This is the third in a series of five posts. (Part 1, Part 2).

The original French versions of the articles will be found at http://zarathousetra.net.

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ZaratHOUSEtra

As The Philosopher Nietzsche Once Said

by Bernadette Dahan-Delelis

bdahandelelis@hotmail.fr

translation by Heather Osborne

heather.k.osborne@gmail.com

http://heatherosborne.speculative-fiction.ca

The Functioning of the Solitary

     There are many divers ways and modes of surpassing: see thou thereto!
     Thus Spake Zarathustra, Third Part: Old and New Tables

Given that there are no ready-made recipes for man to surpass himself, each individual must use his own ways to attain that level. For House, it is essentially in the practice of his art that we can detect his methods: on one hand, through his relationships with everyone who surrounds him in the hospital, and on the other, his ways of working and thinking.

***

There is a common denominator to nearly all of House’s actions and initiatives: his apparent cold-heartedness. Most of the time, all anyone can see of House is his uncaring attitude, which is so basic to House that he refuses to deviate from it: certainly, he refuses to surrender to emotion, because it would compromise his ability to think and render him less efficient. House applies this principle in his private life as much as in his profession, and it is the fundamental element of the way he functions.

In the season four episode “No More Mr. Nice Guy”, House is intrigued by a patient because he is too nice for House’s tastes. On the whiteboard in his office, House writes the word “NICENESS” in large block capitals on the list of symptoms, which certainly provokes his team. Kutner says, “If we believe in the existence of extreme jerkiness, which I suspect that we do—” (he glances pointedly at House, which House apes back at him) “—then we also have to accept the existence of the opposite extreme.”¹ In so saying, Kutner implies that House’s antipathy is a disease: very well, we’ll stipulate that the nice guy is sick, but only to the same degree that you are yourself.

4.13 “No More Mr. Nice Guy”

House is characterized as “a jerk” many times throughout the series. And equally often, House is the one who points out that fact. For him, it’s a justification, or his own personal brand name. He doesn’t want to hear anyone talk about niceness, as he explains to Wilson in the first episode of the second season:

Wilson: You know why people are nice to other people?
House: Oh, I know this one. Because people are good, decent and caring. Either that, or people are cowards. If I’m mean to you, you’ll be mean to me. Mutually Assured Destruction.²

House does not seek tranquillity. He refuses to hide behind friendly smiles so that in exchange, he will be seen as a “good doctor”. For him, as for Zarathustra, goodness is a synonym for weakness. Strikingly, Nietzsche uses effectively the same vocabulary to speak of niceness. His reasoning is identical to House’s:

Round, fair, and considerate are they to one another, as grains of sand are round, fair, and considerate to grains of sand. [...] In their hearts they want simply one thing most of all: that no one hurt them. Thus do they anticipate every one’s wishes and do well unto every one.
That, however, is cowardice, though it be called “virtue.”³

Therefore, certainly, in refusing to be a grain of sand, House stands out. His open intransigence brings out not only his patients’ unhappiness, but their families’ as well. The Superman refuses to compromise the values he has created. Playing the role of the good, compassionate, and understanding doctor has no place in House’s morality. The search for the truth is all that matters. And if that means he will be called a jerk, then so be it.

The absence of empathy between House and his patients is particularly flagrant in the first season. In the beginning, House refuses to even see them. He stays in his office or, at best, on the other side of the glass wall of their rooms. When he deigns to enter, he treats them like idiots, or forces them to sign consent forms, or inflicts radical, agonizing treatments on them. In general, all his patients know about House is his name and what the nurses tell them about him: he’s a jerk. The nurses could hardly believe anything else: House treats nurses like he treats his patients, with no tact whatsoever. It is not shocking, therefore, that before Cuddy hired House, she preemptively set aside a sum of fifty thousand dollars to serve as House’s budget for attorneys’ fees and damages when his patients or their families sued him.

Thus, in the episode “Paternity,”⁴ the parents of a teenage boy find House in the hospital garden, enjoying a coffee with Wilson. They recognize him because they asked him for a consult directly, not because he ever made the effort to meet them. When House sees them approach, he says to Wilson:

Another reason I don’t like meeting patients. If they don’t know what you look like, they can’t yell at you.

This reiterates the opening idea: House knows that he doesn’t play the game the way the boy’s parents expect, and therefore, necessarily, they will get angry with him.

1.02 “Paternity”

House would place himself beyond reproach if he acted like most doctors by going regularly to his patient’s bedside to prove that he is working on his case. But appearances don’t interest him: keeping up appearances is a waste of precious time in the race House runs each time he takes on a patient, against the clock and against death. And he is right: the young man’s parents accuse him of mocking their son’s case and of not caring enough to stay by his side. They go so far as to tell him: “You haven’t checked in on him once.” At this point, House lists all their son’s symptoms and the results of every test his fellows have performed, which impresses even Wilson. The parents stare at him open-mouthed as House concludes: “Go hold his hand.” To each his role: the parents’ domain is emotion, as House’s is logic, deduction, and reflection. He doesn’t need to hold the patient’s hand; he certainly must not involve himself personally if he wants to get results.

For the reasons enumerated above, then, House shows no kindness toward his patients or their families. He doesn’t communicate with them either, or at least speaks to them as little as possible. The prime reason given for this lack of communication is House’s motto: Everybody lies. If he doesn’t obtain the right information, or if part or all of the truth is hidden from him, the diagnostic process is muddied and confused. It would be interesting to count the number of times when House is confronted with lies. Is there even one episode when no one lies? Because it isn’t simply the patient or their families who lie; Cuddy lies to House, House lies to everybody, and House’s fellows lie too. Everybody lies! The only difference is that House’s lies, those that he tells in pursuit of his diagnosis, always have the objective of uncovering the truth, while the patients’ and their loved ones’ lies only lead to disaster. The idea that everyone lies is reflected in Thus Spake Zarathustra, in terms that House would be the first to affirm:

Is this to-day not that of the populace? The populace however knoweth not what is great and what is small, what is straight and what is honest: it is innocently crooked, it ever lieth.⁵

This passage shows the difference between House’s lies and those of his patients: he doesn’t tell innocent untruths. House lies knowingly, while most of the time, his patients don’t even realize that they are lying. They couldn’t know because theirs are lies of omission or of ignorance. Thus, the hostage taker in “Last Resort”⁶ ends up telling House for the first time that, not counting House, he’s already seen sixteen doctors—in Florida. House retorts that he already asked if the man has been to a tropical country where he might have contracted his disease. “Florida counts?” the man asks incredulously, bewildered by House’s irritation (House treats him like an idiot, as is his habit in this type of situation). His lie, “innocently crooked,” nearly cost him his life. And that is the case with many of the series’ patients; the number of idiots is too long to list.

5.07 “Last Resort”

Just as Zarathustra tries not to approach “the populace,”⁷ House keeps his distance from his patients. Similarly, he stays aloof from the people he is thrown into contact with on a daily basis. This is not to avoid their lies or their ignorance, but well and truly to treat them as they deserve.

***

The treatment House’s colleagues undergo is doubtless worse than that suffered by his patients, because disdain is added to distance.

4.06 “Whatever It Takes”

There is, for example, the doctor at the CIA to whom House says, during their introduction, that he uses his book to stabilize one leg of his piano. As for the other CIA doctor, House hires her…and fires her two days later when he realizes that he had only been impressed by her beauty.

There is also Dr. Sebastian Charles, who considers himself the saviour of humanity, and who refuses to treat his tuberculosis with drugs that are, in his opinion, too expensive. He calls a press conference to denounce the disparity of health care between developed nations and underdeveloped nations. House treats him like a “pompous white man”: he sees him only as a patronizing white lesson-giver, pontificating and arrogant. House doesn’t want Charles participating in the differentials, because he wants to treat him like an idiot. He also treats him like a “stubborn jerk”, a “human telethon”, and a “media whore.”⁸ According to House, he uses only two letters of the alphabet (T and B) because he sees tuberculosis everywhere.

2.04 “TB Or Not TB”

Then there is Dr. Phillip Weber, who turned House in for cheating off his test in university. In Cuddy’s name, House invites Weber to Princeton with the goal of showing how ineffective his new vaccine against migraines is. Not only does House mock him in public, but he causes Weber to lose his research funding.

2.12 “Distractions”

Also, there are all the candidates for a job on his team whom House treats like cattle. He designates them by number because who they are doesn’t interest him. All that matters is how capable they are. Stripping away someone’s very name means invalidating his existence as an individual.

4.02 “The Right Stuff”

House can go incredibly far in showing his disdain for the people who are ostensibly, if not his equals, then at least learned individuals who have spent years in study and research. Only Dr. Ezra Powell⁹ seems to find respect in House’s eyes, and Powell confirms that House is right to make his heart beat faster than is safe in order to see if his respiratory problem originates there, thus cautioning against more orthodox methods. House respects him, but only to a point. At the end of the day, he treats him like the others—if slightly less insulting and disdainful—and when he acts to try and save Powell’s life, House tortures him and lies to him. House goes so far as to make Powell believe that House will help him die, and instead puts him in a coma in order to continue running tests on him against his will. As Foreman says: “So much for the admiration.”

3.03 “Informed Consent”>

But apart from that instance, House’s disdain for his colleagues and his sense of superiority are blatant. Nietzsche does not speak specifically about doctors, but the second part of Thus Spake Zarathustra mentions “scholars” in general. One entire chapter is dedicated to them, and the sentiment of disdain is evident throughout:

For this is the truth: I have departed from the house of the scholars, and the door have I also slammed behind me.

Too long did my soul sit hungry at their table: not like them have I got the knack of investigating, as the knack of nut-cracking. [...]

I am too hot and scorched with mine own thought: often is it ready to take away my breath. Then have I to go into the open air, and away from all dusty rooms.

But they sit cool in the cool shade: they want in everything to be merely spectators, and they avoid sitting where the sun burneth on the steps.¹⁰

Most of the doctors who cross House’s path are these “lesser ones”: they belong to the category of scholars who are content with appearances, as with Dr. Kurtz, who didn’t realize that the man who’d just been in a bike accident suffered from locked in syndrome and who was preparing to harvest his heart for a transplant!¹¹ Unlike House, the lesser ones are incapable of taking risks, of standing up in the face of morals and laws. Because they mindlessly respect the rules and the simple teachings of other scholars, they fail to be creative and audacious; they remain in their “dusty rooms” where it is cool. They will never know what it is to be burnt by the sun. The triumph House feels when, at last, he discovers which disease his patients are suffering from, the disarray he falls into when he cannot save them because he failed to solve the mystery they represented, all this is and always will be forever unknown to the lesser ones. What does House say to Foreman about Dr. Hamilton, the doctor of John Henry Giles, the paralysed trumpeter?

House: He said it wasn’t your fault.
Foreman: So?
House: So it was. You were wrong, but it was still great. You should feel great that it was great. You should feel like crap that it was wrong. That’s the difference between him and me. He thinks you do your job and what will be will be. I think that what I do and what you do matters. He sleeps better at night. He shouldn’t.¹²

Dr. Hamilton sleeps well at night. He sits in the cool shade. He is content to do his work by following the principles he has been taught, and if that doesn’t work, there’s nothing more he can do. Whereas House is someone who takes responsibility, someone who suffers when he doesn’t manage to arrive at the truth, and someone who sleeps badly because, contrary to what one might think, his only obsession is saving his patients. He does not treat colds, he saves lives, as he is all too pleased to repeat. He doesn’t play with “false dice”¹³ as Dr. Weber does. And House pushes away the cameras in order to do his work better rather than holding press conferences to pontificate on television like Dr. Charles.

***

This passage contains another explanation for the way in which House treats the people around him, starting with the doctors on his team. If he ill-treats them, if he tells them coldly that they have failed—how many times have we heard the expression “You screwed up!”?—it is because he wants them to become like him. Like Zarathustra, House sees himself as a teacher. He treats “his” doctors like some teachers treat their students, without consideration, with the sole objective of improving them. He is cold and direct with them, but his goal is the same as Zarathustra’s, to incite them to climb higher and go farther:

For this am I from the heart and from the beginning—drawing, hither-drawing, upward-drawing, upbringing; a drawer, a trainer, a training-master, who not in vain counselled himself once on a time: “Become what thou art!”¹⁴

House demands that his team be perennially available, day and night if necessary, that they take his insults and his rebukes, and that they accept being contradicted at every turn. He insults them to jolt them out of a rut, to make them react, and thus advance the differential. There is a good example of his modus operandi in the third episode of season one. House has just reproached Foreman for not being interested in the patient in fairly violent terms. This dialogue with Wilson follows¹⁵:

Wilson: I get that you’re not a big believer in the “catching flies with honey” approach, but do you honestly think you’ll collect a jarful by cleverly taunting them?
House: Flies, no. Doctors, sure. If I’d said to Foreman, “Nice try, it was a great guess, but not this time,” what do you think he’d be doing right now?
Wilson: I think he’d be going home not feeling like a piece of crap.
House: Exactly.
Wilson: You want him to feel like a piece of crap?
House: No, I don’t want him going home.

The honey metaphor is decidedly recurrent in House as in Thus Spake Zarathustra. House’s ‘honey’ is made of admonitions and insults, of coldness and distance, but he is certain of catching doctors with it, and more importantly, doctors who resemble him. He succeeds perfectly with Foreman, who quits his job with House precisely because he realizes he is becoming a mini-House. Foreman is the paragon of the perfect Zarathustrian disciple, who follows all of his master’s principles, including this one:

Verily, I advise you: depart from me, and guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he hath deceived you. [...] One requiteth a teacher badly if one remain merely a scholar. [...] Now do I bid you lose me and find yourselves.¹⁶

He succeeds partially with Cameron, who tells him later that she appreciated “playing private investigator.”¹⁷ And he fails with Chase, whom he fires, but then, Chase is the only one House didn’t choose in the first place.

That being said, contrary to Zarathustra, House is not only waiting for his fellows to surpass themselves in order to become themselves (or, in effect, to become his doubles), but also for them to help him in his quest for the truth. Their role is essential to the Sherlock Holmes side of his character, not for the Zarathustra side. They are the ones he sends to rifle through his patients’ homes in search of environmental toxins, mould, or hidden medications. Most of all, they were the ones who contradicted him, resisted him, and caused him to see other possible solutions to the puzzles. Their role was therefore more important than the much more passive disciples of Zarathustra.

***

On House’s chessboard, there are many pawns; certainly a king; a more or less invisible queen who can take the form of his ex-girlfriend, or Cameron, or Cuddy; and the fool, Wilson. He is the only one to whom House grants freedom of movement, even if it is often House who decides the direction of those movements. House accords Wilson a role to which no one else can aspire: that of counsellor and confidant. When House has a problem, whether personal or professional, he turns to Wilson. Wilson permits House, in fact, to move outside of himself, to examine his own thought processes from a distance, which is how a discussion with Wilson most often triggers House’s epiphany. In that case, generally, House’s face goes blank, he leaves his friend’s office without explanation and without saying goodbye, and goes to fix his patient’s problem.

House is a doctor particularly interested by individuals with autism, the insane, or those who suffer from psychic isolation, simply because they resemble him: life outside his ‘mountain’ doesn’t interest him. He only rarely leaves, in Wilson’s company, for bowling, bars, or monster truck rallies. And when he is forced to replace Wilson with someone else, he becomes terribly bored. Once, he must make do with Chase for a bowling partner, and another time, Cameron as his companion for monster trucks, because he has no other friends. But he does have, by all means, more access to Wilson in the course of his practice than in his private life, which he claims doesn’t exist.

What, then, does Zarathustra say on the subject of friends? There, too, the resemblance is uncanny:

“One, is always too many about me”—thinketh the anchorite. “Always once one—that maketh two in the long run!”

I and Me are always too earnestly in conversation: how could it be endured, if there were not a friend?

The friend of the anchorite is always the third one: the third one is the cork which preventeth the conversation of the two sinking into the depth.¹⁸

1.06 “The Socratic Method”

The metaphor of the cork fits Wilson admirably. He is always there to hold House’s head above water when he drowns himself, whether in his private life or in his work, and when he his cornered and doesn’t know what to think. Certainly, the doctors on House’s team are there precisely to disentangle situations, but they don’t always manage it. Above all, they don’t have personal relationships with House and don’t connect with him the same way that Wilson does. As mentioned earlier, it is while House and Wilson are discussing something other than the patient that Wilson, without meaning to, gives House the solution that he was waiting for. When House realizes that talking to himself, in playing with his ball in front of his whiteboard, has its limits, that is when he has the third, the friend, intervene—the one who stops him from brooding by himself and speaks to him of different things, for example, about a poker tournament and who, in this fashion, without intending it, gives House the key to the puzzle.

Let the future and the furthest be the motive of thy to-day; in thy friend shalt thou love the Superman as thy motive. [...] My brethren, I advise you not to neighbour-love—I advise you to furthest love!¹⁹

House puts this precept into practice, staying distant from everyone except Wilson. Why? Because he shares his taste for monster trucks or for bowling? It seems doubtful. The true motivation is much more likely to be the motivation of the Superman: because Wilson can help him in his undertakings.

***

For someone like House, people who are obstructions are never pawns on a chessboard. Only powerful characters pose a danger to House, as they might prevent him from doing what he wants (opening a patient’s skull or exhuming a corpse, for example). In the first five seasons, three authority figures can be distinguished: Dr. Cuddy, Michael Tritter, and Edward Vogler.

House, evidently, has no respect for his professional superiors or more generally, for representatives of any given authority. House leaves an anal thermometer in Tritter, even before he finds out that Tritter is a police officer, because he cannot tolerate being treated the way he treats the rest of the world, with disrespect. Tritter kicks his cane, deliberately tripping him, and as a result, he finds himself abandoned in an unpleasant situation while House leaves the hospital without giving him a second thought.

3.05 “Fools For Love”

When House learns that Tritter is a police officer and could cause him serious trouble because of his addiction to Vicodin, House only redoubles his provocations. He continues to insult Tritter to his face and pushes his pill-taking in Tritter’s face. He first spends few hours in jail, and later, he doesn’t escape being tried for possession. The only reason House gets off the hook is because Cuddy perjures herself so that he will be exonerated. House might have dragged Cuddy, Wilson, and his team down with him, but none of that mattered to him as long as he got the better of Tritter. Thanks to Cuddy, he was able to move on with his life.

Edward Vogler suffers similarly. He is given the full, insulting treatment. Finally, in a memorable speech, House exposes how Vogler makes his money by changing a meaningless part of the formula for a medication in order to receive a new patent and put a “new” and much more expensive product on the market.

1.17 “Role Model”

Tough luck that Vogler leaves with the hundred million dollars he brought with him to direct the hospital; his pretentiousness earned him House’s treatment with the anal thermometer…metaphorically speaking. He doesn’t merit any better. The bully whom House called “Mr. Moneybags” and “Bow down before me”²⁰ could only be the object of disdain for the Superman:

And on the rulers turned I my back, when I saw what they now call ruling: to traffic and bargain for power—with the rabble!²¹

The rabble, in Vogler’s case, are the pharmaceutical companies, all ready to sacrifice the interest of the patient in the name of big profits.

It seems likely that House would love to insert a thermometer in Cuddy’s behind; however, House does treat her with a hint more tact. He satisfies himself with manipulating her episode after episode, or trying to manipulate her. Cuddy is no slouch in that department herself, and she attempts the same thing. The two of them battle to see who can manipulate whom the best. Even though Cuddy often reminds House that he is her employee and that he must do as she says, the facts prove that, employee or not, House defines the playing field. He uses all possible forms of manipulation: he bets reducing his clinic hours against reducing his Vicodin intake; he has his team do his clinic hours instead; he lets Cuddy believe that she has made a decision, while behind the scenes, he arranges for it to be the only possible course she could have taken. The best example is doubtless the manner in which he is obliged to accept that there will be four doctors on his new team instead of the original three.²² The dialogue at the end of the episode summarizes all of House and Cuddy’s relationship:

Cuddy: What the hell did you do?
House: [shrugs innocently] You told me to hire Kutner and Taub.
Cuddy: Because I knew you wouldn’t.
House: Oops.
Cuddy: I can’t let you hire two men.
House: Now that is sexist.
Cuddy: You’ve already got Foreman.
House: Is he a dude?
Cuddy: [conceding] Hire a woman too.
House: Hire two women.
Cuddy: You can have the one that gives a crap about people.
House: [seriously] They both do.
House: Right. Hire “Thirteen”.

At that moment, House nods, as if he is obeying orders. Cuddy turns her back on him as she starts to leave. A sneaky smile plays across House’s face. Cuddy stops short when she realizes what has just happened, without even seeing House’s smirk.

Cuddy: This was your plan all along.
[She turns back to him. House keeps smiling.]
Cuddy: Well, at least, the games are over.
House: How long have you known me?

4.09 “Games”

House’s games are never finished. The one that involved recruiting the best possible doctors for his team is over, yes, but not those that he will play permanently with Cuddy to make her understand that he recognizes no authority but his own. The Superman cannot recognize any authority, no matter what its nature:

O my soul, I have taken from thee all obeying and knee-bending and homage-paying; I have myself given thee the names, “Change of need” and “Fate.”²³

***

Cuddy should resign herself to the obvious: she is not the alpha dog²⁴ in her own hospital. She tries to use Foreman, then Cameron, to control House, but he remains uncontrollable. Vogler used Chase to spy on House, but in vain. House brings chaos. Everything he is breaks down the established order: his fundamental freedom, his refusal to compromise, and above all his rejection of traditional moral values, everything that makes him the very image of Nietzsche’s Superman makes him disruptive. Yet despite the obstacles that are put in his path, his eternal creativity is the principal medium whereby House “surpasses man.”

Behold the good and just! Whom do they hate most? Him who breaketh up their tables of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker:—he, however, is the creator.²⁵

To Tritter, House is nothing but a criminal, a drug addict and perhaps even a dealer, a danger to society. Cuddy and Vogler accuse him of wanting to destroy the hospital’s reputation and its smooth operation. Those accusations are the cost when we don’t comply with rules; when efficiency is our only objective; and when our only desire is to go farther than the “lesser minds”, those who blindly obey the old tables, deem possible. “Get creative!” House often says to the doctors on his team. Creativity is, indeed, another trait of the Superman. House wants disciples in his image. Occasionally his team, much like him, finds extreme or unlikely solutions to the problems their patients pose. Opening skulls to insert electrodes, using maggots to clean wounds, or using a long-outdated imaging mechanism to discover a patient’s symptoms, are hardly the solutions of the faint-hearted.

With the creators, the reapers, and the rejoicers will I associate: the rainbow will I show them, and all the stairs to the Superman.

To the lone-dwellers will I sing my song, and to the twain-dwellers; and unto him who hath still ears for the unheard, will I make the heart heavy with my happiness.

I make for my goal, I follow my course; over the loitering and tardy will I leap.

Thus let my on-going be their down-going!²⁶

House is a creator because he constantly “thinks outside the box.” If we believe Foreman, “He has no idea where the box is!”²⁷ He has crazy ideas, or at least, they appear crazy to those around him, but his ideas prove themselves right, precisely because they are not conventional.

In the end, in the domain of creativity, curiously enough, House attaches just as much importance to metaphors. Similarly, Nieztsche’s book teems with them. The recourse to this figurative style is recommended by Zarathustra himself:

Give heed, my brethren, to every hour when your spirit would speak in similes: there is the origin of your virtue.

Elevated is then your body, and raised up; with its delight, enraptureth it the spirit; so that it becometh creator, and valuer, and lover, and everything’s benefactor.²⁸

The mark of the Superman shows in House, right down to the manner in which he expresses himself. Certainly, his metaphors are often maladroit and he is the first to recognize it, but they often permit his team to better understand what he means to say, or to find new paths by following them or by adjusting them slightly. Linguistic creativity is combined with scientific creativity.

***

Friedrich Nietzsche remains vague when he tries to evoke the way in which man can surpass himself in order to become a Superman. He always uses the same phrases: “to go beyond”, “to surpass oneself”, “follow one’s own path”, and he writes:

There are many divers ways and modes of surpassing: see thou thereto!²⁹

In House’s mode of functioning, and in the relationships he establishes with the people around him, House’s chosen methods become clear: coldness toward everyone; distance with patients and their families; disdain for hesitant doctors; requiring constant efficiency from his team accompanied by an unbending, uncompromising attitude; the recourse to a friend in difficult cases; the complete rejection of all authority; and even the use of metaphors in his search for creativity. All these elements contribute to making him one who traverses the bridge that leads to the Superman.

Acknowledgements:

Thank you to Heather Osborne for her splendid translation, to Jean-François Vaillant for his ability to always be able to tell me who said what in which episode when I was stuck, and to Gérard Dahan for his pitiless hunt for double spaces and other typographical errors.

Footnotes