IS THERE A SUPERMAN IN THE HOUSE?: A NIETZSCHEAN POINT OF VIEW

I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

To Nietzsche these Übermenschen appear as symbols of the repudiation of any conformity to a single norm: antithesis to mediocrity and stagnation.

—Walter Kaufmann

Had their paths ever crossed, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) might well have become a patient of Dr. Gregory House. Nietzsche suffered from a mixture of undiagnosed diseases and bouts of depression throughout his life—just the kind of unusual case House handles week after week at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Nietzsche’s symptoms and ailments included severe migraines exacerbated by extreme eyestrain, painful nausea, colic, diphtheria, and dysentery. Haunting him virtually his entire life, these maladies intensified during his debilitated years (1874-1876) and culminated in “a literal collapse,” forcing him to leave his teaching position. Nietzsche writes at this time: “I could no longer doubt that I am suffering from a serious brain illness, and that my eyes and stomach only suffered as a result of this central process.”¹ Ten years before his death in 1900, Nietzsche lapsed into an undefined madness from which he did not recover.

Nietzsche may be most famous for his controversial concept of the Übermensch, translated as “superman” or “overman,” a figure of great achievement but, more important, of noble or superior character, self-assured with a will to “overcome” a conforming and constricting gravity of custom and morality. Does this sound like our Dr. House? Could he be an example of what Nietzsche had in mind?

Men and Supermen

On the one hand, Nietzsche often writes as if there are no current supermen—the superman belongs to the future: “Never yet has there been an Übermensch,” says Nietzsche’s fictional character Zarathustra. So the overman remains an ideal type—what the human species only potentially can become: “Man is a rope tied between beast and Übermensch.”² Nietzsche often suggests that the course of an entire culture, even a mediocre society, is justified if it produces just a few superior beings.

On the assumption that no one presently meets the criteria for the overman, then, of course, House could not. However, what Nietzsche sometimes imagines for some future superior class, he suggests has already happened somewhat by accident in individuals from many different spheres of our culture—religious, military, and artistic. Among them we can find the names Napoleon, Goethe, Jesus, Caesar, and Shakespeare. If we are to consider Dr. House in this context, we need to think of his hospital as a microcosm of the world at large and House, an individual of obvious achievement and influence, relative to that environment.

Nietzsche is more provocateur than prophet. Of course, so is House. Nietzsche’s words are often charges against his readers and challenges to them to act in ways that defy the norm. Man is something that needs to be overcome, and Zarathustra asks of everyone and no one, “What have you done to overcome him?” What have you done to move beyond the ordinary, to become more like this superior being?

House’s Character

House as teacher can be seen in two ways. First, there is the House who works his diagnostic magic, solving special cases for the sake of solving alone, much like one might attempt a crossword puzzle. We can imagine this House indifferent to the education of his staff and not particularly interested in the welfare of the patients.

Second, there is the House who teaches character. House isn’t offering additional medical knowledge alone. Rather, from House, his young staff can learn the virtues of the overman, which are not to be found in Gray’s Anatomy. House wants his staff to think independently, to “overcome” their previous education. To do this they will need a special kind of courage—the courage to stand up in the profession and voice objections over the desires of patients and in spite of restrictions imposed by their own superiors. House teaches the need for the energy and tenacity to look beyond the solutions found in the medical books, to resist the defeatism that often leads to wrong turns, and the willingness to take risks and to exercise imagination.

By example, House teaches blunt patient interview and insightful observation. House is often able to see that a patient is lying—out of fear or embarrassment. Or he can notice personality quirks that offer Holmesian clues to complex diseases. But unless House overturns standard analyses, he will fail the patient. He succeeds as teacher only if his pupils can see beyond the strictly medical, in a narrow sense of that word, and expand the traditional role of doctor. House exemplifies a doctor with the discipline and self-will to control and overcome the professional status quo. Eschewing professional rewards and inertia-laden contentment, House does not hesitate to act in underhanded ways to encourage the progress of his staff and to solve the often bizarre problems laid out for them.

The Double Standard

There is a double standard operating in each episode of House, as House is tolerated as an exception to hospital rules and regulations. This fits nicely with Nietzsche’s conception of the overman: “He [Nietzsche] wanted to make room for an aristocratic morality designed for exceptions. And he sought to undermine the idea that there is one type of morality for all individuals, one dictatorial morality that prescribes how all humans ought to live.”³

Believing House is somehow special, his colleagues enable and defend him despite his many violations of custom, tradition, and the law. We have seen House forge prescriptions, lie to almost everyone, and violate drug laws. But curiously, House doesn’t justify his own behavior by appealing to his achievements and thus his value to others. It isn’t a matter of self-entitlement—House is simply indifferent to confining rules, and if circumstances dictate, he acts as if the regulations did not exist.

House’s Style

There is a definite aesthetic dimension to Nietzsche’s work, and the artist is perhaps the best example of the overman. For the artist, creation is overcoming. However, the artist can become the artwork as the overman makes his own life a work of art.

Nietzsche emphasizes “giving style to one’s character” as the substance of an outstanding life. The obvious prominence of style in the character of Dr. House leaves others at his hospital, which, for all their diversity, dress and speak in the same tentative modes, pale or sterile by comparison. Their range of emotional expressions and attempts at humor are nearly non-existent when considered alongside House’s adolescent antics and cutting words.

The stylistic pluralism of Nietzsche’s writings is reflected in his contention that one can mold one’s own life in accord with a number of different, but distinct, styles. Style is a complex and elusive matter, changing with change in context. That Gregory House doesn’t dress, speak, or have the manners of a good hospital doctor is the most obvious mark of House. As a dramatic device, the strong style of House creates a constant tension between himself and the other characters while soliciting ambiguous admiration from the viewers. The aura of House’s style serves as a visual and auditory symbol of this value—that he is defended and tolerated despite his appearance. We envy House for the unpretentious way he speaks his mind and for his guilt-free attitude in pushing across his own beliefs and desires. Nietzsche’s overman is superior in the sense that he does not reference the world to determine who he is. Like House, the overman constructs his own identity.

On one interpretation the overman is valued in and for himself, not for what he may bring to the culture. Indeed, it is the culture that may form the soil for whatever the overman may become. On this note Walter Kaufmann says, “For Nietzsche, the Overman . . . is valuable in himself . . . and society is censured insofar as it insists on conformity and impedes his development.” ⁴ If this is not quite the circumstance of Dr. House, it certainly would seem to reflect the attitude of the viewer toward House and perhaps even many of his colleagues, who are attracted to House for who he is—his blunt and witty talk, his rebellious and humorous attitude toward the all-too-serious hospital scene.

In addition, there may be an equally significant purpose to House’s unique lifestyle. We, the viewers, may be asked to remember just what is important about doctoring and what is not—what is essential to the medical profession and what is mere accessory.

Denial

Not to be confused with the “aesthetic,” Nietzsche’s comments on the “ascetic”—the person who practices self-denial—are particularly surprising. One might think that the Nietzschean affirmation of bodily things would set him against the ascetic way of life. But Nietzsche offers the ascetic some small praise among his condemnations, something that seems to have come from Nietzsche’s Asian influences. The self-imposed material restraints of the ascetic are really an attempt to preserve life, to fight for existence in a difficult and suffering world. So for Nietzsche, a world in which the human is a sickly animal, “the ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life. . . . You will see my point: this ascetic priest, this apparent enemy of life . . . is among the greatest conserving and yes-creating forces of life.”⁵ House, while not quite an ascetic, is almost never depicted as having or wanting the usual emblems of material success afforded to him by his profession. His motorcycle and jeans attest to his modest lifestyle. We don’t see in House a conscious denial of consumer goods, only a lack of interest in them. And we see House, like the ascetic, as nonpolitical, immune to the politics of the hospital and the medical profession. What we see of his surroundings is modest and simple, without acquisitive habits.

Pain

In writing about pain, Georg Simmel (1858-1918) says, “This is one of the fundamental themes of the history of the human soul—the essential elevation of our being is effected through pain. . . . Nietzsche transfers this connection beyond the individual to mankind: only discipline attended by great pain has brought forth ‘all elevation of humanity.’”⁶ In a poetic sentence Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says, “One must still have chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” House’s “chaos” seems to find its roots in his very real pain, which, according to at least one placebo-contrived episode, may be psychosomatic. The pain, whatever its cause, may be the detour directing House on the higher road to accomplishment via focus and intensity.

Nietzsche’s earliest works, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, radically reinterpret standard contemporary views regarding Greek philosophy and art. As M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern say, “The suffering hero of Greek tragedy, Oedipus or Prometheus, is the original model for Nietzsche’s superman.”⁷ These mythological characters messed with gods, and because of their acts, they pay heavily and with physical pain. With House we encounter some obvious similarities with these Nietzschean models. House’s achievements are remarkable if not mythological, and while they are for the good of others, House disregards standards of common courtesy and rules that have historically regulated the institution of medicine. House’s pain, like that of Oedipus and Prometheus, engages our empathy and may be connected with his ability to solve problems unsolvable by most others, his “elevation.” It would be easy to say that House’s acerbic personality, quite unlike the overman, is an outgrowth of his pain and his abuse of others is a mode of relief. But what would a protagonist be without a flaw to move him just a little bit toward the role of underdog when his behavior seems to flow in the opposite direction?

Inheriting the Earth

The philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who wrote extensively on Nietzsche, sees the overman’s role as an answer to an overwhelming question: “Is man, as man in his nature till now, prepared to assume dominion over the whole earth?” Heidegger credits Nietzsche as “the first thinker who, in view of a world history emerging for the first time, asks the decisive question and thinks through its metaphysical implications.”⁸ If man is not prepared, he says, man must be brought beyond himself, and this Beyondman is some future type of being who can be delivered from revenge and has the will to free itself from the “it was,” the past that can no longer be willed. It is a freedom from the past—its memory of guilt, shame, and bitterness brought on by European morality. House seems to have the capacity to disregard any guilt that would have been due to the offensive behavior he may have inflicted upon patients or colleagues. Instead he acts with flair, confidence, and careless indifference. So, then, the “over” in overman contains a negation for Heidegger—a negative affirmation steering our species away from what we are, creatures of revenge, to a new kind of future being. How does House fit with this account? Pretty well. House shows little if any sign of self-pity or resentment despite the bullet wounds he sustained and the bad luck causing his leg pain.

The Fiction

Is House’s contempt for bureaucracy and his rejection of medical recipes in favor of instinct and intuition for uncannily getting things right a “bridge” between man and superman? Can House really be a foreshadowing of a futuristic alternative to Western medicine and a willingness to escape the narrow historicity of the white-coated doctor’s image? Clearly House’s feats have no equivalent in the actual world of the hospital. House is a fiction within a fiction. The frequency of challenging, even bizarre, cases, his specialty and his raison d’être at the hospital where he works, and the ingenuity of his solutions are beyond the plausible. His demeanor and dress tend both to exaggerate his alien presence and to present him as a gritty anchor to an extra-medical world. And while his arrogance and abusive behavior may not be what Nietzsche had in mind by an Übermensch, his achievement and style, his strength of will, his absence of resentment, and his timely disregard for the conforming behaviors and moralities of others are well in line with Nietzsche’s ideal.

NOTES

1 Quoted in Karl Pletsch, Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius (New York: Free Press, 1991), 183.

2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1966), 14. All other short quotes from Nietzsche are from this edition.

3 George J. Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1992), 338.

4 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 3rd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1968), 313-314.

5 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann, excerpted in Existentialism, ed. Robert Solomon (New York: Modern Library, 1974), 68-69.

6 Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, trans. H. Loskandl, D. Weinstein, and M. Weinstein (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1991), 166.

7 M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 296.

8 Martin Heidegger, “Who Is Zarathustra?” in The New Nietzsche, ed. and trans. David Allison (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 67.