Intro and Disclaimers
1. This is one of those funky posts that comes out of my head in trying to work out my understanding of what I have thought is so great in Harry Potter, and usually these types of random posts that are limited in scope as far as the content covered in HP have to do with philosophical matters. Here the HP thing is apparition and the philosophical/psychological thing is phenomenology of body.
2. I'm not an expert in the field of phenomenology, and like Hargid waltzing with Madame Maxim, I will probably step on the toes of a few professional philosophers in my descriptions of what might be much finer points, especially in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. But, as a philosophy major in undergrad and having been friends with a fair number of philosophy grad students during my time as a theology grad student, and having had a share of coursework in continental post-modern philosophy even in my own doctoral course work (for instance, a course under the systematics wing of the theology department covering contemporary philosophy in relation to theology), I think I can make a stab at a general picture that at least does not do too much damage and that gets enough detail for making the comparison with the Harry Potter element I want to discuss (apparition) to be useful.
3. I hope I am not doing what I have noted some doing, a thing that I have noted as alright for them but that is not what I want to be doing here, which is to use a thing in Harry Potter simply as a springboard from which to embark on a whole different exposition of something entirely different that I have studied. I really am interested in this discussion broadening the understanding of Harry Potter's literary artistry.
4. Since the phenomenology material below centers so much on "embodiment," the reader might want to check out my comments on "body" and "flesh" in my post on Tolkien's "Incarnational imagination."
Phenomenology, Psychology, and the Experiential Level
Normally I would probably try to get a hook in first with the concrete details on the element from Harry Potter (apparition), but, in the present situation, because of the nature of phenomenology and a few other things, I want to get some clarifications and the presentation of that philosophical system set first.
One of the things that particularly requires clarity is that I am not officially connecting any of this with the other stuff I have been doing on body/flesh or an experiential element in Incaranational imagination and chiastic reading (the mention of my other post above is simply "you might find this interesting too"). It's not that I don't think there can be any eventual connections between those things and this, but this is a more limited application thing. The other recent work is more this broader thing I am (probably poorly) trying do of a more holistic interpretive theory of literature as such (that description would be longer, but I ran out of pretentious "philosophy sounding" phases :). I do feel like phenomenology probably presents a better philosophical system for examining art, but the present post is really just more like the traditional popular level "philosophy/theology in literary work X," in which part of the schtick is usually the concept that the author was at least somewhat familiar with the philosophical idea (say, Plato's allegory of the cave) and intended to instantiate it, because authorial intent makes things a lot easier to process when looking for "meaning" when doing it on the popular level, which is entirely fine. Obviously I'm hoping that phenomenology is a bit more interestingly connected with the HP element because it is, in and of itself, more interesting than introductory-level understandings of the allegory of the cave (maybe not the original allegory itself, but definitely the introductory level understanding of it required for popular level works). But, ultimately, what I am specifically trying to do in this post is still that more traditional "philosophy in literary work X," rather than tying the content of this post into the larger themes I've been trying to develop recently (chiastic structure, characters as the "face"/experiential level in "body" as a metaphor for literature, Incarnational imagination, etc). Basically, it's more like the "introduction to philosophy in literary work X" project than anything else: whether consciously or not, she did instantiate that thinking (phenomenology of the body) in one particular, limited thing (apparition).
Phenomenology 101
So, the other thing to clear up is ... "what the hell is phenomenology?" I put it this way because I have heard it expressed this way in frustration by those coming from an older tradition of knowing the lines between distinct areas in philosophy like "ontology/metaphysics," "epistemology," and "logic." I'm not knocking that background, and it is actually my own. I also advocate it as a starting point and approach, rather just jettisoning the traditional categories and throwing undergrads in cold to phenomenological discussion ... which usually does not yield "help! I'm so confused!" but rather, "Oh, I get it ... the tradition is bunk and these progressive ideas are right (and others along with them, like certain moral concepts and political concepts)" with not real any actual content of thought behind it (but many nudges and winks from faculty who are looking for devotees to themselves and soldiers for their cause ... not all academics are like this, but I have been in grad school and this kind of academic is definitely not non-existent, and not even a minority). I can't make any great claims to be smarter, and I'm definitely not as well read in phenomenology as those eho work in it regularly. I do think, though, that I may have found a better way in on understanding its core deal than is usually done by the "traditional" approach that says that post-modernity is bunk or by post-moderns who say the tradition is bunk.
So, this will be my "one trick pony" on an initial "way in" on understanding phenomenology. I hope I'm not plagiarizing somebody by quoting them without citing, but I honestly can't remember hearing this from anyone, and so the default assumption is that I came up with it on my own. One of the most famous of Immanual Kant's thoughts in epistemology is the "categorical imperative." This says that there are two "worlds: the "noumenal," which is outside us, and the "phenomenal, which is the world of our impressions inside our minds. The "imperative" means that we never really know the outer world as it really is; what we know in our minds is the sensory data received but only once it is interpreted according to categories we ourselves provide and impose on it (shape is a particularly important one: think about those negative space writing things of the name "Jesus" [I've even included one below] ... whether you use positive space or negative space category in interpreting what you see makes a huge difference in what you see as being "there" objectively). This isn't "imperative" in the sense of "you had better," but rather in the sense of "you can't help but." You cannot get to the noumenal world as it really is; what you encounter will always be the sense data received from it only as interpreted through the categories that your mind has imposed.
I think there is some confusion when one hears the sort of seminal phenomenology motto "back to the things themselves" because, coming out of the tradition of ontology, many think of "things" as external objects. Kant and modern epistemology turned from thinking that we can rely on our sense data as something solid, something set and shared among all humans, from thinking that the content of our perceptions of a thing in the outside, and turned to asking questions of the validity of our knowledge: HOW do we know? how do we know that we know? How do we know that these categories hook onto external reality accurately? Some who see this as a bad idea could take "the things themselves" as a return to un-problematized metaphysics, "things" in the objective ontology sense.
But, for phenomenology, the "things" are the categories in the "mind" (including "mind" itself as a category). Kant was still looking for solid knowledge about the objective world and thought that the categories were solid in and of themselves as long as we do a verification of how they are applied to the data from the external world. The "grounds for ..." in the titles of a number of his works is about this, making sure that we have gotten everything set up right, the "grounding" for doing work of actually establishing an objective ethics using the categories in the mind ... which means that the categories remain pretty much the same for all human minds (if we're to be able to find a universally applicable ethics, say).
Basically, Kant said you can't know the noumenal world without imposing categories on it. Phenomenology says you can't even know Kant's "phenomenal" world without having imposed categories on experiential elements prior to their categorization, elements that can be observed or discovered by observing sense data that is the internal version of the external sense data from the noumenal world of which Kant spoke ... observation work that is the task phenomenology sets itself. In a way, phenomenology applies the same examination of interpretation that Kant applied to thinking about the external/"objective" world, except that it applies it to the "categories" in the mind, no longer taking their definitions to be set.
For example, the concept of "self" is not taken as a solid mental concept that is experienced in the same way by everybody (much less a a real ontological category shared by all human beings) or even experienced at all by some.
One of the places where this confusion over whether "things themselves" are objects in the external world (Kan't noumenal world) or experiential elements that are in the "mind" back beyond even the categories is the fact that there is a school of thought that calls itself "phenomenological realism" (a number in the philosophy department at the university from which I received my MA in theology are the major proponents of that school). It seeks to meld phenomenology, objective realism, and "personalism." I don't really know enough to critique that, but I was at one point talking with a really smart woman who was finishing her philosophy PhD at Fordham in her new office at a small school (College of Mount St Vincent, in Riverdale in the Bronx) where she had just gotten a job while ABD and where I was adjuncting in the Religious Ed department, which shared a big old room with offices all round and cubicles in the middle with philosophy and other liberal arts departmens, and I said something about "and then you have the whole phenomenological realism crowd trying to do their supposed thing," and she just chuckled and said she liked the "supposed" (and she was part of a set of fairly conservative Catholic students whom I knew at Fordham).
Phenomenology and Psychology
Phenomenology is, of course, intimately tied to psychology because one must ask whence come the categories that phenomenology now applies to the older traditional categories. If the concept "self" is not to be taken for granted and if its origin is to be examined in detail, and if we're talking about even more primal acts of categorization back behind the stage of "mind," that is going to be in the stages studied by developmental psychology.
Psychology is all about development of the "ego" (the "I") through experience of behavioral factors (that is, psychology proper ... as I understand it, getting into the organic side is to move into psychiatry as a distinct thing). When academics refer to the "linguistic turn," they mean the fact that, in the twentieth century, particularly in the wake of Freud, philosophy and literary studies, particularly linguistics, as disciplines (and therefore also disciplines like theology) began to travel closely and bound up with psychology and its methods. I'll be bringing in psychology specifically at a later point in the next section, but for here, as an example of the complexities that can arise, I would note Edmund Husserl's concept of "inter-subjectivity": (as best as I can understand it) "I" am a part of "the tree" in so far as the "tree" is known by me through my intentional act of looking at it and experiencing the "sight" of it and categorizing it as "tree"; therefore, "I" as the "knowing subject" and "the tree" as the "existing subject" that I observe have an "inter-subjectivity" that cannot be dis-integrated (my "knowing" and it's "existing" are inextricably intertwined). Where the rubber hits the road with psychology is that this complicates the concept of the ego, the "I," as an independent subject in the world.
Experience as the cumulative body of many, many experiences that psychology sees as coalescing in early development is what is going to be important.
Phenomenology, and Apparition, and Psychology (in detail)
So, now I come to the guest-star of my title, a phenomenologist named Maurice Merleau-Ponty. But there is a hitch ... while I feel 100% confident that the sourcework can bear out the descriptions I will give here, I can't actually produce all of that sourcework here. I can just give the details of my encounter with the ideas and links to a couple articles that I have perused enough to know that they hold pertinent and supportive material ... I just haven't gone through enough to pin out the one formulation I really want, the one that works so well with the HP material.
The formulation is that Meleau-Ponty summed up the importance of all the "sense" parts for the conception of the whole, especially in conceiving of the self as body (not as just having a body, but of being a body), by saying:
"There's as much of me in my little finger as there is in any other part of my body."
The obvious thing that this challenges is the usual feeling of a sense of the head as more important than other parts because it is where the brain is and the organs of sight and sound. The crux is going to be what is meant by "me."
The problem, the reason that I have to admit that those quote marks are somewhat hypothetical (although I believe it to be a very credible hypothesis), is that, as I said, I haven't been able to put my finger on where he says that. What I have is a recollection of talking with a guy I knew who was doing his MA in philosophy at the same school where I was doing mine in theology, and he either said Merleau-Ponty said that exact thing, or he was doing his own paraphrase of Merleau-Ponty's thought ... or maybe it's my paraphrase of what Kyle said interpreted as his own memory of M-P saying these exact words? Who knows. One way or another, it is what I think is philosophically sound (meaning not only that I agree with it myself but that I think it is consistent with phenomenology as a school of thought in philosophy), and so even if neither Merleau-Ponty nor Kyle said anything like it, I'm stating it because I think it true. But ... I think Kyle said it at least paraphrasing M-P (I distinctly remember the spot in the library where we were having the conversation) and that, if it was only a paraphrase, it is likely to be a pretty good one.
What I have done, though, in an attempt to be helpful to any who wind up reading this, is to find a few sources available online that look promising for researching this in Merleau-Ponty and pinning it down:
Thomas Fuchs, "The Phenomenology of Body Memory," chapter 1 in Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement, edited by Sabine C. Koch, Thomas Fuchs, Michela Summa, and Cornelia Müller (Amsterdam, NL / Philadelpia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company)
Taylor Carman, "The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty," Philosophical Topics 27.2 (1999): 205–26.
Hubert L. Dreyfus, "The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment."
(I've studied a decent amount of phenomenology, but not as much on Merleau-Ponty specifically [more Husserl and Heidegger], and what I have encountered of it is, at this point, tucked away in notes in bins in the basement, so this is a bit of an archeology venture for me, which is easier online than on my knees in the fruit cellar looking at old grad school class notes in my own untidy scrawl, but I feel relatively confident on the ideas after just perusing these pieces, and I want to go ahead and write the post without turning it into a significant research project.)
The main Phenomenology Point
I will pick this up again in more detail in the psychology section, but for here what I want to say is that the conception of identity, of being "me," is an embodied one and that this "embodiment" is not simply a concept of body "as a whole," but of body as the experience of operating all the parts of it together. For example, I conceive of "me" as walking down the street with my arms moving in a certain way (maybe swinging goofily, as Harry becomes especially aware of his arms walking with Cho down to Hogsmeade on the ill-fated Valentine's Day date in Order of the Phoenix, at least I think that is the scene I heard recently in audio book while driving), of myself walking duck-footed like Krum, of myself as having a smooth gait or having a clumsy gait because of overlarge feet. My concept of my body, and therefore of "me" as being a body, is of many parts working together in an operating whole (although really "living" is the most correct term, not just "operating" like a machine) ... Although, I also think we develop a concept of the whole that is more than the sum of its parts, as evidenced by the fact that we use the singular word "body," AND I think that that concept is a direct product of the operation of the whole together, of living in physical activity (see the part at the end of this post about "soul").
FINALLY Getting to Apparition
So, I have to get around to this before my reader gives up on me (including the reader that is myself writing it). The Merleau-Ponty statement is basically that the sense of "self," of "me," is every bit as much made up of the sense of my little finger as it is made up of the sens of my head as the place of my brain and, thus, my rational capacity.
The pertinent spot in Harry Potter is when Wilkie Twyrcoss tells the students taking apparition lessons about the "determination" that is one of the three "D"s for apparition, describing it thus:
"Focus your determination to occupy the visualized space! Let your yearning to enter it flood from your mind into every part of your body" (Half-Blood Prince, p. 384 [ch. 18, "Birthday Surprises"].
In order to move the entire body, the entire "me," through space in this way, one has to take a step of sharing the movement among all the parts. If I want to move all of "me," I am going to have to think about that part called "my little finger" in the process (although, Susan Bones should have focused on her leg, which was the part she left behind when splinched herself as the first student to accomplish any apparition at all, although why she wasn't bleeding to to death like Ron is when he gets splinched in Deathly Hallows is an inconsistency, but such things happen when an author is trying to organize this many elements and events across a series of this scope).
I know this section is brief and that, since it is the only Harry Potter element I officially have, this can make it seem like I really have just used a Harry Potter element as a jumping off point for my own little esoteric exposition of other stuff I'm into. But I think this one description, when taken with the phenomenology of body material, really does connect with and sum up a bodily psychology that pervades the whole Harry Potter series and gives it a distinctive flavor. The line that springs to mind in writing this is the scene in Deathly Hallows after he has watched the "Prince's Tale" in the pensieve and prepares to walk down to the forest: "Why had he never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart?" and the "He felt his heart pounding fiercely in his chest" leading to "He knew that she could feel the steady pounding of life against his ribs" when he is examined by Narcissa Malfoy in the forest. I love the richness of those descriptions.They remind me of one of my favorite lines by Paul Simon: "I know the reason I feel so blessed; my heart still splashes inside my chest" (from the song "She Moves On" on the Rhythm of the Saints album) ... "splashes" is simply a brilliant metaphor.
Psychology: Construction of the Self
I put the apparition material up before the psychology material because I felt that I was making the reader wait long enough as it was for the Harry Potter content. But I also definitely want to include the psychology material, not only because I think it is necessary to fill out the picture of phenomenology, but also because it fits with what I have always seen as a psychological realism, a depth of psychological portrayal in the Harry Potter series (hopefully I will soon write another post that came to my mind while listening to Order of the Phoenix on a trip out to go biking in NYC, about how heavy the use of particularly talk therapy and dream interpretation tropes is in that book, in which post I will probably also relate the conversation I had online in the Muggle Matters blog days with two clinical psychologists who gave an excellent paper at Lumos in Vegas in 2006, which I attended, on tracing out the diagnosis criteria for certain disorders in the DSM IV to specific characters in the Harry Potter series).The connection with Merleau-Ponty's "as much of me in my little finger" embodied concept of self is the theory in psychology that it takes a certain amount of time for an infant to develop an actual sense of self as independent and separate. I may be stepping on toes here, because I know the theory rankles some, but I believe it to be true, and I don't think that such psychological claims threaten a belief in an ontology of individualized spirit from the moment of conception ... they just note that the child would not be aware of it yet, just as the fact that our brain being the center of interpreting sensory data does not mean that that's not the case before we realize, that it's not the case from the moment we have a brain and sensory perception in the womb.
I have pondered this in relation to the "as much in my little finger" a lot, and this is my layman's expression of what I have come up with. In the womb, sensations are undifferentiated. There would not be a difference between the "outerness" of the sound vibrations of the mother's voice and an "innerness" of the tactile sensation of the feel of amniotic fluid on skin, much less a "self" as the source of the latter and an "other" as the source of the former. After birth, sensory data would become differentiated and a certain set of sensations would become grouped together as somehow different from others, as "interior" or grouped together in a singular thing called "myself": the sensation of wiggling toes, being itchy, and the discomfort of having gas all go in the "me" cluster and my mother's smile and the sound of my jerk older brother yelling his head off go in the "other" category (although the child would not have a word for it yet because he or she would not have the use of language). The point is that the concept of "me" and of myself as being embodied is made up of all these many different sensations being brought together in the "me." So there is as much of the whole of "me" in my little finger as in any other part of my body ... or in the whole. We're not aware at that age of things like "collection" and "category" or of doing an "action" called "coalescing." We just have this sense of "me" as all those different sensations coalesce into "me." And by the time we are able to have such concepts, the actual doing can't be examined: at the time when memories of doing that would have to have been made, we didn't have the concepts yet to formulate such memories ... so the memory really doesn't even exist to be examined.
Phantom Pain as Evidence
As evidence that I would present to those who are uncomfortable with this notion, I would offer the phenomenon of "phantom pain" in amputees, the feeling of sensation in a limb or appendage that is no longer there. The nerves in the foot are gone because the whole foot is gone. So, how does the amputee still feel a pain in that missing foot, supposedly carried by those missing nerves? Psychologically, I think the foot still "is" there because the "me" that was made from coalescing the foot sensations in the infant stage is still there. "I" am still here, so the things that originally made up "me" must still be here, or so says the primal part of the mind, of the psyche.
To get a little more metaphysical and classical about it, the word "psyche" from which we get "psychology" means "soul." It does not mean the "soul" that we have come to think of along the lines of "spirit" in Western Christian thought. I think that that conflation is not only fine but has a deep spiritual and theological value to it, but some might disagree with me on why, because it is based in my advocacy "bipartite" anthropology (maybe I will get around some day to writing the post that I have in seminal draft form on the bipartite vs tripartite debate and the heresy espoused by Apollinarus [and by "seminal" I mean basically just having the title "Bipartite versus Tripartite" in the draft in my blogger dashboard]).
BUT I also think there is immense value in observing the differences between "soul" and "spirit" in the ancient languages. "Psyche" is the Greek translational value of the Hebrew "nehpesh" and is translated by the Latin "anima," and they are distinct from the words for "spirit" in those languages: the Hebrew "ruach," the Greek "pneuma," and the Latin "spiritus." "Psyche," "nephesh," and "anima" mean basically an animating life force. The medieval scholastics had epic debates on whether humans progressed through the three types of "soul -- the vegetative (which trees and plants have), the sensate (which animals have), and the rational (which only humans have) -- leaving the lesser behind as we gain the greater, or simply accumulate them and in the end have all three. My point is not to enter into any such debates, but simply to note that what defines a "soul," a "psyche," is animating a body, and that means animating all the different parts of the body whose sensory data makes up the "me" that the rational soul perceives as a unified whole. We don't sense our "body" as a whole ... we sense the feet, and hands, and knees, and bowels, and eyelids, and so on that our soul is animating. But once the holistic "me" is there in the rational soul, if that me is still here, the animal soul part of that soul expects all the parts it knows the soul of "me" animates ... hence phantom pain. I still need that part of "me" called "my little finger" in order to process being "me," and so if the actual finger is gone, I manufacture phantasm sensations, because "there is as much of me in my little finger as there is in the rest of me."
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