[HPforGrownups] Re: Destiny, Truth

[Carol Bainbridge]

No: HPFGUIDX 43692

bugaloo37 wrote:

>To have a purpose in your life-chosen of your own free will-fostered
>by your own abilities (did Harry's parents impart some special
>ability to him?-only time will tell-but even if they did, it was for
>his own safety-not to restore order to the WW-although that maybe an
>added plus)-recognized and promoted by those who love you and have
>only the best wishes for you- is not manipulation.


Now Porphyria:
>But in order for Harry to be able to choose his purpose in life of
>his own free will, he needs information.

He has information.  It might turn out to be the wrong information, but 
it's still information.  And he acts on it.  He doesn't go blindly into 
situations where he thinks everything is going to be just fine.  He often 
goes on when the knowledge he has tells him it will be dangerous to do 
so.  As for Harry choosing his purpose in life, it seems to me that he's 
not at a point where he can even begin to make that kind of decision 
himself.  Maybe some 14 year olds can figure out what their purpose in life 
is and choose their actions accordingly, but I don't know any of them.  I 
did know some who THOUGHT they knew their purpose in life, but as they got 
older and learned more about themselves and the world around them, they 
changed their minds.

Porphyria:
>If he doesn't have enough
>information to make an informed decision, then he has to be trusted
>to 'feel' or 'intuit' or 'just sense' the right decision; in other
>words we'd need to trust his 'purity of heart.' Indeed, Harry often
>makes the right decisions based on the wrong information, especially
>at the climax of every book.

I must be missing something because I don't see how the one thing leads 
necessarily to the other.  Just because someone doesn't have enough 
information (at least what we would consider enough in Harry's case, being 
as how we seem to know more than he does), doesn't mean that the person 
hasn't made an informed decisions.  I make informed decisions all the 
time.  They're based on the information I have at that given point in 
time.  Sometimes I think I have all the information. Sometimes I know I 
don't.  But I still base my decisions on the knowledge I have.  I don't 
make  my decisions based on intuition.   At least not solely on 
intuition.  I'm sure sometimes my decisions have an element of intuition 
behind them, but that's true whether I think I have all the information or 
not.  To carry on this comparison with Harry, I could say that my ultimate 
decision is based on "purity of heart," or at least the kind of person I 
am, but again that factor comes into play whether I think I have all the 
information or not.  It is simply part of who I am, which happens not to be 
a computer making purely objective decisions based exclusively on objective 
input.

Porphyria:
>Harry didn't know that Quirrell was
>after the Philosopher's Stone, nor did he understand the nature of
>the protections in place -- it's likely that Quirrell would have just
>been stranded in front of the Mirror or Erised if Harry hadn't
>bothered to pursue him.

Again I must be missing something.  The fact that Harry didn't know it was 
Quirrell after the stone doesn't really change much.  He thought that it 
was Snape and he believed it would be dangerous.  What's the 
difference?  Would he have behaved differently if he knew Quirrell was the 
danger and not Snape?  Quite honestly, I think the prospect of  having to 
face a person I know hates me and is pretty darn mean would take much more 
courage than the prospect of facing what I had thought was a stuttering 
scaredy cat!  It seems to me that even if Harry had been told that Quirrell 
was the evil villain, his mind simply wouldn't have conjured up the same 
fearful images because he had no experience of them.  He did for Snape, 
though.  And I agree that Quirrell might have been stranded in front of the 
MoE if Harry hadn't arrived.  But Harry didn't know that.  He KNEW 
something else.  Now if we are saying that someone was about who could have 
actually told Harry that it was Quirrell who was after the stone and that 
the charms had been placed there with the knowledge that Harry and Co. 
could work their way through them, then that might lead to a slightly 
different discussion.  But *we* don't *know* that.  We would just be 
guessing.  So until we ourselves have more complete knowledge, how can any 
of this matter?  It's fun to think about, but I don't see how it tells us 
anything more about Harry's character or about the nature of knowledge, 
particularly in terms of its relation to our behavior.

Porphyria:
>But Dumbledore (and we) recognize Harry's
>actions as heroic. Harry had no idea that his mother's love would
>protect him from Quirrell, but that's what saves him in a pinch.

You're right he didn't know.  And the fact that he didn't know is exactly 
what makes me think of Harry as heroic.  If he knew he would be protected, 
what would he need to be courageous for?  For example, if I jump in a 
flooded river in the middle of a severe storm in order to save a drowning 
child, I'm going to figure that there's a darn good chance that I could die 
trying to save that child.  Let's suppose that I live in a magical world 
and I have a natural ability to stay afloat and not drown.  If I knew ahead 
of time that I couldn't sink and couldn't drown, the decision wouldn't be 
nearly so difficult for me.  Not so much risk to me then.  Limited 
knowledge or even incorrect knowledge does not mean no knowledge at all, 
nor does it indicate that one acts on feeling alone.

Porphyria:
>Similarly, Harry didn't know that Tom Riddle was the culprit in CoS,
>nor that his loyalty to Dumbledore would effectively summon Fawkes
>and the sword of Gryffindor, but everything works out for him OK
>nonetheless. And in GoF, he had no idea what the Prior Incantatem
>did, but he instinctually knew how to handle it. So the point is that
>Harry somehow doesn't need objective knowledge to make the right
>decision, to be heroic. He needs, as darkthirty puts it, a 'good
>heart.'

I really disagree.  Harry knows what he knows at any given point in time, 
just as we all do.  I assure you that had I known certain things at age 17 
that I know now, I would have behaved quite differently.  That is not to 
say that I knew nothing and behaved on instinct, or heart or whatever, 
alone.  My decisions were based on a combination of what I felt and what I 
believed to be true at the time.  I seem to keep getting tangled up in 
philosophical debates here, but this one does seem to revolve around the 
issue of exactly what objective knowledge is.  Is it only objective when it 
turns out to be true -- at least for the moment?  How many of us liked 
Moody and felt he was a good friend to Harry?  Why did we react that 
way?  Because we didn't have objective knowledge or because the objective 
knowledge we had turned out to be incomplete?  Since our knowledge was 
incomplete, were we reacting based on our "hearts"?  I don't think so.  I 
think our hearts told us how to react based on the knowledge we had *at the 
time.*

Porphyria:
>There is a lot that Harry doesn't know about his situation: 1) why
>Voldemort wanted to kill him in the first place, 2) what Trelawney's
>first accurate prediction was, 3) the complete extent of his powers,
>both what powers the scar conferred upon him and what other unique
>abilities he may have, 4) the meaning of the Gleam in Dumbledore's
>eye, 5) the nature of his parents' involvement in the campaign
>against LV, 6) whether or not James was significant in some other
>way, such as being descended from Godric Gryffindor. And that's just
>off the top of my head.

Wait a minute -- this looks more like a list of things that we as readers 
are concerned with.  Maybe I'm dense and far more forgetful than I had 
realized, but I don't recall Harry wondering about his father's 
significance or possible descendance from Godric, nor do I recall that much 
ado about the gleam in Dumbledore's eye.  Harry just thought for a moment 
that he saw it. We readers are the ones who are wondering about so much 
about it.  Even if Harry does wonder as much as we do about these things, I 
don't see how that changes anything.  I will still contend that it is 
Harry's actions based on what he knows at any given time and his responses 
to that knowledge that define who he is.

Porphyria:
><snip>  My
>interpretation is that Dumbledore doesn't tell Harry everything not
>because the knowledge would be contaminating per se, but more
>overwhelming. Which is what Carol and bugaloo37 mean when they point
>out that some knowledge might be a little much for a child to handle.

That's exactly it!

Porphyria:
>OTOH, Harry is no longer a child and you'd think that he himself
>would start to demand answers for some of these questions. I'm not
>100% sure that we can decide right now what the role of Harry's
>knowledge about himself will play since the gradual revelation of
>this knowledge is part of the story arc, and we're only halfway
>through the story.

That is exactly what I've been trying to say, apparently not very well!  I 
would like to add, though, that not all people are as demanding as we might 
imagine Harry could/should be.  I've known kids who are very accepting of 
what adults tell them, particularly when they trust the adults in 
question.  That is part of who they are and helps to define them.  Since 
I've known kids like this, I've had no problem imagining Harry as such a 
kid.  Add to this the fact that he is encountering adults for the first 
time in his life (Dumbledore, Hagrid) who seem to genuinely care about him 
and I just don't see Harry, at this point anyway, demanding more 
information.  I can certainly picture him rebelling against the Dursleys 
and demanding things from them, but not Dumbledore or Hagrid or anyone of 
the other adults who seem to care about him in the wizarding world.

>Still, we can observe that the books seem to
>privilege one type of knowledge over another, and the
>more 'objective' the knowledge, the more limited its usefulness.

But again I'd have to ask just what objective knowledge it.  Is it what we 
know that we think Harry ought to know?

Carol:
><snip> In fact, I'm
>quite fond of Hermione's constant quest for knowledge, being like
>that myself.

>Porphyria's response:
>
>I feel this way myself, but you have to ask yourself what good
>Hermione's constant quest for knowledge does in the plots.

I thought the issue was with the attitude toward knowledge.  Even if none 
of Hermione's information pans out, she has still sought it out.  I don't 
see this as being turned into a terrible negative quality either.  Now, 
Hermione's know-it-all attitude can be a bit put-offish, but then that's 
about attitude, not knowledge.

>Carol continues:
>In addition, as I mentioned before, JKR seems to make a rather big
>deal about the importance of knowledge and its pursuit. Isn't
>Hermione constantly searching for knowledge and doesn't much of this
>knowledge find practical uses? (Polyjuice potion, Nicholas Flamel)

Porphyria replied:

>See, the Polyjuice potion was cool, but it did them absolutely no
>good. The only thing they learned was that Draco was *not* the heir
>of Slytherin, plus Hermione learned the hard way why not to confuse
>cat hair with people hair. It didn't advance the plot or help to
>solve the mystery; it hit a dead end.

I have to disagree here too.  The fact that they didn't learn what they 
thought they would learn does not mean that they didn't learn anything 
productive.  Had they not learned that Draco was not the heir, they would 
have been acting on the belief that he was.  That would certainly have led 
to behave differently, it seems to me.

Porphyria again:
>And as to Nicholas Flamel, all
>Hermione's searching through history books and Harry's sneaking into
>the library netted them absolutely nothing. Harry found the answer on
>the back of a trading card that was a gift from Ron.

I suppose that's true enough.  Harry did find Flamel on the back of a 
trading card, but Hermione did also remember it from a book she had been 
reading, although it was reading she was doing apparently for pleasure 
(light reading) and then ran to get the book to get additional 
information.  I suppose we could say from this event, that learning for the 
sake of learning, or gaining knowledge for no practical reason is not 
useful, while collecting trading cards it, but I'm not willing to go there.

Porphyria:
>In my post from
>Sunday I detailed as best I could the various ways that the type of
>booklearning Hermione brings to the table is good, but second best,
>in much the same way that Hermione herself remarks that being
>in "Ravenclaw wouldn't be too bad," as a sort of afterthought to her
>comment "I hope I'm in Gryffindor, it sounds by far the best."

Couple things about this statement.  First, I don't think that knowledge 
and book learning are the same things at all.  So, I might tend to agree 
with you on this issue.  There is certainly more to life than what we get 
from books.  We have to be able to apply what we've learned to life.  That 
learning can come from books or it can come from experience.  I don't think 
many of us would want children, particularly ours, to grow up doing nothing 
but reading books, getting all their knowledge from books and never 
experiencing the world.  Hermione seems to have that tendency, to want to 
experience the world through books.  But again, that's not the equivalent 
of knowledge.  As for Hermione's remarks about Ravenclaw and Gryffindor, 
they come from a girl whose parents are dentists.  What did she know about 
Gryffindor or Ravenclaw?  Being a Muggle myself and having no more 
information than Hermione had, *I* thought Gryffindor would be the best 
too, with Ravenclaw a possibly second.

Porphyria:
>Harry's internal, instinctual knowledge always outdoes Hermione's
>objective, logical knowledge. So I agree with darkthirty to the
>extent that the books seem to endorse a sort of 'not knowing,' an
>instinct for the right choice over intelligence on its own.

Is the issue instinct versus book learning or instinct versus objective, 
logical knowledge.  I contend that these are different issues.  If the 
issue is instinct versus book learning, I'm probably going to be leaning 
more toward instinct.  However, if the issue is instinct versus knowledge, 
then I'm going to have to say one is related to the other, since our 
"instincts" are really based on whatever knowledge we have (which, BTW, is 
part of what makes me lean away from book learning -- one doesn't get 
enough knowledge about the "real" world through books alone).

Porphyria:
>I'm not sure, however, if this is why adult readers like the books.
>While everyone wants to be a little like Harry, at the same time it's
>our adult curiosity for the knowledge of the books' secrets that
>drives us, that makes us all crave the next one. As a group, we
>constantly strive to figure out future plot twists and backstories;
>we're extremely curious. We scour JKR interview transcripts and buy
>the schoolbooks. We form discussion groups like this one. We write
>FAQs and maintain informational web sites and on and on.

I would agree with you on this.  I would also add that in discussing the 
books we are also striving to understand a bit about the human condition 
--- what motivates people, what makes them what they are, etc.  Good 
literature does that and I do think the Potter books qualify as good 
literature, probably better than some non-Potter fans realize.

Porphyria replied:
>So while I
>tend to feel that the typically "Ravenclawish" personality gets short
>shrift in the books, I think there is lots of room for us out in the
>fandom.

Again, it just seems to me that we might be mixing things together that I 
don't ordinarily mix together -- book learning and knowledge.  Anyway, I 
would imagine that many of us sitting here thinking about the intricacies 
of the HP book would like to pretend we'd all be sorted into Gryffindor, 
but no doubt would find ourselves in Ravenclaw, sitting in the common room 
discussing our homework.


Carol Bainbridge
(kaityf at jorsm.com)

http://www.lcag.org