Why you'll never see "The Science of Harry Potter"

[prog]

A background process I didn't realize I had going returned a value yesterday and told me the point at which the last Harry Potter novel soured a little on me, preventing it from being really great. It was when Hermione, by way of example, explained that if she stuck Ron with a sword, his body might break and die but his soul would remain whole (and commence along whatever post-mortem processes souls go through in HP-land).

This was a girl who, at Hogwarts, shared a building with highly visible ghosts, and had helped battle creatures that quite literally ate souls, and I have never had a problem with any of that. She was also a master spellcaster, breaking real-world physics many times a day while practicing; fine. Despite all this, to hear her so matter-of-factly deny materialism, to do so in a by-the-way where I can't even recall what point she was making? It was like hearing someone you thought you knew well, maybe even someone you considered a friend, suddenly make an analogy based on an implicit belief in young-earth creationism, or in the inevitability of the Rapture. That harshed my enjoyment more than a little, I think, and it never really recovered.

No, it doesn't make much sense, in the greater context of the work. But that's the answer I got!

Comments

[cnoocy]

So is it that you don't mind magic and ghosts, but positing the existence of a soul is too much like what you've heard in this society from anti-evolutionists?

[prog.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's it, that many people - heck, many entirely rational readers of that very book - also have the same dualist view as Hermione, even though nearly all of them would agree that the books' various ghosts, goblins and wizards are pure fantasy.

Complicating factor: When I was the books' target audience age, I was most certainly a passive, never-really-thought-about-it supporter of dualism as well.

[doctor-atomic.livejournal.com]

Barclay turned into a spider doieee.

I can understand how you can have a problem with what Hermione says and not have a problem with dementors and such. She is explicitly saying that the soul can exist outside of the physical self, whereas the soul the dementors capture is more abstract, more like the essence of a person that could be their sort of life-force or whatever; something that a materialist can place his or her own beliefs into without much trouble. Even horcruxes have that magical edge to them that makes them so much less explicitly non-materialist.

[brentdax.livejournal.com]

It's long been clear to me that the HPverse has a separation between body and soul. Don't forget that the whole plot of the last two books revolves around Voldemort taking bits of his soul and attaching them to various "bodies". (For that matter, if you get into some of the underpinnings of HP magic, like alchemy, you find a three-way split—mind, body, soul.)

I'd say that Hermione has been given some pretty clear evidence of dualism, which makes it very forgivable to me, but I sort of wonder if she was a dualist before she got her Hogwarts letter. Granted, most almost-twelve-year-olds are, but if anybody wouldn't be, it'd be her.

(For that matter, it's almost a wonder that most Muggle-borns aren't like Luna, happy to believe almost anything with no proof. After all, they spent their first eleven years of life disbelieving in magic, right? But now I'm really going off on a tangent...)

[prog.livejournal.com]

I like dr_atomic's sense in a previous comment of more "abstract" mentions and instances of souls / life force / what-have-you in the books, which I found inoffensive and (as with Horcruxes and their creation) even compelling. Hermione's statement seemed startlingly pat, not quite congruent with all that more fantastic stuff. And yes, the fact that it was her saying that line added to the disappointment.

Never really considered whether Hermione was herself a dualist, versus merely describing her knowledge of how her world worked. I get a sense that there's little room for existential philosophy in the wizarding world. Things just are...

But then again, when one's POV is a bunch of kids with other stuff on their minds, maybe one doesn't really have a full scope on such things.

"Different" vs "plus"

[kahuna-burger.livejournal.com]

Esp in comparison to your Star Trek analogy, maybe the issue (as it often is for me) is whether the fantastic is something added on to the world, or a rearrangement of what you consider the baseline reality. It's one thing to say "Star trek adds transporters and warp drive to our universe, and you just have to accept those additions" and imo a very different on to say "In the star trek world a retrovirus can cause you to grow extra limbs and add up to 200 lbs of body weight, and curing that virus will magicly disolve those additions, and also humans are descended from spiders!"

In the same way "Magic can extract parts of the mind and personality and make them 'real' in a way best described as souls" could be easier to take than "The base reality of the universe is that everyone has a dualistic souled nature." Its reality plus vs reality is different.