Harry Potter and Stoicism

[dumbledore11214]

No: HPFGUIDX 185894

Alla:

So I figure I will pick another book from my Hary Potter shelf.
 Please bear with me the point about Potterverse will be in the end, 
but please be assured that I will ask canon question and I want to 
discuss canon, and am not planning on off topic conversation if one 
ever to happen. :-)

This was actually one of the very few books about Harry Potter that I 
liked well enough when I read it first time around. The book is 
called "The Wisdom of Harry Potter" by Edmund Kern.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-
/1591021332/qid=1092357769/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/104-6646421-
2123969?v=glance&s=books&n=507846.

I actually thought that it sheds some light on HP books, but now when 
I am skimming through it, some points do feel stretched, of course 
the fact that he was also writing when canon was incomplete makes a 
difference. But I digress.

Among many arguments this book makes is that JKR often shows the 
virtues of stoicism, give or take in her good characters.

For those who are unfamiliar with stoics here are very basics from 
Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism

And let me quote the first paragraph:

Stoicism was a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by 
Zeno of Citium in the early third century BCE. The stoics considered 
passionate emotions to be the result of errors in judgment, and that 
a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not 
have such emotions.[1] Stoics were concerned with the active 
relationship between cosmic determinism and human freedom, and the 
belief that it is virtuous to maintain a will (called prohairesis) 
that is in accord with nature.


I learned about Stoics briefly in my course of Greek roman history 
and in the philosophy for beginners, heh and actually to me this 
paragraph pretty much summarises the essense of stoicism as I 
understood it. I always think of Stoics as somebody who exercised 
restraint, for whom emotions were bad and intellect was good, etc.

I know, it is simplified to the extreme, but just saying what stoics 
mean to me.

Anyway back to Potterverse, as I said Kern argues that among other 
things Rowling shows virtues of stoicism. Do you guys agree or 
disagree and why?

I mean, I would totally say that in some ways Dumbledore is very very 
stoic - restraint in everything, emotions totally ARE bad, that he 
did not want to feel anything for Harry, etc.

It actually makes sense to me that Dumbledore as stoicist if he is, 
would have restrained himself from ever having a love life too.

But I mean, if I understood Kern correctly, then books should show 
that emotions can be destructive in the major way. And we saw it 
several times, but I would say not in a major way (IMO of course). 
Like we see Peter being scared and letting the fear overcome him and 
betray his friends, in fact we see Marauders' friendship being torn 
apart by conflicting emotions, no?

But at the same time we have that Love being major theme, and of 
course sacrifice, etc. Now I do not think that books having major 
christian themes would have contradicted characters showing stoicism 
virtues, etc, but isn't sacrificial love especially being shown as a 
good thing and nothing to be restrained of, but in fact cultivated 
etc?

Thoughts?

Alla