by the reducti
on. In Harry’s world, the designation of just these curses as the Unforgivable Curses seems to serve the purposes of both legislation and instruction. The designation of these curses as “unforgivable” helps the community make efficient and broadly correct judgments about whom to imprison and what to teach children. But one can clearly use other curses to dominate others in far-reaching ways, and one can dominate others in significant ways but do so justifiably. Legilimancy seems to lie in this gray area (both Dumbledore and Voldemort are proficient at it), as do uses of memory charms. The series’ ultimate judgment on Gilderoy Lockhart is that he is, or was, a bad man, stealing fame that properly belonged to others by taking away from those others part of who they were—their memories. But Kingsley Shacklebolt uses Lockhart’s trademark charm on Cho Chang’s friend Marietta when Marietta is about to expose Harry’s Defense Against the Dark Arts club, and Shacklebolt is praised for doing so. We might say that in the first case, the domination intended is more complete, and in the second, less so. But even if it is possible to thus explain why a certain use of a memory charm should be regarded one way and not another, this explanation will never go so far as to create a fully adequate set of underlying principles. Principles are nearly always reductions of a less-than-fully codifiable reality.