Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts

by David Baggett

  Dementors

  These horrible creatures are less ambiguous than boggarts. They have a form that shows exactly what kind of creature they are, down to their clothing: “Where there should have been eyes, there was only thin, gray scabbed skin, stretched blankly over empty sockets. But there was a mouth … a gaping, shapeless hole, sucking the air with the sound of a death rattle” (PA, p. 384). That skin, also described as “rotting,” is covered by a hooded cloak. Dementors glide soundlessly, inches above the ground. The dementor seems a cross between the Grim Reaper, a ringwraith from Lord of the Rings, and the character in Edvard Munch’s painting, “The Scream.” The dementor’s entire form says “death,” and death itself does not exist except as the parasite on and destroyer of life.

  It is not just physical appearance that tells us about dementors. In Order of the Phoenix, Harry defends Dudley from dementors who have entered Little Whinging. For the use of magic by an under-age wizard off school property, Harry must have a hearing with the Ministry of Magic. The lone witness to the attack, Mrs. Figg, describes the dementors: “I felt them. Everything went cold and this was a warm summer’s night, mark you. And I felt … as though all happiness had gone from the world … and I remembered dreadful things …” (OP, p. 145). The dementors’ very presence brings a physical sensation of cold—the feeling of corpses—and the feeling that the presence of ghosts is traditionally described as bringing. More importantly, it floods the mind with numbing unhappiness, the memory of “dreadful things,” as Mrs. Figg says.

  How do dementors bring these memories back? Not through any positive means, but only negatively. Dementors can survive only by taking the happiness out of a person’s mind. The absence of happiness forces human beings to remember only unhappiness, horrible things, and especially the reality of death—the absence of life. Lupin tells Harry, “If it can, the dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself … soul-less and evil. You’ll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life” (PA, p. 187). Unlike boggarts, dementors literally feed off human happiness. They survive as parasites, soul-vampires who destroy the spiritual and psychological well-being of their victims for their own survival and pleasure. This is why they have gotten into the prison business, to have people sent to them by legal means so that they can have a sort of perpetual feast. Sirius Black recounts how he survived his stay in, and eventually escaped, their prison, Azkaban: “I think the only reason I never lost my mind is that I knew I was innocent. That wasn’t a happy thought, so the dementors couldn’t suck it out of me … but it kept me sane and knowing who I am …” (PA, p. 371).

  While it is not clear that the boggarts do anything more than temporarily paralyze those who come near them, the dementors actually take away happiness, rendering their victims insane. Insanity means a lack of health in mind and soul. If a person lacks all health, he is dead. Many people go completely insane in Azkaban, and many of them just die. Because the mind and body are so connected, a lack of health in mind leads to a lack of health in body. (This connection between mind and body is also shown in the effectiveness of chocolate to remedy a close encounter with dementors. As chocolate soothes the bodily senses, it restores one’s spirits as well.)

  The most horrifying aspect of the dementors is their “soul kiss.” Although they generally feed slowly from the human souls in Azkaban, they are also able to swallow a soul whole through that “gaping, shapeless hole of a mouth.” Lupin explains that the Dementor’s Kiss reduces the victim to a terrible, drained state “much worse than [death]”: “You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you’ll have no sense of self anymore, no memory, no … anything. There’s no chance at all of recovery. You’ll just—exist. As an empty shell” (PA, p. 247).85 That these soul suckers survive on the complex emotions of humans and human-like creatures makes them a classic portrayal of an evil being, one that harms not only the body, but takes instead the interior lives of persons. But even the horrific dementors are not the most terrifying portrayal of evil as a parasite. The most frightening picture is …

  Voldemort

  Voldemort is most frightening because he is human. Although boggarts and dementors chill us because of the kind of creatures they are, Voldemort chills us most because he is one of us and represents the possibility of choosing evil freely. He represents a choice to forsake living a life of abundance, giving and receiving love, for a life of simply taking by force or deceit from another’s life. Therefore, we fear most hearing from him what Luke Skywalker heard from Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back: “I am your father”—I am of the same flesh as you. But we will discuss the role of choice later. First, let’s see how Voldemort fits this description of evil as privation and parasite.

  The first reference to Voldemort in the books gives us an insight into what is wrong with him. In the wake of Voldemort’s defeat at the hands of the infant Harry, Professor McGonagall remarks that Dumbledore is the only wizard Voldemort ever feared. Dumbledore replies, “You flatter me … Voldemort had powers I will never have.” How odd. If evil is a privation, an inability, a weakness, how can Dumbledore say that Voldemort has powers that he not only doesn’t, but will never have? McGonagall answers this question, “Only because you’re too—well—noble to use them” (SS, p. 11). What appears as weakness on Dumbledore’s part is revealed to be strength, the nobility that Voldemort lacks. While “noble” sometimes means famous or upper-class, McGonagall means by “nobility” greatness of character and high moral ideals, qualities needed by a powerful person to act consistently for the good—and check baser impulses. While Voldemort’s power to manipulate things magically is amazing, he seems unaware that this is not the only kind of power, or even the most important kind. Voldemort has powers Dumbledore will never have, but the opposite is also true. Dumbledore has the power of nobility, a good character and high moral ideals. He can see the world clearly in a way that is completely impossible for Voldemort.

  Voldemort was unable to see what accounted for his defeat at the hands of Harry. He was a more powerful wizard than Harry’s parents, even more so than a mere infant. But though he was able to kill James and Lily Potter, he was not able to defeat them or kill their baby. He was unable to do this because he encountered in them the very thing he lacked, love. This love, more powerful than the death curses he hurled at the infant Harry, deflected them back at himself, leaving him lacking even more as a person.

  In Sorcerer’s Stone we encounter the defeated Voldemort weak as a boggart but as horrifying as a dementor. Voldemort himself explains what resulted from that attack: “‘See what I have become?’ the face said. ‘Mere shadow and vapor … I have form only when I can share another’s body …’” (SS, p. 293). Like the boggart, Voldemort seems to have no “him” there. Unlike the boggart, Voldemort doesn’t just use fear, he actually uses someone else’s body. The face of Voldemort, “the most terrible face Harry had ever seen,” is “chalk white with glaring red eyes and slits for nostrils, like a snake”—and bulges out of the back of Professor Quirrell’s head (SS, p. 293)! Voldemort is literally a parasite on Quirrell’s body. But living by taking another person’s life is not enough; Voldemort must gain strength by feeding, via Quirrell, from the blood of unicorns, those onehorned symbols of purity. Voldemort has no qualms about slaughtering innocent unicorns, just as he had no qualms about attacking the infant Harry or parasitically sapping Quirrell’s life.

  It is one thing to live because of someone else’s willing self-sacrifice, as Harry does because of his parents, and another to live because one sacrifices others for one’s own gain. Voldemort doesn’t understand this, but Dumbledore explains that this is why Quirrell feels tremendous pain when he touches Harry: it is “agony” to touch someone marked by something so good as sacrificial love (SS, p. 299).

  Quirrell had “learned” about good and evil from Voldemort who taught that only power matters (SS, p. 291). Quirrell learned this
“truth” at a great price since Voldemort ultimately abandons Quirrell to die. As Dumbledore says, “… he shows just as little mercy to his followers as to his enemies” (SS, p. 298). Notice Dumbledore doesn’t say “friends” but “followers.” To have friends one must be a friend; not to understand love is to make friendship—and life itself—impossible.86 Dumbledore also notes, “not being truly alive, he cannot be killed” (SS, p. 298).

  Voldemort eventually gains a body. Initially weak as a baby, it has the form of a “crouched human child” but is, Harry sees, like no other child ever: “It was hairless and scaly-looking, a dark, raw, reddish black. Its arms and legs were thin and feeble, and its face—no child alive ever had a face like that—flat and snakelike, with gleaming red eyes” (GF, p. 640). For all of Voldemort’s use of others’ lives—Quirrell, the unicorns, and the people he killed simply because they were not useful to him—his life is still a half-life. Voldemort plots to regain his adult body by means of an ancient spell that requires three sacrifices—first, bone from Voldemort’s Muggle father, whom he hated and murdered; second, the sacrifice of Wormtail’s hand, severed in fear and desperation by this servant himself; and, third, blood from Harry, Voldemort’s enemy. This terrible restoration shows us again the parasitic character of evil. Unlike a true human child, the weakened Voldemort could not grow to flourish as an adult; he regains an adult body through a potion concocted from the elements of others’ bodies. His new bone, flesh, and blood are gained through fear or force at the expense of other people.

  Evil Protects Itself and Grows through Deception

  If evil is a privation, then it will always have a weakness. Its power flows not from true strength but from the manipulation and distortion of what is good. Truth and goodness will always be stronger in and of themselves. In their completeness, they expose evil’s lack—lack of love, lack of health in mind and body, lack of hope, and lack of clear-sightedness. In order to gain the upper hand, evil’s best strategy is to disguise itself. Often, we find Voldemort or his followers trying to convince others that Voldemort is irresistible in his power and that the moral principles that might inspire one to oppose the dark lord are empty shams, the hollow wishes of weak and foolish people. 87 In the Harry Potter books, evil masks itself by deceit.

  Regarding creatures, the boggarts and dementors make use of deceit to paralyze their victims. Boggarts take on false forms to confuse and overwhelm opponents through fear. The heart of the boggart’s effectiveness is its ability to fan a person’s fears through its shape-changing. The only way to win against a boggart is to keep firmly in mind that the boggart’s form is in fact false; then one can use the boggart’s ability to read thoughts against the creature. A boggart is ultimately repelled by laughter. The trick is to use the Riddikulus charm—which forces the boggart to take on an amusing shape or circumstance. For example, when a boggart appears as Professor Snape, Neville defeats it by imagining that Snape is wearing Neville’s grandmother’s clothing.

  The Riddikulus! charm requires strong concentration, however, a difficult task in the face of the embodiment of one’s greatest fear. When Mrs. Weasley faces a boggart in Order of the Phoenix, she breaks down in tears because the boggart takes on successively the shapes of her husband, her children, and Harry, all sprawled dead at her feet. This visual lie is powerful because it is drawn from the very real fears of a good person: the boggart paralyzes Mrs. Weasley because it has turned her love for her family and Harry and her worry for their safety into weapons against her. Despite herself, Mrs. Weasley is drawn into the grim illusion that the boggart presents. A boggart is dangerous precisely because it attempts to deceive us into believing that our greatest fears have come true. The boggart’s victim will only be able to use the Riddikulus! charm effectively if she can see through the physical deceit and laugh at the boggart.

  When Harry first encounters the dementors, he is much more affected by them than his classmates because, as Lupin explains, Harry has more horrors in his life than other people. When the dementors “drain peace, hope, and happiness” from Harry, they leave him with only sadness and misery (PA, p. 187). This is the key to the dementors’ brand of deceit: they take away not only happiness and peace, but hope—the virtue that allows one to be open to peace and happiness in the future. This offense against hope is essentially an offense against truth. Whether Harry’s happy thoughts and feelings have been sucked away or not, it is simply not true that Harry’s past and present life have not contained the happiness and peace which are the results of love that Harry has been given and has given to others. That love is the care and concern of one person for another’s well-being and development as a full human person.

  It is precisely in this way that the half-lifed Voldemort is able to convince people to follow him: he convinces them that there is no hope. When sad Peter Pettigrew admits to betraying Harry’s parents to Voldemort, his excuses are offenses against truth and hope: “He—he was taking over everywhere!” and “He would have killed me” (PA, pp. 374-75). The first excuse is a falsehood about the present and past. Voldemort had not been taking over everywhere, a fact that Pettigrew knew well—Dumbledore always kept Hogwarts as a fortress against Voldemort. Further, Pettigrew and the Potters were part of the Order of the Phoenix, a secret bastion of principled resistance to Voldemort. Pettigrew’s fear makes him susceptible to the lie that these efforts to fight Voldemort are futile. The second excuse offends hope because it offends the truth. The truth is that Voldemort surely would have tried to kill Pettigrew as he did kill James and Lily Potter and unsuccessfully tried to kill Harry. But somehow Voldemort had convinced Pettigrew that there would be no escape, that nobody could ever protect him. Worse, Voldemort convinced Pettigrew that his loyalty to the Potters and their love for him were not ultimately worth fighting for. Instead, he betrays both to save his own skin.

  Remember Quirrell’s “lesson” (SS, p. 291). This is the great lie—that there is no goodness, hence no love; there is no evil, thus no lack of love. But this is simply not true. Pettigrew and Quirrell should have known that there is such a thing as love in the world because they experienced it. Presumably their parents raised their boys not because they were too weak to seek power, but because they cared for these children enough to seek their good at the expense of their own power and pleasure. The experience of being raised as a human being, assuming that there is no abuse or neglect, should be enough for anyone to know that there is such a thing in the world as goodness, such a thing as love. Even Voldemort should know this. He is human, too.

  But this is where we see the lie goes deeper. Voldemort and his Death Eaters don’t want to acknowledge that they are human. The Death Eaters always cover up their faces when they appear to others. They apparently want to look like those other hooded deceivers, the dementors. Voldemort is constantly trying to wipe away all traces of his humanity and appear as something more than human. He kills his own father and grandparents, to erase the living memory of his own humanity. He has no wife and children, signs of hope for the future if there are any. (Here, one might note that none of the Death Eaters seems to have more than one child at most; by contrast, the Weasleys, who embody hope in the face of horrible circumstances, are a large family.) Voldemort changes his name from Tom Riddle, another reminder that he is human (Tom is his father’s name) into the horrifying name that means something like “Will to Death.” This title is itself a lie, because he doesn’t have a death wish. Like almost all humans he is afraid of death. But in his case, he will do anything to avoid it, including taking the lives of others.

  Why, in the face of reality, do people buy these lies? Why are they deceived by the unreality when reality has been all around them? Why, we ask again, is there evil in the world? The answer is difficult, but what is frightening is that it seems to be the result of a free choice.

  Evil Is a Result of Free Choice

  One of the scariest aspects of Rowling’s view of evil is that people can and do choose it. They choose th
e lie of evil rather than the truth of goodness. Of course, as we noted, they don’t choose it as evil. Nobody says outright, “I choose to forego love, happiness, and peace for a dreary, friendless, loveless world in which I seek power alone, power that will probably destroy me along the way.” Nobody, or almost nobody, reaches the stage where he courts evil as evil, incompleteness, and death. Even Voldemort must keep telling himself lies about the world in order to pursue his own agenda. But it is true that people in the end must choose lies or truth.

  One lie about evil is that people are simply predestined for evil because of their ancestry, the alignment of the stars, or some other characteristic necessitating a “destiny” to head to the dark side. In other words, the last deceit of evil is that one has no choice whether to succumb to it or not. Like Peter Pettigrew, it blames outside forces for one’s own choices. This theme runs throughout the series. From the very beginning Harry worries that he will be in Slytherin, Voldemort’s old house, because it is his “destiny” (SS, p. 130). When he discovers in Chamber of Secrets that he (like Voldemort) speaks parseltongue, the language of snakes, Harry worries that not only is he destined for the dark side, but that he is the heir of Slytherin who will unleash doom on all Hogwarts.