Good moral core (Re: Dirty Harry/Clean Harry)

[Dan Feeney]

No: HPFGUIDX 117177


delwynmarch wrote:
> As for Harry, he seems to repeatedly make instinctive decisions. 
Because those choices have good consequences, we don't wonder too 
much about them. But let's see things another way : what if Harry's 
decision to go after the Philosopher's stone had resulted in 
Hermione's or Ron's death ? What if Harry's decision to go after the 
spiders in CoS had resulted in Ron's death? What if Harry's decision 
to enter the Chamber of Secrets had resulted in his own death, in 
Ginny's death and in Diary!Tom's gaining a real body? And so on. In 
short, what if Harry's apparent good decisions had had bad 
consequences? Wouldn't we then wonder why he took such suicidal 
decisions, maybe even what was wrong with him?

Neri wrote :
> " How do you know, in your life, which decisions are right? OK, you 
might tell me that you frequently don't KNOW for sure which are the 
right decisions, you just do your best to choose right, and sometimes
you get it wrong."

Del replies :
> But what's wrong with being the murderer of someone like Pettigrew? 
And what makes Harry think that he knows what his father would have 
wanted ? Wouldn't Sirius and Remus know better ? Also, what makes 
Harry think he has a right to stop Sirius from getting his revenge 
for those 12 years in Azkaban ? Again, Harry was right by my book, 
but we aren't told why he thinks that way. It's just "the right thing 
to do". But why ? I know why *I* think it was the right thing to do, 
but I don't know why Harry thinks so.
> And the thing is : we do not know what his beliefs actually are.

Del replies :
> But doesn't that go against his free will? Now that he knows about 
the Prophecy, this knowledge will interfere with his decision-making. 
Because he knows he is The One, he might decide to do things he might 
not have done otherwise, or the other way around. Whether this means 
that he is more free or less free is not the point : the point is 
that his free will is now conditioned by his knowledge IMO.
 
> In other words : IMO, free will is not really free. It is only free
> within the limits your nature and your nurture have put on you.

Dan:

Well, continuing on in this thread, a couple more points to make.

First, the fact that Rowling isn't telling us what Harry's "actual 
beliefs are" doesn't at all seem problematic for me. If I were trying 
to come up with some codified scale of values, some dogma for being 
good or right, perhaps it would bother me, or if I were trying to 
place Rowling's characters on some continuum of grace, perhaps, some 
arc of goodness - yet, even then, would rationalization get me 
anywhere? Would being able to rate expressed intentions and 
verifiable outcomes solve anything? They only seem to work in terms 
of economic planning and prediction, and only as rubrick, not as 
proof of objective.

The attraction to Rowling for me is quite linked to the fact that 
neither her nor her characters explicate themselves or parse the 
consequences of their actions for our reading pleasure. And, as we 
watch them, begin to zero in on them as characters, the less they 
appear as simple embodiements of this or that moral stance. Their 
character, then, is not circumscribed by this or that belief they may 
or may not hold, or that other characters may or may not hold 
regarding them. Really, in some ways, it's quite anti-statist, quite 
like anarchism. This is lovely, not irritating. It's a kind of 
generosity in the telling, whereas, I think, to some it comes across 
as parsimony with "truth," as if truth were only and always how 
something is codified. This is pretty much philosophical idealism (as 
opposed to, like, "believing in a great and wonderful future" 
idealism.) Things are a certain way because we say they are, because 
we describe them such, and, what you think about an act you do has 
some effect on the outcome, even if it does not modify the act at 
all. (Which is mysticism, really.) Translating this to the question 
at hand, it seems to some, if I am reading them correctly, that 
Harry's actions cannot be anything until some rubric is added wherein 
Rowling SAYS they're something.

Of course, I disagree. Wang Wei in front of the tanks at Tienamen 
Square is acting, and we will never know why he was there. That takes 
absolutely nothing away from this person returning home from 
shopping, seeing a row of tanks heading for the students, and 
standing in their way. In fact, in these kinds of cases, insistance 
on rationale seems irrelevant.

Rowling does not privilege ideas or rationale in that way. In fact, 
knowledge itself is very problematic in her books. There's Hogwarts: 
A History, but it appears to tell us nothing about what being in 
Hogwarts is like, in the same way a military history of the 
Napoleonic Wars doesn't tell us anything about what being in Europe 
at the time was like. Knowledge is not static or final, either, in 
her books (to this point, anyway), though it appears to be possible 
to await finality like an approaching epiphany of sense and meaning, 
if you will.

It may be unusual, may be quite different from insipid story-telling, 
but is it really so perplexing, so hard to ride the waves? Is there 
possibly a strain of expectation here that would not exist were the 
books not sold from the Children's book shelves?

Regarding freedom - just as we cannot imagine an prison without 
reference to the peculiar and particular, so we cannot imagine 
freedom without the peculiar and particular. What I mean is, there 
are contingencies. That alone makes impossible the idea of absolute 
freedom. There is never a question of Harry, or anyone else, being 
absolutely free.

But, contingencies also make prophecy impossible, at least for us. I 
agree that we do not know all the consequences of our actions. What I 
take from this, however, is not inaction, avoidance, despair. It is 
the greatest arrogance to think we are right about anything we do, or 
to think we can know all the consequences. It is only a check on this 
arrogance that our ignorance provides. Without this limitation, if we 
could see everything clearly... well, I can't imagine, I'm not some 
omnipotent diety. One would have to be able to think infinitely fast, 
on infinite levels....

So, Harry is doing this and that, like us. The dialogue, I suggest, 
is occuring between us and Rowling, her characters. In my last post, 
I described the processes as a testing, a kind of touching, as it 
were, our way among the novels. But they are a kind of Erised, and 
operate that way because she is not telling us what we see in the 
mirror - she is leaving that to us.

Dan