Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts

by David Baggett

  By drawing so many young people back into reading, the Potter books are igniting the imaginations of countless kids. A powerful imagination functions centrally in any commitment to morality, because so much of ethics consists in having the right kinds of emotional and intuitive responses to situations as they arise. Being truly ethical is largely about having the appropriate feelings, the proper sorts of imaginative capacities and properly empathetic tendencies. Rowling is performing a powerful service in drawing kids back into the imaginative exercise of reading.

  Imagination and Faith

  A few years ago a television special debunking a number of enduring mysteries, from crop circles to the Loch Ness monster, aimed at heightening the viewers’ commitment to a careful examination of the evidence. The more I watched, though, the more concerned I became that it was doing more harm than good with its persistently skeptical tone. The biggest obstacle for beginning philosophy students is often their unwillingness to suspend both disbelief and skeptical doubt to exercise their imaginations. They resist engaging in thought experiments meant to stretch their creative limits and challenge their thinking to higher levels. A reluctance to imagine, cloaked as skepticism, tends to produce more arrogant cynicism than genuine wisdom. The philosopher’s task is not merely to mow down superstitions. It’s also to irrigate intellectual deserts.

  Not only is a vivid imagination crucial to morality, it’s integral to religious faith. The nature of religious truth claims is not such as to appeal to the unimaginative or narrowly empirical. We are called to believe in an invisible God, battle unseen forces, and do good to those who harm us. On the face of it, this is definitely stuff that calls for a great imagination. It requires an openness to more than what the eyes can see, a willingness to believe passionately in more than the senses, a capacity to consider a broader array of evidence than a narrow scientism would admit as legitimate. Such imaginative openness to life’s deeper realities may well require a cultivation of imagination; a great imagination may well prove valuable in our quest for knowledge. If the basis of one’s decision about religion is just wishful thinking, following fashions, or a failure of imagination, one’s rejection (or acceptance) is less likely to track the truth. Philosophy calls for a real and honest openness to what evidence is available, not a dogmatic assumption from the outset that one side or the other is outside the range of possibility.

  Those interested in pushing the importance and legitimacy of classical religious faith should perhaps be more careful not to discourage kids from reading books like Rowling’s, at least if such reading is done with discernment. Such apologists of the faith may need to think out of the box, as it were, more expansively about their task as defenders of faith, and encourage the reading of all kinds of imaginatively vivid literature. In particular, they ought to endorse the reading of morally potent fairy tales that enliven the imagination, give readers fresh eyes to see through, and open minds. Such openness is not enough, but it may well be necessary for religious hypotheses to retain plausibility and remain, in William James’s phrase, a “live option.”108

  Religiously motivated critics of Potter may wish to think twice before launching criticisms of something that may well do more for their cause than they currently imagine.

  We began by talking about the widely different perspectives on Rowling’s series. Aristotle had the insight that the truth often resides between the extremes, and this is likely the case with Potter. The books may not be suitable for six-year-olds, but that doesn’t mean they’re not suitable for nine-year-olds (not to mention most adults of all ages). The books may well broach moral complexities, but that doesn’t mean they’re morally ambiguous. They may not be the greatest literature ever written, but that doesn’t mean they’re not good. They remain infinitely better than many books that tout a kind of worldview that offers little encouragement to think seriously about anything at all. The Potter books are well-written, not to mention incredibly fun, stories that generate conversation well worth having.

  Ravenclaw

  Many-Flavored Topics in Metaphysics

  13

  Finding Platform 9 : The Idea of a Different Reality

  GARETH B. MATTHEWS

  We picture the actual world—indefensibly—as the one solid, vivid, energetic world among innumerable ghostly, faded, wispy, “merely” possible worlds.

  —DAVID LEWIS

  Some of the most exciting stories we can read introduce us to a reality very different from the humdrum world with which we are so familiar. To get to this different reality the characters in these stories may travel, or be taken, to some far distant place, perhaps to a place on the other side of the world, or to a planet in outer space. Or the characters in the stories may discover, perhaps quite by accident, some magical point of entry, such as a special kind of mirror, or a secret door.

  We could call such stories “metaphysical,” since metaphysics is that branch of philosophy that concerns itself with the nature of reality. But the stories are not themselves works of philosophy. What they do is raise, sometimes in gripping and unforgettable ways, intriguing questions about whether there might be realities very different from anything we have ever experienced.

  It will be useful to compare the Potter stories with two other popular story series, one American and one English. The American series, by Frank Baum, is about the Land of Oz and the English series, by C.S. Lewis, is about a place called Narnia.

  The Oz Stories

  Think about Dorothy, who in the most famous Oz story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is lifted up by a cyclone in Kansas and dropped down, with her dog, Toto, on the other side of the world, in the Land of Oz. What Dorothy finds in Oz is quite different from what she knew in Kansas, but it is not completely different. She can go on speaking English and understand, and be understood by, the inhabitants of Oz. She can even recognize the Scarecrow as a scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman as a woodman, even though she had never before met a talking scarecrow, or a man made of tin, let alone a scarecrow or tin figure she could actually have for a friend and companion.

  Part of the fun of reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or of seeing the movie, comes from following the adventures of Dorothy in this strange place. The story is funny and dramatic. It’s filled with surprises. It’s a good yarn.

  Yet there is much more to the Wonderful Wizard and the later books in the Oz series than the fact that they tell us about strange and surprising adventures in a faraway place. These stories also make us think! Consider, for example, the autobiography of the Tin Woodman. He began his life, he tells us, as a creature of flesh and bones, like Dorothy. He was gradually transformed, he explains, by a succession of accidents and repairs. A wicked witch had enchanted his axe so that it chopped off one of his legs. To replace his missing limb he had a tinsmith fit him with a tin leg. Then the enchanted axe chopped off the other leg, which, again, he had replaced by a tin limb. The process continued until the Woodman was all tin.

  “Could that really happen?” you might ask yourself. Could it even begin to happen? Could a person who had lost an arm or leg really get a tin replacement? If so, what is the limit to the number or kind of replacements for limbs and body parts that someone could get and stay alive?

  The Ship of Theseus

  The idea of piece-by-piece replacement is well known to philosophers through the old story of the Ship of Theseus. For convenience’s sake, let’s call the original Ship of Theseus, Athena. Let’s suppose that Athena was made up of nine hundred separate boards and other wooden pieces. And let’s suppose further that the ship’s carpenter began to replace each of these nine hundred boards and pieces, one at a time, with a new board or piece. When would Athena cease to exist? After the first plank was replaced with a new one? After the 451st board or piece was replaced? Or not until the last, the nine hundredth, board or piece was replaced? Would it matter whether the boards and pieces, after they had all been removed, one at a time, were reassembled in another location to form a whole ship?
And, if that happened, which of the two ships would be Athena—the one that was the result of piece-by-piece replacement, or the one produced by putting all the old pieces together again to form a ship?

  The story of the Ship of Theseus comes down to us from ancient times. Yet it raises questions that we can still puzzle over today. For example: What do I have to know about the bike I got back from the repair shop to know that it is really and truly my old bike, and not just a patchwork bike, with parts from the old bike, perhaps most of its parts, or perhaps only the handlebar, or the seat? And what allows my own body to continue to be my own body from day to day, even though the cells that make up my body are constantly being replaced? Why don’t I get a new body every time my body gets a new cell, or loses a cell?

  The autobiography of the Tin Woodman adds two new elements to the old story of the Ship of Theseus. For one thing, the woodman, unlike the Ship of Theseus, gets replacement pieces that are of a different material from the original. The ship got a new wooden piece to replace each old wooden piece, whereas the Tin Woodman gets a tin piece to replace a piece of flesh and bones. Is this change of material important? If so, why is it important?

  Once we consider replacement with parts of some different material, we can modernize the story of the Tin Woodman to allow for, say, plastic replacements for hearts, lungs, and skin, titanium replacements for bones, biochemical replacements for blood, and so on. We can even think of replacing networks of nerves with computer circuitry. A modernized woodman could become the Bionic Man, constructed by replacing organs and body parts, one at a time, including even the brain.

  A second thing that makes the story of the Tin Woodman different from the old story of the Ship of Theseus is the fact that the Woodman is able to remember and tell others his story of what it was like to become, gradually, all tin. Unlike the ship, he can, it seems, recognize himself as himself in his new material. Exactly why that should be important is also worth thinking about.

  We can see with only this one example—and there are many, many more interesting examples—that the Oz stories take us to another place with a different reality in such a way that we are prodded into thinking freshly about our own familiar world. The world of Oz is enough like, but also enough different from, our own world, to raise intriguing questions about our familiar world, and about whether we really understand it.

  The Narnia Chronicles

  Some stories, however, introduce us to another reality by having their characters get to another place, not by a cyclone, a balloon, or a spaceship, but by magic. In C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the child characters discover that they can walk into a wardrobe in a strange old house and end up in a completely different place, a land called “Narnia.” It is a place with its own climate, its own creatures, and even its own time! We realize that the time is different when we learn that Lucy and her friends can spend weeks and months in Narnia and yet, when they return through the wardrobe to the house they had been exploring, no time in that world has passed at all!

  The Narnia tales, like the Oz stories, are engrossing yarns. They are books that both adults and children find it hard to put down. But do the Narnia chronicles, like the Oz stories, offer us any help in thinking about or understanding our own familiar reality? Or are they just an escape, even if an exciting escape, from the boring things we are already so familiar with?

  In fact, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and the other Narnia tales that follow it, are supposed to tell us something important about our own lives. The drama that Lucy, Edmund, Peter, and Susan are drawn into, and become central participants in, is meant to help us understand the religious significance of our own lives. The writer of these stories, C.S. Lewis, was quite clear about this purpose. Thus, for example, he meant for his readers to realize that the lion in Narnia, Aslan, is a Christ figure, and that part of what happens in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, is a retelling of the biblical story of the crucifixion of Christ. Lewis carried on a correspondence with some of his child readers and he reported, with obvious satisfaction, that many of them had understood the religious meaning of the stories, sometimes better than adults do.

  There are, of course, many readers of the Narnia chronicles who do not realize that C.S. Lewis meant to be writing a religious epic that could be enjoyed by kids. No doubt there are some readers, whether adults or children, who can enjoy these gripping stories without even being interested in the religious meaning their author assigned to them. Nevertheless, it’s true that the author intended to present another reality, not just as a diversion, but as a story version of what he considered a great cosmic battle between good and evil. It is also true that he thought this religious epic is what gives meaning to our own ordinary circumstances of being born, growing up, having a family, getting old, and dying.

  Hogwarts

  What, now, about the Harry Potter stories? They, too, present the reader with a different reality from what we think of as the reality of our ordinary lives. It is a world of witchcraft and wizardry, of magic potions, spells, and transfigurations, a world of flying broomsticks and messenger owls. Do they present this world in a way that is like the Oz stories, or in a way that is like the Narnia tales, or in some other, perhaps completely different way?

  A first thing to say is that the Harry Potter world of Hogwarts is meant to be a separate reality that is nevertheless coordinated with our familiar everyday world. It is certainly not just a faraway place, like Oz—something you might use a balloon, or a jumbo jet, or a spaceship, to reach. Nor is it something that runs on a time system that is different from ours. Hogwarts itself is, presumably, somewhere in England, though we won’t be able to find it on an ordinary map, that is, on a Muggle map.

  There is, of course, a standard way to get to Hogwarts. It is to go to King’s Cross Railway Station in London, which is otherwise the mainline station for trains from London to Cambridge, Ely, and points beyond. To be sure, you won’t get to the right platform for the Hogwarts Express, Platform 9 ¾, unless you push your baggage cart resolutely toward the barrier between Platforms 9 and 10 (and Dobby hasn’t bewitched the barrier!). But a certain physical and entirely public (that’s to say, Muggle) location is a point of entry into the Hogwarts world.

  Hogwarts and Narnia

  So far, Hogwarts is a bit like Narnia in that there is a locatable entry point for reaching this other reality. But does the business about Platform 9 ¾ sufficiently resemble the wardrobe in the Narnia story to make the world of Hogwarts very much like the world of Narnia? Here are some important differences.

  First, once Harry gets past the barrier and the Hogwarts Express comes into view, what he sees is a scene much like that of other trains taking kids to English boarding schools. The story continues in this vein. There are, of course, constant reminders that things are also different in the wizard world. Thus the kids on the train munch chocolate frogs, rather than gummi bears, and trade witch and wizard cards rather than football cards. But the similarities are as obvious as the differences.

  Second, some people in the Muggle world know something about the world of Hogwarts, even though they have never themselves been through the “door” to wizard reality. They may, like Harry’s aunt and uncle, fear and reject the wizard world, but still acknowledge it even as they try not to. Some Muggles, like Hermione’s parents, seem happily reconciled to the existence of the magical world, sending her to Hogwarts and shopping with her in Diagon Alley.

  Third, there is plenty of movement back and forth between the Muggle world and Hogwarts. Messenger owls appear with messages from Hogwarts. In fact, when Harry and Ron discover that they have missed the Hogwarts Express, Ron leads Harry to his father’s Ford Anglia, which has been parked on a side road near King’s Cross Station and, since the car is enchanted, they can use it to fly to Hogwarts. Once they take off, they can see the whole of London, “smoky and glittering, below them” (CS, p. 70).

  Fourth, and this may be the most interesti
ng point of all, the school subjects at Hogwarts are the various “sciences” and “disciplines” of witchcraft and wizardry. There is a library of volumes on these topics, there are textbooks on them, there are specific classes in potions, transfigurations, etc., and, of course, final examinations. I shall return to this observation later on.

  So far we have noted four points of difference between the wizard world of Hogwarts and Narnia. What about the religious significance of the Potter stories? As we have already said, the Narnia chronicles are meant to be stories about another world that give us the religious meaning of this world. The Potter stories are not meant to do that. However, there is a strong sense of evil in them, personified, of course, in the figure of Voldemort. And Harry’s life is clearly a battle of courage and decency against darkness and depravity. So, although the Potter stories are not a religious allegory, they do dramatize the battle of good against evil that is central to a religious view of our “earthly existence.”