Rocking with Dr. House: Tractatus Vicodin - Philosophicus

Rocking with

Dr. House

Rocking with

Dr. House

Tractatus Vicodin—Philosophicus

Giuseppe Cascione

Copyright © 2010 by Giuseppe Cascione.

ISBN:          Softcover                  978-1-4535-4370-2

                  E-book                      978-1-4535-4371-9

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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300749

To all of those tolerant people

hurt every day by the jerk I am.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

I

THEMES FOR A HOUSIAN PHILOSOPHY

II

TRACTATUS VICODIN-PHILOSOPHICUS

INTRODUCTION

This essay is a game. And like all games it sets some rules.

In this book, I’m not going to distinguish between Dr Gregory House’s line of thought and that of the series creator David Shore, just as students of Socrates are obliged to ignore the distinction between Socrates’ and Plato’s ideas.

In both cases one is dealing with virtual characters. In House’s case, it’s obvious that as a fictional character he doesn’t exist as such; rather he’s a person through which a team of screenwriters voice their ideas. In each episode these reflections are re-worked around a single plotline, a mix of character and physical being, in line with a narrative project. In Socrates’ case, it’s more or less the same thing, with Plato constructing a fiction as a vehicle for his ideas on important philosophical questions. The fiction—meant here as a performance of characters, some fictional, others based on real people, representing divergent and often contradictory opinions—relies on the well-known ‘Manzonian’ criterion of ‘plausibility’. Would Socrates plausibly have said this, thought that? Would he have inferred that? But who is this Socrates? What do we know about him? We currently know two things for sure: firstly, as far as we know there are established historical witnesses to the existence of Socrates; and secondly, the task of establishing whether there is total convergence between the thoughts and philosophies of Socrates and Plato lies beyond this author’s remit and the scope of this work. Thus, we can draw certain deductions from what we have so far said:

1. we will treat the ideas of Dr Gregory House as if they were genuine philosophical ideas;

2. we will act as if Dr House was a philosopher who actually lived (or is living), just as we do for Plato’s Socrates;

3. we will no longer refer to our Plato, that’s to say to the screenwriters of the television series, but to their creation, even if it’s to them that we owe the credit, or demerit, of provoking the current reflections.

The second reference I intend to make is to a philosopher who in many ways shares House’s outlook, namely Nietzsche. This analogy essentially rests on a central claim—that both have, as Ernst Nolte said in a famous and controversial essay, turned their bodies into battlefields. Both have gained an intimate knowledge of their body through its darkest and most horrendous aspect—pain. For both, philosophising has had to painfully make its way in a jungle of suffering. In these conditions no thought is taken for granted, no inference is ever banal; everything is earned at high price. Consequently, every element in this context should occasionally be re-considered as a non-given element. When normal gestures that are easy for everyone to make become complicated and reliant on the actor’s inexhaustible will, there’s no longer a place you can call home, a communal place. You have to continuously invent your way. There is no better condition for the researcher, indeed for anyone who refuses the comfortable banality of everyday life, whether detested or longed for. From a methodological point of view, this is a privileged situation as it allows us to examine everything, to take nothing for granted and to see things where others no longer see anything.

The other analogy, strictly linked to the first, is the tendency to behave in a politically incorrect way—taking drugs, sex, gambling and so on. These are forms of behaviour which depend totally on the rejection of the ordinary as the sole rule of life and on the use of the self as a testing ground for the out-of-the-ordinary. The cynical behaviour that results is, at this point, obvious.

Another analogy is in the rational method. Even if both Nietzsche and House successfully use a rational method (the former a philosophical method, the latter a logical-scientific method) this does not mean that both are absolute rationalists. As Nietzsche sustains, the dialectic method of the Greek philosophers refuses emotions and rewards rational analysis. However, it retains an element of feeling in its roots. And this is the pleasure in using the dialectic method itself. The real passion is to philosophise, meaning here exercising one’s capacity to resolve philosophical problems, dilemmas, or, as we’d say nowadays, brainteasers; in a word, puzzles.

The last element which I’d like to focus on is the fundamental non-functionality of the two philosophies, in the sense that they don’t present themselves as theories, rather they continuously diverge, deviating off the main line and engaging in apparently futile and senseless exchanges. Or so it would seem. In fact, the method advances through diversion and deviation. Both thinkers persist in talking to people who are in no way comparable to them in philosophical terms, yet it is thanks to these people and the suffering generated in the unequal confrontation that the procedural dynamic of intuition can arise.

Finally, and as is obvious from the title of this work, there’s the analogy with Ludwig Wittgenstein. But this is so radical that it doesn’t deserve to be set out explicitly. House pays a methodological, conceptual and experimental tribute to Wittgenstein. I trust that this will become clear over the course of this work.

I thank those who have read and discussed this manuscript with me: Rossella Pisconti, Francisco Oliver Català, Gino Dato; and those who have shared and discussed their love for the House character, in particular Genti Puka. I extend a special thanks to Giacomo who, with his youthful acumen, has often provided precious ideas. He is a genuine testament to the fact that Italy no longer has to be a country for old men.

For his careful work on the translation of my writing I am particularly grateful to Duncan Garwood.

This work concentrates on the first three seasons of House M.D. for a number of reasons. Above all I am convinced that the fourth season was excessively affected by the American writers’ strike which forced the early suspension of the series and an excess of mannerism. The last two extraordinary episodes are exceptions but they could nevertheless be read in the light of this analysis.

The translation supplied here takes into account the original American version, translations made for the Italian version and some scripts available online. Everything has been re-interpreted in the light of several evident errors and some culpable omissions and the ‘philosophical’ interpretation of the scripts.

Housian quotations will be followed by two indications in brackets. The first refers to the season and the episode (eg. episode 12 of the first season will be written as [1.12]). The second indicates the time of the quotation (eg. if the quote takes place twenty minutes and thirty seconds after the beginning of the episode and lasts until twenty-one minutes and forty seconds it will be written as [20:30-21:40]).

I

THEMES FOR A HOUSIAN PHILOSOPHY

1. Who is Gregory House?

Who’s that man? White, Anglo-Saxon, lame, slovenly in dress and body care. This is the superficial, visible phenomenology of the House character. Arrogant, unlikable, sociopathic—this is his psycho-biographical personality. Cynical, lawless, addicted to drugs, alcohol and sex with prostitutes—these are his behavioural traits. However, these phenomenological considerations are only possible from the outside. This is House as seen by the others. There’s also the House that thinks about and describes himself. The difference is relevant enough to merit a rigorously divided treatment.

Let’s start with the House seen by other people.

This House represents his political face, his public contextualisation. At the end of the day other people interpret him in their own way and according to a logic informed by experiences they have shared with him or through him. His work group (the ducklings) tend to treat him as a boss and acknowledge his leadership qualities. They look up to him, which exalts his rough, strict side—from the male perspective—and his male-appeal—from the female perspective.

His ex-partner tends to see the unpleasant traits of his day-to-day behaviour. She is someone who has deified him but whose expectations have been (severely) deluded and she views his behaviour in the light of this disillusionment. She develops a cynical and disillusioned attitude towards him which blinds her to the aura with which he subdues his crew.

His boss sees his professional side, his technical quality, knowing that this is the only quality which allows her to tolerate his behaviour which is so obviously politically incorrect and insubordinate. There’s a continuous conflict between the two, although in the communal interests of the hospital, for which both hold a sacred respect, this can never erupt into open warfare. In its place there’s a kind of cooperation-competition which, on the one hand, complicates things, but on the other, gives rise to that dialectic tension which so often leads to intuitive impulses and the limits within which these impulses can be explored.

His friend sees him as a blank cheque signed such a long time ago that he can’t even remember why—if, of course there was a reason—he signed it. House can do anything to him, overstep any mark. The friend’s sense of loyalty and protection towards House is a sort of universal, limitless ethical duty. The reason for this loyalty is probably his ongoing bet that House has a ‘human side’, a ‘weak point’ that will bring him down to earth and back to normality. There’s no professional jealousy of House’s brilliance nor intolerance of the obvious awe that the friend feels. Rather there’s a kind of patient waiting for the moment when House will surrender to his need to be loved. After all, «everybody needs somebody to love . . . ».

Finally, there are the institutional figures. His medical colleagues hate him, because his very presence represents a continuous threat to the reassuring medical procedures and to the medical profession as practiced in the Third Millennium. The typical de-responsibilisation of the figure of the doctor, the presumed guarantor of efficiency in the name of the patient, doesn’t affect House. House gives the impression of being able to continually test the limits of medical procedures and the language of medicine. At heart, he seems to believe that medicine is nothing more than a tangle of kaleidoscopic techniques. This conviction obviously sits on a complex, not banal, epistemological level but his colleagues probably regard it as arrogance. Paraphrasing the philosopher, «medicine doesn’t discover, it invents»—and this could be House’s methodological motto, where the inventing process is simply the testing of medical procedures’ presumed limits through a surplus of rational criticism, free from the constraints of everyday banality.

On the institutional front, there are also the financiers, those who would like to exercise direct control over House’s goals and the professional choices he makes through their money. These people are simply irritated by House’s un-functional and anti-utilitarian logic. Their language produces no communication with House, who probably regards the logic of capital as simply meaningless in dealing with such radical questions as life and death.

Finally, there are the norms. The representatives of the law, be they judges, policemen or politicians, hate House. He represents total civil disobedience. House is an anarchist, they say, one who fails to recognise why institutional norms are necessary. In reality, however, what House can’t stand is the fact that different logics interfere with the logic of the medical profession. His instinctive need to order the world rationally impedes him from reasoning according to a logic based on judicial, legal or political grounds in a field which has never recognised these grounds. His anarchy is a request for sovereignty within a logic which already has its own rules and which is often incompatible with the presuppositions of other logics. Just as it’s utterly meaningless to apply economic rules to ethical problems, so legal and political norms have no sense in a field held to exist a priori to the application of these rules.

Up to this point we have looked at the context, at how House is judged from the outside. But how does House see himself? How does he define himself?

Naturally, to provide a comprehensive answer to these questions, we will have to rely on what House says about himself, even if we have no way of knowing whether this coincides with what he thinks about himself. But, you know, everyone lies . . .

From his own point of view, House regards himself as a simple man, in the manner of Ockham and his razor. To quote Norman Malcolm’s excellent book on Wittgenstein «nothing is hidden».