A question of "essentials"

[lupinlore]

No: HPFGUIDX 120902


There has been a lot of talk on the boards about JKR and her 
statement/belief about "innate" goodness.  This has been, for better 
or worse, transformed into a discussion of "essential" goodness, i.e. 
are people or particular persons good "in essence" which means others 
are evil "in essence."

Well, I guess there are 4 ways to look at this:

1) People are born essentially evil and any good they do comes from a 
struggle against that essence.  This is the position of certain forms 
of Calvinism, for instance.

2)  People are born essentially good, and if they do evil it's 
because they have been corrupted by hurtful experience and bad 
teachings.  This is the point of view of some Chinese philosophy.

3)  The essence of people is neither good nor evil.  Good and evil 
comes from an exercise of free will.  This is favored by many 
religions and philosophies, but it runs into all sorts of logical 
contradictions because "free will" is, in its turn, very difficult to 
define.  

4)  This leads to the fourth option, that free will is an illusion 
and some people are good in essence and some evil in essence.  For 
example, the will of person who was molested as a child who in turn 
molests children is not really free, in that it is conditioned by 
his/her own experience.  A truly free will would be one that isn't 
conditioned, but that means it would operate purely at random and 
without regard to reason or influence (which restrict its freedom), 
which negates all idea of morality as generally understood.  This is 
the famous argument of the Calvinist Jonathan Edwards against free 
will.  Theologians and philosophers have been trying to get out of 
Edwards' net for nearly three centuries, but if the argument is 
stated correctly and in full (which I have not done by any means) 
then it is impossible to refute using strictly logical analysis.  You 
are left with a definition of morality that is purely arbitrary and 
given, generally things are morally right because God decreed them 
that way, and people are moral or not because of factors beyond their 
control.  Most religions and philosophies evade this by arguing that 
strict logical analysis is an incorrect way to approach matters of 
essence and morality, and thus invoke various degrees of mystical (I 
don't mean that as a bad word) explanation.

To relate this to HP, many people seem to want to make HP as exercise 
in number 3, the free will definition.  JKR herself has given some 
statements along these lines.  Yet, many of the things she has 
written indicate that JKR leans, probably unconsciously, toward 
option 4.  The saying by DD that actions "reveal" rather 
than "determine" who and what one is leans this way.  So does the 
very structure of Hogwarts, with four houses based on what seems to 
be some kind of essentialism with regard to personality and, yes, 
even morality in terms of Slytherin House.


Lupinlore