The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy

Hogwarts for Muggles

William Irwin, Gregory Bassham, William Irwin, Gregory Bassham

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470627358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A philosophical exploration of the entire seven-book Harry Potter series

Harry Potter has been heralded as one of the most popular book series of all time and the philosophical nature of Harry, Hermione, and Ron's quest to rid the world of its ultimate evil is one of the many things that make this series special. The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy covers all seven titles in J.K. Rowling's groundbreaking series and takes fans back to Godric's Hollow to discuss life after death, to consider what moral reasoning drove Harry to choose death, and to debate whether Sirius Black is a man or a dog.

With publication timed to coincide with the release of the movie Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1), this book will be the definitive guide for all fans looking to appreciate the series on a deeper level.

• Covers a range of intriguing topics such as the redemption of Severus Snape, the power of love, and destiny in the wizarding world
• Gives you a new perspective on Harry Potter characters, plot lines, and themes
• Makes a perfect companion to the Harry Potter books and movies

Packed with interesting ideas and insights, The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy is an ideal companion for anyone interested in unraveling the subtext and exploring the greater issues at work in the story.

PART ONE

THE HORCRUX OF THE MATTER: DESTINY, IDENTITY, AND THE SOUL

1

THE SOUL IN HARRY POTTER

Scott Sehon

Souls play a huge part in the Harry Potter saga. At different points in the books, Harry, Sirius Black, and Dudley Dursley narrowly avoid having their souls sucked out by dementors; Barty Crouch Jr. does not escape this fate. And notoriously, Lord Voldemort intentionally creates six Horcruxes, and unintentionally creates a seventh in Harry, thereby dividing his own soul into eight parts, all of which must be destroyed before Voldemort can die.

So, what is the soul? In Harry’s world, people have souls that generally survive bodily death. But it is not entirely obvious how souls work and what their nature is. Over the centuries, philosophers and theologians have proposed and debated various accounts of the soul. In this chapter, we’ll survey some of those accounts before turning to the questions of how souls work in J. K. Rowling’s books and whether her picture of the soul is plausible.

Philosophical Conceptions of the Soul

While competing conceptions of the soul are legion, we’ll focus here on five different philosophical views.

The Life-Source View

According to some ancient Greek philosophers, the soul accounts for life itself. In this view, the essential difference between living and nonliving things is that living things have a soul and nonliving things do not. Yet because the lowest animals and even plants are alive, this means that all plants and animals have souls. Blast-Ended Skrewts and even gillyweed would have souls, according to this view. These days, not too many people think that this conception of the soul is correct.

The Sentience View

According to a second conception, the soul is responsible for sentience , the ability some organisms have to feel pleasure and pain and sense the world around them. If an organism is consciously aware of its surroundings, then the organism feels, it has experiences. According to the sentience view, the soul is responsible for sentience, along with all higher-level thought. Plants, one assumes, do not have sentient awareness and so, in this conception, would not have souls. (Of course, in the universe of Harry Potter some magical plants, like the Whomping Willow, do have some direct sensation of the world and would thus have souls.)

The Cartesian View

A third view of the soul further narrows the scope of ensouled organisms. According to a view associated with the philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), the soul is not responsible for sensation and awareness. Descartes thought that those features of mental life could be accounted for by purely material causes; however, he believed that mere material causes would never be able to explain our ability to use language and formulate complex beliefs. For this, we need souls. So Descartes said that our immaterial soul is responsible only for higher-level cognitive functions, including beliefs, desires, and, especially, our ability to use language.

One consequence of the Cartesian view is that nonhuman animals do not have souls—at least, if those animals lack linguistic ability and higher-level thought. Descartes was willing to accept this and thought that nonhuman animals were entirely soulless. Some of the magical creatures in the Harry Potter stories might blur this distinction within the Cartesian view. For instance, owls seem to understand human speech, although they don’t speak in return, and magical pets like Crookshanks seem much more intelligent than your average cat.

According to the life-source, sentience, and Cartesian views, the soul is usually thought to be some sort of immaterial substance, something not made of matter but still associated with, or connected to, a person’s material body. If souls are in fact like that, then there is a possibility that the soul could survive a person’s bodily death. On the other hand, there are many philosophers and scientists who would deny the existence of a soul, if what we mean by a soul is some sort of entity independent of the brain and the body. This leads to a fourth view of the soul: materialism.

Materialism

Materialists hold that ultimately there is nothing but matter and physical forces. All mental functioning, including language and emotions, is due to physical processes in the brain, and there simply is no extra entity above and beyond this. Needless to say, according to a materialist view, there is no life after death; with bodily death, the processes that underlie our mental and emotional life simply cease, and that’s all there is to it.

The Sentimental View

In everyday talk, the word soul is often used in a way that does not clearly correspond with any of the more abstract conceptions just discussed. From the Hoagy Carmichael tune, we have: “Heart and soul, I fell in love with you./Heart and soul, the way a fool would do, madly.”

Or we might speak of a person seeking his or her soul mate. We talk of people having good souls. We might describe music or art as soulful or as soulless.

These sorts of everyday sentimentalist uses of the word soul need not be taken to imply any particular metaphysical view. That is, they don’t commit one to any view on which the soul is an actual substance existing independently of the body. If we say, “Unlike her later work, the artist’s early paintings were soulless,” clearly we are not suggesting that the artist literally lacked and then later somehow obtained an immaterial soul. Rather, we are suggesting that the artist’s early work was uninspired or somehow lacked genuine emotional depth. Or if I say that I love her, heart and soul, or that we are soul mates, I am commenting about the emotional depth of my attachment and the deep connection we feel for each other.¹ If we say that someone has bared her soul, we mean she has let us see through the superficial trappings and down to what is most deeply important to her. These uses of the word soul are essentially metaphorical ways of talking about that which makes us most human and makes life most full: our deepest emotions, our ability to love, our moral conscience. Materialist philosophers don’t need to renounce any of these ways of talking and certainly don’t need to go back and translate Hoagy Carmichael’s lyrics into some sort of thesis about brain states (“C-fibers firing, I fell in love with you . . . ”).

With these sundry options on the table, we are now ready to turn to Harry Potter and try to place the conception of the soul as developed in the story. To foreshadow, we’ll see that Rowling’s picture of the soul is an interesting mix of views. In many ways, it seems that her conception of the soul is closest to the sentimental view, but she combines it with a metaphysics that incorporates parts of the Cartesian and sentience views.

Ghosts and “Going On”

Materialism is the dominant view among philosophers and scientists in our world today. But materialism is false in the world of Harry Potter, where souls typically survive bodily death. Here is Hermione Granger’s explanation of souls:

“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. ²

So we know that in Rowling’s world, the soul survives destruction of the body. Beyond the fact of survival, it’s not entirely clear what happens to the soul of a deceased person. In Order of the Phoenix, in the room at the Ministry of Magic where Sirius dies, there is a mysterious archway with a veil, and both Harry and Luna Lovegood hear voices from beyond the veil. Luna’s interpretation is that dead people exist just beyond and that we will see them again. Later, Nearly Headless Nick tells Harry that the recently killed Sirius will have “gone on,” but he has no further light to shed on what happens in the ordinary case. Nick, of course, is a ghost, and he explains to Harry that a wizard is able to avoid “going on” by remaining behind as a ghostly imprint of his former self. He says that few wizards choose this path, and perhaps it is not too hard to see why. Nick lives on, sort of, in a ghostly imitation of a body, one that can see and be seen, hear and be heard, but that otherwise walks through walls and has few physical effects. Rowling’s ghosts apparently induce an icy sensation when a person has contact with them, and Moaning Myrtle is somehow able to make splashes in toilets, but beyond this, they seem to mostly lack bodily effects. Voldemort presumably could have had this sort of immortality all along, but it is a form of immortality devoid of real physical contact and, more important for Voldemort, devoid of power.

Besides being a ghost, there are several other ways in which souls can appear on earth after their bodies have died. First, there is the case of Voldemort himself, who, because of his Horcruxes, survives bodily death when his killing curse aimed at baby Harry backfires. We’ll talk more about Horcruxes later, but at this point it is worth noting that when Voldemort’s soul continues, it is in an incredibly weak form; he later describes his condition at the time as “less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost.”³ In that state, Voldemort needs to attach himself to a living body to have any physical effects at all.

Second, there is the semi-ghostly condition in which Harry twice sees his departed loved ones. In the graveyard scene in Goblet of Fire, Cedric Diggory, Bertha Jorkins, Frank Bryce, and Harry’s parents appear out of Voldemort’s wand. These ghostly figures look to Harry much more solid than ordinary ghosts, and they have enough of a physical presence that James Potter tells Harry that they will give him some time to escape once the wand connection is broken. Similarly, when Harry uses the Resurrection Stone in Deathly Hallows he sees Sirius, Remus Lupin, and his parents, and it seems that they are again, at least in some sense, real. Less substantial than living bodies and here only temporarily, they are nonetheless not mere ghosts; they are described as “neither ghost nor truly flesh.”⁴

So, it seems that although souls normally “go on” in some undescribed way, disembodied souls can stay or return to earth in certain circumstances, and when they do, they take one of a variety of forms, ranging from Voldemort’s almost entirely nonphysical state to Nick’s ghostly state, to the temporary but slightly more substantial physical states of the souls brought back by the Resurrection Stone. ⁵ All of this would be impossible if materialism were true. So, materialism is false within the Potter universe. But to learn more about the nature of souls, we need to consider dementors and Horcruxes.

The Dementor’s Kiss

Dementors suck good feelings and happy memories out of people. Worse than that, they can destroy your soul. As Lupin explains to Harry:

“You see, the dementor lowers its hood only to use its last and worst weapon.”

“What’s that?”

“They call it the Dementor’s Kiss,” said Lupin, with a slightly twisted smile. “It’s what dementors do to those they wish to destroy utterly. I suppose there must be some kind of mouth under there, because they clamp their jaws upon the mouth of the victim and—and suck out his soul.”

[. . .]

“What—they kill—?”

“Oh no,” said Lupin. “Much worse than that. 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. And your soul is gone forever . . . lost.” ⁶

This is very interesting. A wizard’s soul normally survives bodily death, and the natural further assumption would be that souls are immortal. But with dementors around, not all souls achieve this happy state, for dementors can apparently destroy souls completely. You can still exist even without your soul, however. Lupin’s words here are open to more than one interpretation. He might merely mean your body can still exist and keep functioning biologically as long as your organs are still intact. According to this reading, the Dementor’s Kiss would leave the victim in something like a permanent vegetative state, in which basic metabolic functions continue but in which there is no substantial mental life at all. Yet if this is what Lupin means, it’s odd that he portrays it as the continued existence of the person but in a state worse than death. If the soul is the source of all conscious mental life, and if all of that disappears after the Dementor’s Kiss, then it would seem more appropriate to say that the person truly is no more, that the empty shell of a body is just that—a body but not a person.

Because Lupin is insistent that a person can continue to exist without a soul, a different picture seems to be suggested. This is speculative, but here’s my gues...