Another Crack at House and Reductionism/Scientism

    

     I have noticed a clear pattern or theme that is varied in different episodes that I think goes morally deep. The theme runs like this: House takes on a case partly because it seems to present a challenge to his cynical, reductionist attitude toward life and other people; he attempts to de-mean (quite literally) what challenges this attitude, to prove that what calls him into question is a sentimental illusion; then in a sublime revelation, he is refuted by a reality he cannot honestly deny; he nevertheless retreats into denial, tragically unable to change his life and thus the attitude that props it up. This suggests that the writers of the show do not share House’s attitude and want to call it into question.  

      I want to examine how this theme plays out in the episode “Lines in the Sand,”

     At the risk of repetition, I want to map House’s life philosophy again. The character fails because he keeps trying to rationally reduce everything and to accept the resulting ‘vacuum’ as what life ultimately is. He is held captive by a picture of the world and his tragedy consists in uncritically accepting the prison as the price of intellectual integrity. (Woody Allen has the same problem, but he makes something funny out of it.) House mistakes real science as a metaphysical philosophy (scientism), habitually debunking any appearance of intrinsic meaning, authentic goodness, or love by reducing it to terms other than meaning, by translating it from the language of love into a language which has no conceptual space for love or any of its related meanings, the language of instinct, selfish impulses, brain chemistry, symptoms of illnesses – a language that come from a scientific, value-free way of looking at the world as if from no place within it.

      As in everyday life we still say ‘the sun rises’ even though science has proved that the earth spins and the rising sun is an illusion, so for House we still use a language of meaning and love in some contexts even though science has proved that there is no place in the closed, mechanical system of nature for such things. This is scientism, not science, but House (like so many people) is unaware of the difference, which is this: in the case of the rising sun, there are proven ways of testing it scientifically; in the case of the real experience of meaning and love as part of reality, there is no possible way of testing it scientifically. From this it cannot be inferred that the experience of meaning is unreal unless one is prepared to assume a metaphysical theory which states that reality is nothing but what science can investigate scientifically; nothing else can be real. In that case, the realm of meaning would be an illusion, like the rising sun. But this making science into metaphysics is not itself scientific because it is not testable by any possible scientific method.  This is House’s confusion.

     Scientism is closely linked to another approach to life: reductionism. We are all familiar with what seems to be a law of human nature: before violating, destroying, exploiting, or just ignoring, we must first demean: literally de-mean, take away the meaning from whatever or whomever is to be violated, exploited, destroyed, or ignored. The forest is termed natural resources; immigrants or Jews are termed vermin, political opponents are termed terrorists, a woman you don’t like is a bitch, and so on. Reductionism, when it is not a being used legitimately in a strictly scientific context, is a form of de-meaning. A phenomenon of meaning such as loving your newborn baby or grieving over the death of your father is ‘reduced’ to radically different categories that have nothing to do with love or meaning, which in effect explain away the experience of love in particular and meaning in general away as illusions or shadowy effects of something more basically real: instinct, brain chemistry, evolution, genetics, social programming, etc. etc. Things that fit into the the closed, causally determined system of nature as science understands it. Thus  that which does not fit into the scientific picture of the universe cannot be real and must be explained in other terms that are consistent with this picture. For example, a closed system is deterministic. For anything in the system, it is predictable all the way back in time to its origin and into the future until it perishes. The position of Venus relative to Earth and Sun is accurately predictable during the time of Christ and 2000 years from now. There is no more room in a closed system to sacrifice for one’s children than for Venus to spontaneously slow down its movements, though the behavior we in our folk metaphysics may describe as sacrificing may have vastly more complexity in terms of its causes than the orbits or planets. Our experience of meaning is as naïve as our experience of the sun rising.

 

   The episode I want to look at call scientism and reductionism into question by examining them in the person of Dr. House, and what they mean for his life and actions. Scientism and reductionism are not just House’s default philosophy but it also serves a deeply rooted coping mechanism for House in his battle against what Wittgenstein called an “attitude toward a soul.”   To see another person through the lens of science is only to see them as part of a closed system of cause and effect. Science treats nature, and thus humanity, as though everything in it is causally determined (Quantum Mechanics is no exception). Like the question of whether the sun rises or the earth rotates, there is the question of whether we are really souls living in a world of meanings as in our “folk metaphysics,” or are automata following the necessities that determine the motion and changes of all matter and energy. For Wittgenstein, we cannot sanely entertain such a thought. It is not a theoretical question since to doubt our belief in the inner life is to remove the basis not only for science itself but for all attempts at making sense of anything. Here is the passage from the Philosophical Investigations (Part II, iv.)

 

"I believe that he is suffering." – Do I also believe that he isn't an automaton? It would go against the grain to use the word in both connexions. (Or is it like this: I believe that he is suffering, but am certain that he is not an automaton? Nonsense!)

 

   Suppose I say of a friend: "He isn't an automaton". – What information is conveyed by this, and to whom would it be information? To a human being who meets him in ordinary circumstances? What information could it give him? (At the very most that this man always behaves like a human being, and not occasionally like a machine.)

 

   "I believe that he is not an automaton", just like that, so far makes no sense. My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. [emphasis]

 

That is, this is not a question that one can have an opinion about, that can be rationally debated or scientifically investigated, since to deny it would be to saw off the branch the investigator is sitting on to investigate it. I cannot sanely entertain as a hypothesis that my sons or my classes might really be automata. The very possibility of making sense of something presupposes there is a somebody trying to make sense of something – presupposes meaning, presupposes a meaning-grasping person, a soul (in a non-metaphysical sense, as when Homer wrote a man loses half his soul the day he becomes enslaved or Weil characterized some forms of labor a soul-destroying). To regard someone as more than an organic machine isn’t merely a belief; it's an existential orientation, like giving babies names rather than numbers. Looking a suffering human being in the face, one does not wonder whether he might just be an organic machine after all. Opinions are debatable, changeable; attitude precedes and shapes how we act and experience and goes deeper than all opinions. It is not the result of reasoning because it is what makes reasoning possible in the first place.  It is prior to conscious belief. It is the lens through which one sees the world one reasons about. Saying “I believe she’s not an automaton” makes no sense: it is like saying ‘I believe the world is real and not just my dream’ or ‘in my opinion I am not really a brain in a vat connected to a computer generating a virtual world.’ I cannot prove I am not a brain in a vat but to seriously entertain the possibility is not only unhinged but negates everything. It’s not a claim to be weighed or disconfirmed; it's nonsensical outside the shared life of human beings – which House works hard not to share (increasingly as the series goes on). Raimond Gaita (whose reading of this passage I am drawing on here) links meaning of attitude here (Einstellung) to the German song lyric "von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt" (“from head to toe attuned to love”). He is referring to an existential tuning: love orients you prior to all reasoning. House, however, rejects it and uses reductionism and scientism to battle against it. He takes up a different attitude – a nonhuman, alien (alienated) attitude that sees humanity from the outside, as if from no place within it (Thomas Nagel).  

     House wages war against the attitude towards a soul. He habitually treats human beings as objects – automata of a sort. When his staff treat them as human beings, he often accuses them of not being “objective,” that is, of seeing them as they really are (to him), of seeing them sentimentally. His suspicion of genuine inner life (e.g., “just autism,” “she’s chemically brave,” “tumor not baby”) reflects not just debatable beliefs, but an underlying rebellion against humanity, in others and himself. But still he cannot refrain from allowing the philosophical expression of this rebellion – his reductionism, his scientism – to be challenged from time to time, as though part of him wants to overcome it. But a powerful psychological program works against this. I will return to this after I examine the episodes.  

   One more framing thought. Blaise Pascal contrasted two kinds of knowing. On the one hand, Cartesian/empiricist reason, seeking certainty method, measurement, and clear and distinct ideas (Descartes) or sensory verification (Locke, Hume). It operates only within what can be explicitly stated and proven and tends to reduce reality to what fits the method. This is House’s idea of reason, and it goes deep in him is part of what makes him a brilliant physician. On the other hand, there are the “reasons of the heart.” As Pascal wrote: “The heart has its reasons of which [rationalist, empiricist] reason knows nothing.” This is not irrational, but supra-rational: we see someone’s dignity, or love’s reality, immediately, as an attitude of the soul rather than as a conclusion from data. This is close to Wittgenstein’s attitude towards a soul.  It is a kind of attunement to another’s humanity that comes before opinion or proof.  

     House lives almost entirely in the Cartesian/empiricist world. He wants empirical verification, observable causation, and measurable symptoms. He wants technological and scientific control of nature (the human body), a control he ironically does not have over his own body. This is why he often treats moral beauty, love, bravery, or even personhood (the soul) itself as hypotheses to be tested or dismissed if they can’t be confirmed physiologically. That stance is already a decision of the heart, an attitude based on the rejection of an attitude towards a soul. It tunes him away from seeing other human beings as living souls. But again, in all the episodes I want to discuss, he cracks open the door, light comes in, but he proceeds the close the door again.