But Dudley’s close encounter with the cold terror of the dementors seriously shakes him and forces him to confront himself in a new way, requiring a radical readjustment of his previous sense of himself. As Harry knows, the dementors cause Dudley to relive the worst moments of his life. All of Dudley’s intellectual habits that were designed to reconfigure or push away the awful truth are stripped away. For the first time, Dudley sees clearly who he truly is—“spoiled, pampered, bullying”—and begins to interpret his place in the world properly.7 When Dumbledore later speaks of “the appalling damage” that Petunia and Vernon have “inflicted upon [this] unfortunate boy,” perhaps Dudley is finally in a position to hear and accept Dumbledore’s diagnosis, even if his parents are not.8
Dudley’s obstinate prejudgments finally change so that he can receive and understand the truth. This new perspective on reality and his own place within it enables Dudley finally to recognize Harry’s courage and capacity to help, and to feel gratitude for Harry’s rescuing him and perhaps even a certain admiration, if not affection, for his magical family member.
Betrayed by Biases
Dudley’s experience isn’t unique but rather reflects the similar experiences of J. K. Rowling’s other characters. Harry’s temperament, biases, and expectations shape his own intellectual habits. Just consider Harry’s ongoing prejudice against Severus Snape, his initial fear that Sirius Black is out to get him, his misplaced trust in the imposter Mad-Eye Moody, his confidence in the veracity of his own dreams, and his trust in the Half-Blood Prince’s potions book.
These habits, in turn, blind Harry to the reality of the situations around him. He can’t see where the real dangers lie, who truly means him harm, and what’s actually going on. He’s oblivious to his own liability to deception and the potential harm of the Sectumsempra spell. Harry often comes at his world with the wrong sort of expectations and questions and, as a result, doesn’t end up with the right sort of answers. Because it’s Harry’s perspective we readers experience, we, too, are likely to interpret the unfolding events through the wrong filter.
In similar ways, other characters misjudge the situations and the people around them. Dumbledore’s youthful infatuation with Gellert Grindelwald feeds his ill-conceived dreams about wizards ruling the world “for the greater good.”9 Merope Gaunt is attracted to the wealthy Tom Riddle and desires to escape her miserable home life, leading her to think that Riddle might truly fall in love with her, even if she has to assist the process with a potion. In Deathly Hallows, Hermione Granger, Harry, and Ron Weasley find their own fears, suspicions, and biases magnified by the locket Horcrux. They end up misreading one another until Ron finally runs off in a fit of paranoia, jealousy, and hurt. Likewise, the Malfoys’ lust for pureblood power impels them to underestimate the depths of evil to which Voldemort would sink.
In each case, prejudgments make the characters misread the truth until the pain of banging up against reality forces them to rethink. This is why the truth is something to care about: false beliefs do not accurately depict the world and thus prove to be an unreliable map for navigating through it.
Dangerous Dreams
Let’s consider a specific example involving Harry. In Order of the Phoenix, Harry is understandably disturbed by his insight into Voldemort’s thoughts. Such flashes of vision mostly happen when Harry is asleep and dreaming, when his mind is at its most “relaxed and vulnerable.”10
Yet Harry remains cocky in his own sense of mission in opposing Voldemort, wrongly believing that he uniquely understands Voldermort’s true nature and capacities. So Harry comes to trust the truth of his dreams as a transparent window and privileged perspective into Voldemort’s own mind. Dumbledore, however, warns Harry that if he can see into Voldemort’s mind, then Voldemort can probably see into Harry’s mind as well. And if Voldemort becomes aware of his connection to Harry, he could use his formidable powers of Legilimency to manipulate and deceive Harry.
Harry, confident in his own ideas, discounts Dumbledore’s warnings. Even when Dumbledore emphatically warns Harry that he “must study Occlumency,” Harry neglects to practice and quickly falls prey to new dreams.11 Although Dumbledore himself sent Harry to Snape for lessons in Occlumency, Harry’s suspicions against Snape lead him to resist the training. Harry suggests instead that the lessons are making things worse. When Hermione urges him to keep practicing Occlumency and to work harder at it, Harry likewise rejects her advice in a fit of frustration. His later conversation with Sirius Black suggests that Harry never really saw why Occlumency was at all important. It’s tempting, therefore, to think that Snape’s accusation hits a bit too close to the truth: “Perhaps you actually enjoy having these visions and dreams, Potter. Maybe they make you feel special—important?”12
The Cost of Overconfidence
In this case, the price of Harry’s prejudices is profound: the death of his godfather, Sirius Black. During his History of Magic O.W.L., Harry dozes and sees Sirius being tortured by Voldemort in the Department of Mysteries. His immediate reaction is to begin plotting some way of getting into the Ministry of Magic to rescue Sirius.
Hermione raises a series of reasonable objections.13 Rather than doubt his own certainty, however, Harry snaps back at Hermione. He even turns Dumbledore’s warnings on their heads in order to prop up his own beliefs, interpreting the Occlumency lessons as proof that his dreams must be real. Hermione finally persuades Harry to check first whether Sirius is still at Grimmauld Place before trying a rescue. Using Professor Umbridge’s office fireplace to connect to Sirius’s home, Harry finds only the lugubrious and unreliable house-elf Kreacher there. Kreacher is only too happy to confirm Harry’s belief that Sirius had left for the Department of Mysteries. This is all Harry needs, so he single-mindedly undertakes the “rescue” that will lead to Sirius’s death.
What are we to make of this? Was Kreacher’s testimony enough of a fact-check to justify Harry’s rescue attempt? Or was Harry again led astray by the bent of his own intellect and emotions, now twisted in the hands of Voldemort’s craftiness? The danger of not thinking clearly is that Harry begins to see certain “evidence” as reliable that should instead be considered suspicious. Too often, Harry underestimates the many ways he’s far less objective in assessing the evidence than he might like to think.
Nothing up to this point in the story would suggest that Kreacher’s testimony is worth taking seriously. Kreacher’s behavior seems pretty shady as Harry interviews him; he appears “highly delighted about something,” with signs of recent injury to his hands, chuckling and cackling at Harry’s interrogations.14 Indeed, as Dumbledore later points out, he had warned Sirius that his lack of concern and coldness toward Kreacher could have dangerous consequences. Harry, moreover, is acting all by himself in his trust of Kreacher’s testimony because he never bothers to share with his friends that the house-elf was his source.
We shouldn’t be too hard on Harry, however. He is still only a fifteen-year-old kid and is acting with noble intentions. The dangers to which he falls prey remind us of times when we ourselves—because of either youth or cockiness, laziness or impetuousness—have seen what we wanted to see, thanks to blinders that blocked or skewed our picture of reality.
Memories Help Make Meaning
Memory plays a crucial role in how our biases and intellectual habits form, develop, and reshape. If we forget the past, individually or as a culture, we lose knowledge that has already been gained, and we lose valuable tools by which our knowledge may grow. Thus, time can be the enemy of understanding, closing us off from the resources of the past that are necessary for knowing the present. What’s already happened can disappear and be lost forever, entirely forgotten, unless traces of the past somehow persist into the present. We can speak of these traces of the past as “memories,” especially as they register in our experience and consciousness.
In his classic autobiography, the Confessions, the philosopher St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) tried to explain the
nature of time and time’s connection to memory. He noted that the past no longer exists and the future hasn’t yet come into existence. How, then, can the past stay with us? Moreover, the present, as the place where the past and the future meet, has no duration of its own. What, then, is this ghostly, fleeting thing we call “time”?15 Augustine’s answer was that time is only fully known in human experience. Through us, the memory of the past comes together with anticipation of the future in our present awareness. How we experience “now” is a function of how the past brings us to this moment with all of the remembered patterns and habits we possess. These, in turn, help us anticipate and move into the future.
We can connect Augustine’s idea with a point from Gadamer. When it comes to knowing and interpreting reality, prejudgments are a kind of memory we can’t do without. Through our prejudgments, what has happened in the past affects how we approach the present and how we view the future. When we realize that prejudgments function almost like memory, we can see why Gadamer connects them with “tradition,” a word that comes to us in English from a Latin verb that means to “pass down” from the past.16
In our prejudgments, memory is first of all personal. Our personal past experiences—how we’re raised and educated, what happens to us growing up, which responses seem to work for us—mold who we become. The way Hermione values books and education was no doubt shaped by her well-educated parents. The older Weasley twins’ shenanigans, not to mention Mr. Weasley’s penchant for tinkering with Muggle artifacts, likely bolster Ron’s understanding that rules are easily bent and meant to be broken.
Memory, however, is also thoroughly social in nature. In the broadest sense, memory isn’t only the traces of past events and personal experiences that we carry around in our heads. Memory also includes all of the traces of the past handed down to us within our language and culture, our artifacts and institutions.17 These, too, mold the intellectual habits, assumptions, and expectations we use to interpret our world and move forward in knowledge, often in ways we’re not even aware of.18
In Rowling’s novels, it’s the Pensieve that symbolizes the power of memory—both individually and socially—and its much-needed role in communicating and forming knowledge. In fact, when Dumbledore explains the Pensieve, he describes its primary function as epistemological: to preserve and organize knowledge. Dumbledore remarks that he sometimes has “too many thoughts and memories crammed into [his] mind.” With the Pensieve, a person simply “siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure.” Not only are the thoughts and the experiences preserved, but it “becomes easier to spot patterns and links . . . when they are in this form.”19 The Pensieve allows its users to step back and look more observantly at themselves in order to gain a fresh perspective.
The Pensieve isn’t only for personal use, however. It also makes memory available to others, reminding us that memory is at root a social phenomenon. Through the Pensieve’s magic, Dumbledore puts Harry in contact with past events he otherwise would never have known about. And these events provide evidence and context that bump up against Harry’s assumptions, provide insight into those around him, and help him to better understand the threats and the opportunities he encounters.
Most of Harry’s experiences with the Pensieve occur under Dumbledore’s direction and provide Harry with information he needs to understand and vanquish Voldemort. Thus, Harry learns of Tom Riddle’s childhood as an orphan, his youthful sadism, his promise as a pupil, and his self-loathing that led him to murder his Muggle family and to buy into pureblood ideology. Harry also learns how Riddle sought immortality, even though it required terrible acts of evil to split his soul and preserve its pieces through dark magic.
In addition, the Pensieve presents reconstructed memories, extracted only with difficulty from Hokey and Morfin Gaunt. Hokey was the house-elf who worked for Hepzibah Smith, from whom Voldemort obtained Slytherin’s locket and Hufflepuff’s cup. Morfin was Merope’s brother, the uncle of Voldemort, whom the young Riddle framed for the murder of his Muggle father and grandparents. With each additional memory, Harry gains more insight into Voldemort’s history and character, his past and present activities, and, most important, his vulnerabilities. Just as Dudley needed true beliefs to replace his false ones, Harry needed a fuller picture of Riddle and his history, as well as crucial details about Snape’s life, to discover how to defeat the Dark Lord.
Moving Past Misdirection
In each book of the series, Rowling allows Harry’s prejudgments and those of the other characters to lead them to false interpretations of their world. But when enough tension builds and enough evidence piles up, it alters their prejudgments until they’re forced to fit reality. Dumbledore’s dreams of wizard supremacy evaporate when his relationship with Grindelwald leads to his sister’s death. Merope’s desire for Tom Riddle’s love dissolves into despair when she stops using the love potion and he abandons her. Ron comes to his senses as soon as he’s away from Harry and Hermione and the influence of the Horcrux. Even the Malfoys begin to see Voldemort for what he truly is once Voldemort’s own ambitions threaten the life of their son, Draco.
Most of all, Harry transforms. When we first meet him, he’s a naive and hesitant kid, just entering the wizarding world, full of curiosity and questions. Although he’s open to learning, he’s sometimes led astray or beyond his abilities by his loyalty to friends, disregard for rules, and desire for a sense of importance and belonging. Later, Harry grows into an impetuous and headstrong teenager, often cocky in his own insights and quick to dismiss both friends and authorities he should trust. Through mistakes, tragedies, and struggles, Harry eventually matures into a remarkably courageous young man, able to discern what’s happening and what must be done.
Right knowledge and good intellectual habits are necessary not only to get the facts straight, but also to exercise virtues such as bravery, loyalty, and generosity. Harry can’t be truly brave, after all, unless he understands the nature of the danger confronting him, what sort of confidence he must marshal in the face of it, and whose future depends on his actions. Likewise, true loyalty to Dumbledore isn’t a matter of minimizing his real faults or clinging to a false, idealized image of who Dumbledore is. Rather, it is to understand that despite Dumbledore’s known faults, his missteps, and his failure to disclose key information, his motives and judgment are worthy of trust. And so, personal transformation of character depends on moving past misjudgments, being open to correction, and cultivating a growing sensitivity to what is right and true. In this way, epistemology is inseparable from ethics.
What Harry and his friends go through as characters, we also experience as readers, because Rowling invites us to see Harry’s world largely through his eyes. Although we may sometimes see beyond Harry’s limited horizon before Harry himself does, Rowling uses narrative misdirection in ways that reinforce our mistaken assumptions and guide us away from crucial questions. Many of our prejudgments remain unchallenged, and we, too, along with Harry, go through a process of discovery and reinterpretation on the way to knowledge. And, returning to where we began, if a person such as Dudley Dursley can come to appreciate Harry, there’s good hope for even the most resistant and unsympathetic of readers.
The genius of Rowling’s work lies not only in its powerful storytelling, but also in its power to change us as readers. If we allow Rowling’s magic to work on us, it will engage, challenge, and transform our intellectual habits. As we follow Harry and the other characters, we don’t merely become better readers, we become better people.
NOTES
1 Chamber of Secrets, p. 5.
2 . Deathly Hallows, p. 42 .
3 Philosophers distinguish several types of knowing. “Personal” knowing is a matter of immediate acquaintance (knowing Luna Lovegood, knowing the Leaky Cauldron). “Propositional” knowing is a matter of knowing that such-and-such is the case, whether or not one is personally acquainted with the relevan
t object (knowing that Hufflepuff’s cup is in Gringotts, knowing that thestrals are visible only to those who have seen death). And “practical” or “procedural” knowing is a matter of how to do something (knowing how to Apparate, knowing how to inflict the Cruciatus Curse). Often, these various kinds of knowing intertwine. Here, we’ll focus mostly on acts of self-understanding, which typically involve both personal knowing and knowledge that such-and-such is the case.
4 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., translated by J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), especially pp. 265-379.
5 Sorcerer’s Stone, pp. 1, 21.
6 Goblet of Fire, pp. 26-27.
7 Order of the Phoenix, p. 30.
8 Half-Blood Prince, p. 55.
9 Deathly Hallows, p. 357.
10 Order of the Phoenix, p. 531.
11 Ibid., pp. 622, 635.
The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles Page 19