Guest Essay: Toward an Epistemology of Interpretation, by David Jones

Regular commenter David Jones, better known here as “Dave the Longwinded,” has contributed the following essay.  I commend it to your careful attention, and I look forward to your comments!

“Toward an Epistemology of Interpretation”

One of the great tropes in Harry Potter is Rowling’s use of magic as more than simply a functional tool for her characters.  It surely is a profound defensive weapon, an immense aid in regular housework, and an interesting method of record keeping.  But, it is also an epistemological tool.  The most profound magic in the entire series always sheds light on the characters’ inner lives.  The patronus charm demands a happy memory, a boggart preys upon a person’s worst fears while she must use humor to defeat both the boggart and the fear, and the Mirror of Erised gives the gazer a peek at her deepest desires.  Magic is not just a tool for action, but it is also a tool for reflection, providing both the reader and the attendant character with insight about that character’s self.  When seen epistemologically, Rowling’s use of magic highlights its role as symbolic and/or metaphoric within the narrative and magic becomes something of a metatextual critique on the use of symbolism and metaphor as a tool for understanding themes concerning one’s inner self:  choice, love, anger, revenge, righteousness, desire, etc.  We might be able to look at some of this magic and develop an idea of how a character achieves knowledge in the books, the importance of certain brands of knowledge, and ask a couple of interesting questions:  can “faith” be a method for gaining knowledge, or a kind of knowledge all its own?  Or is faith an alternative to knowledge, supplanting it in times of crisis?  I won’t try to hit every instance in all seven books where these questions and concepts are relevent, but I will try to offer enough examples of a range of magical objects and incantations where I think this is at work.  After all, I think it’s the discussion all of you might offer up afterward that will prove far more interesting.

Playing a Little with “Faith”
Since most of us that participate here at Sword of Gryffindor would agree that the Harry Potter books are deeply Christian in much of their construction (or, at least spiritual), the concept of faith in its religious context is important.  But I also want to examine it a little from the philosophical side.  Distinctions between faith and reason are profoundly important in philosophical epistemology.  Plato and Aristotle posit a “formal world” in which all concepts and things have pure existence, and that those things are imitated imperfectly in the material world with which we interact with.  Yet, neither Plato nor Aristotle offer very much in the way of evidence or argumentation as to why they believe this formal world exists.  It’s generally just presented as a given fact.  By the time Scottish philosopher David Hume rolls around in the 18th century, empiricism as a method of reason leaves him and many of his peers in states of epistemological crisis.  One of Hume’s famous arguments in the Treatise of Human Nature ends with the possibility that nothing can be “known” with certainty.
In this state of being, and about virtually anything we might want to know, we have to assume something to be the case without evidence that proves it so.  In epistemology, this is a foundational problem.  Most epistemologists accept that knowledge is contingent on three essential conditions:  1)Justification, or sufficient grounds/evidence; 2)Truth, or that the evidence proves something to be the case beyond reasonable doubt; and 3)Belief, that if the first two conditions are met regarding a particular subject, then it is only reasonable to “believe” it to be the case.  More commonly, knowledge is then called a justified, true belief.  But, working our way backwards, we often find that the justification for the truth value of something is often only a belief in itself.  It’s an absurd case, but take a famous example from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to demonstrate the point:

1)Wood burns.
2)Witches burn.
Conclusion:  Witches must be made of wood.

In this case, there’s at least one primary unstated assumption in the argument:  that all things that burn must be made of wood.  So, in order to prove the above argument, we need to create a new one that backs this assumption, or belief.  And if we could support this assumption (which is obviously crazy), then we would almost certainly be relying on some other assumption that we’d have to argue about.  And this pattern keeps repeating itself.  We’re left with a potentially infinite regression of beliefs without uncontestable justification for any of them.  In other words faith might be a component to every piece of knowledge, not just that of the divine.  [Check out the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, both free university maintained web-based resources that will give you far more depth on these issues.]
John Granger’s first installment on “The Christian in Deathly Hallows” examines Harry’s crisis of faith in Dumbledore’s tutelage and abilities:

After the first chapters of Deathly Hallows, however, in the face of contradictory evidence, his faith in his mentor, in Dumbledore’s virtue, and his mission for Harry to defeat Voldemort is broken.
[…]

He has his positive experience and he is learning what Dumbledore never shared with him; if the two contradict as obviously as his experience and these reports do, how is the Seeker to choose to believe one way or the other and maintain his sanity? In Harry’s mind, “choosing” your beliefs is a little like “choosing” what you see and hear, namely, the mark of an idiot. You believe ‘what is true’ not ‘what you want to believe.’

One of Granger’s main theses in this piece is that “choice” comes out again, playing a central role in the acquisition of knowledge.  Harry has to figure a way to decide whether Dumbledore’s path is one he is willing to follow.  But his reasoning for doing so has to be based on something other than the hard “fact” that Harry wants.  His perceptions of Dumbledore have failed because his foundational beliefs, based on a “truth” for which the “justification” has been cracked, are disintegrating.
This is the inherent problem for most of us concerning methods of deconstruction.  If all narratives (the stories through which we learn things) inherently contradict themselves and fall into a pile of incoherent nonsense, then what are we left to believe?  Granger also points out this mechanism at work in the competing narratives told by Elphias Doge and Rita Skeeter, and that neither source seems trustworthy on its face.  This is the most open critique by Rowling of the epistemological dilemma described above, and of the postmodern understanding of it.
So, what do we do now…?

Rowling’s Potential Solution(s)
Rowling uses magic to offer up solutions to these problems, though they are not always perfect solutions.  Some magic recreates the character’s emotions, thoughts, or memories in a form that is “physical”, at least in the sense that the character can interact with that form in an external way.  Harry can see his family in the Mirror of Erised, he can see and hear events from a person’s memories in the Pensieve, patronuses can speak and they can repel dementors.  These are just a few examples, but they seem to suggest that Harry can learn something about himself and others by experiencing some of these things in a way that seems undeniably “factual” because they have a phenomenal presence.  They take on forms with which Harry can physically interact and of which his physical senses can formulate information.  It’s like watching one’s internal struggles step outside her own body and perform some kind of drama in front of her.  We’re left with no reason to question whether or not the people appearing in the Mirror of Erised are indeed Harry’s family.  We have no reason to doubt the veracity of the memories experienced in the Pensieve, save for Slughorn’s initial memory of his conversations with Riddle-the-teenager about Horcruxes, which is rather clearly tampered with, and even that is rectified before the end of Half-Blood Prince.  Patronus charms are more problematic in that their representations are symbolic, but the person casting it must have a clearly defined memory in her conscious mind.  Harry is facing these phenomena in ways that he cannot doubt.

When Harry first finds the Mirror of Erised, he does so only after he’s tried something else.  He’s searched the library for the name of Nicolas Flamel, a kind of knowledge that would be pretty straightforward:  who Flamel is and what he did that was so important.  But Harry has to narrowly escape being caught without succeeding at this particular quest, and in his escape stumbles into the room where the Mirror is stored.  Harry’s reaction upon first seeing the reflection is a catalytic event for the alchemical transformations and the hero’s journey we’ve spent so much time with here at SoG:

He had to clap his hands to his mouth to stop himself screaming.  He whirled around.  His heart was pounding far more furiously than when the book had screamed—for he had seen not only himself in the mirror, but a whole crowd of people standing behind him.

But the room was empty.  Breathing very fast, he turned slowly back to the mirror […] Or were they invisible too?  Was he in fact in a room full of invisible people and this mirror’s trick was that it reflected them, invisible or not?  (PS Ch. 12)

Harry is doing the first thing necessary to gain knowledge:  asking questions and analyzing the data presented to him.  But, ultimately, Harry gives up figuring out what’s happening for the sake of simply soaking in the experience.  It takes Dumbledore’s mediation of the Mirror’s purpose for Harry to truly understand the mechanism of the Mirror, and thus understand its process of “[showing] us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts”, a heavy piece of knowledge to drop on the head of an eleven year old orphan.  He must now understand not only what his desires are, but why they are his desires, and what they suggest about him.  And this comes to fruition in Philosopher’s Stone at the end when Harry uses the Mirror to acquire the Philosopher’s Stone (a symbol of the knowledge of life and death) without the desire to use it.
Rowling is toying with her readers here, setting them up to learn something, but instead showing them something else that is far more important.  Instead of learning about Flamel, we have one of the most significant scenes in the series in which Harry has one of his first major conversations with Dumbledore, comes face-to-face with his family for the first time, and must use the experience to learn something about himself, then put that knowledge to good use at the end of the book.

The same might be said of the Pensieve episodes from book 4 onward.  They are not only for teaching Harry about Snape’s defining moments or Riddle’s habits and weaknesses, but about illuminating components of Harry’s own self.  In Order of the Phoenix, Harry empathizes with Snape for the first time, seeing his own self within Snape’s experiences, both figuratively and literally.  He recognizes Snape’s age as close to his own, yet he recognizes the fifteen year old James as being “himself but with deliberate mistakes” (Ch. 28).  The very language of this scene sets up a huge inversion of knowledge about Harry’s self and his relationships with Snape and James summarized at the end of the chapter:  “it was that he knew how it felt to be humiliated in the middle of a circle of onlookers, knew exactly how Snape had felt as his father taunted him, and that judging from what he had just seen, his father had been every bit as arrogant as Snape had always told him” (emphasis added).  One of Harry’s personal quests up to this point includes a restoration of his heritage by understanding his similarities with his mother and father—in this way Harry first tries to understand himself, that he is essentially the sum of their parts.  Now, Harry is confronted with the fact that he doesn’t want to be exactly like James.  And empathy with his enemies is something Harry’s not particularly comfortable with:  “’Could you possibly be feeling sorry for Lord Voldemort?’  ‘No,’ Harry said quickly” (HBP Ch. 13).

He must formulate his own identity with knowledge that is not purely a product of his lineage, which is ironic considering how much Harry testifies to his loathing of the pureblood/mudblood ideology.  For all his espousal of such, this scene serves as the deconstructive moment wherein Harry’s knowledge is subverted and broken because what he wants to believe is some version of that ideology.  It does not have the same kind of prejudicial foundation or outcome (at least not per se), but it is evident up to this point that Harry hasn’t fully understood himself as an individual, thus how or why his own choices are significant isn’t apparent to him either.  After the debacle at the Ministry of Magic in the final chapters of OotP, Harry is left questioning himself, his motives, and their consequences, especially after he deliberately subverts Occlumency lessons in favor of nurturing the psychical link he shares with Voldemort and sets in motion the chain of events that will culminate in Sirius’ death.
As we’ve all pointed out at one time or another here, “choice” is relevant, yet again.  The purpose of choice in the books is not simply about moral responsibility, but it is a crucial tool in solving Harry’s epistemological crises.  Because he must choose, he must participate in the construction of his knowledge.  And herein lies Rowling’s answer to the postmodern dilemma:  that knowledge is not just a bit of information to be directed into the truth seeker’s conscious mind, but that it is something that demands input from her.  Whereas postmodernism posits this as a problem that establishes the instability of any Truth, the Harry Potter books accept “choice” as a tool, imperfect but the best we have, for pursuing it.

By the end of the series, we see Harry gaining knowledge in more conventional and troubling ways.  What Harry “learns” of Dumbledore’s past leaves his faith “broken”, in Granger’s terms.  And this creates the epistemological crisis for Harry:  if Dumbledore is an unknown quantity, perhaps more flawed than Harry had ever before presumed, then can Dumbledore be trusted?  And this is a problem Dumbledore himself has deepened in HBP with his warning about entering the “murky marshes” of “speculation” (Ch. 13).  Harry’s primary sources for information on Dumbledore are from a friend whose perceptions of Dumbledore are flawed by intense admiration (even intellectual subservience) versus the tabloid reportage/speculation of Rita Skeeter, who is firmly fixed as an opportunist willing to sensationalize her subject for her own personal gain.  And the journey through the wilderness partially engineered by Dumbledore is another imperfect source of information, from the gifts bequeathed to the Harry, Hermione, and Ron in Dumbledore’s will to the nature of the distinction between Hallows and Horcruxes.  Harry has to find something that helps him reformulate Dumbledore from the texts given to him, both literal (Skeeter’s unauthorized biography is one example) and figurative (the children’s book given to Hermione).

Without Magic
But, in the hour when Harry’s epistemological crises are at their fullest, Harry’s response is decisive, and it comes in a moment that is decidedly crucial and non-magical:  Dobby’s death.  The event is fully a sacrifice on Dobby’s part.  He risks and ends his life to confront his old masters (one of his greatest fears) for the sake of one his greatest joys (the very existence of Harry).  When Harry buries Dobby, he “want[s] to do it properly […] Not by magic” (Ch. 24).  By asking for a spade, Harry is casting aside the magical for the sake of the mundane.  His tool is one that depends solely on his own will and action; it has no sentience in itself.  It cannot react of its own accord like his wand did against Voldemort earlier.  And the knowledge Harry acquires in this moment is deeply affective and profound:

He dug with a kind of fury, relishing the manual work, glorying in the non-magic of it, for every drop of his sweat and every blister felt like a gift to the elf who had saved their lives.

His scar burned, but he was master of the pain; he felt it, yet was apart from it.  He had learned control at last, learned to shut his mind to Voldemort, the very thing Dumbledore had wanted him to learn from Snape.  (Ch. 24)

“Control” is fundamental, the same as the subtlety that Snape demanded of Harry in Order of the Phoenix.  Harry tends to learn more through his physical experiences than he does through his intellectual processes.  Classes are always presented as a drag that he has to endure.  Yet, when Harry has to act on instinct, he almost always succeeds.  Look through all seven books and you’ll see instances of both Harry’s “mind racing” and his heart “pounding” or “racing”.  When the former is in play, Harry is almost always confused or troubled, like the moments he leaves Snape’s class after a particularly nasty session.  When the latter is in play, Harry’s mind is clear and he always understands what is going on.  For Harry, knowledge is a physical and emotional experience, something Granger’s essay calls “cardiac intelligence rather than cranial intelligence”.

One of Dumbledore’s great insights into Harry’s character is in Harry’s need to act.  Thus, instead of teaching Harry a list of spells or defensive magic, he moves Harry into the realm of taking information and conjecturing with it.  The Pensieve lessons in book 6 are preparatory lessons necessary for Harry’s need to make decisions in book 7.  They not only foreshadow what is to come, but provide an epistemological foundation from which Harry can work, even if he doesn’t realize it at the time.  And Harry’s decision to pursue the Horcruxes instead of the Hallows follows this same routine (Granger points this out as well).  Again, Granger has beat me to the punch (no big shock there…).  Harry’s realization of the mirror during the scene in Malfoy Manor and his acknowledgement of the eyes he’s been trying to deny for many pages sets Harry on his course:  to find and destroy the Horcruxes—Dumbledore’s original mission for him (DH Ch. 24).

The Last Word
If we return to the three conditions laid out by epistemology above, then we see the problem as one of justification.  Rowling establishes a world in Harry Potter in which it isn’t the data or information that is questionable.  Instead, her dilemma is that the characters have to do something with it.  Rowling obviously isn’t a skeptic, certainly not in the Humean sense described above.  She believes that her characters can and should trust their senses.  It’s always the case that they do “see” something, and that they almost always have some idea of the true nature of what they’ve experienced.  But, by demanding that they interact with their perceptions, they don’t always interpret them correctly, and the interpretation is what matters.  Harry’s spends six and a half books letting his prejudices color these interpretations.  We spend much of the series thinking that Snape is responsible for some evil deed, then wondering if he was responsible for the evil deed of the series:  Dumbledore’s murder.  This scene in Half-Blood Prince is the ultimate example of this.  In order to understand that scene, we have to shed our prejudices toward Snape.  We’ve been left with a perspective that has vilified Snape for years, quite literally; yet, we were all left wondering what really happened on the Astronomy Tower, to sort through the clues, the red herrings, and our own prejudices to posit an answer, an interpretation.