is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Cartesian Interrupted.
Cartesian Interrupted.
Last night I asked Caroleen if she could Tivo the season finale of House for me so I wouldn�t be so lame as to choose television over hanging out with friends (who don�t want to watch House). But for some reason we ended up watching House, I�m not sure why. It was strange because the episode wasn�t such a good introduction to the series, so, while I wanted to give it my full attention, I also felt bad (for Caroleen) that it was uncharacteristically gory and more confusing in its narrative devices than usual. However, I myself was pleased by the episode, though mostly the second half of the hour, and then the whole thing retroactively. House gets shot and then most of the hour takes place in his mind as a hallucination brought on by pain and shock. Except that at first we (as audience) don�t know that this is all hallucination (and neither does he). House�s behavior is so erratic in general, and television is a vehicle to which we tend to hand our suspended disbelief fairly willingly, so it would take something huge to make us (as audience) question whether what House is up to this week is not reality but, rather, a hallucination undergone by House in the privacy of his own head.
What I loved about the second half of the hour, and then the whole hour retroactively, was that at some point he starts to realize that he�s hallucinating, and that sets him on a long set of Cartesian meditations within his hallucination: how do I know I�m real? how do I know that what is around me is real? if something isn�t real, or if I�m not real, does it matter what I do? does anything matter? how can I be certain that I am something rather than nothing? I think, therefore I am. And so he tries to reason his way out of a hallucination.
But he also gets challenged along the way by the patient, who is also the man who shot him, and who, for our purposes, is also masquerading as a continental philosopher, who shares a hospital room with House.
House, who is a poster manchild for the perils of hyper-rationality, is a man made miserable by a combination of pain and human reason. Of course, he�s a television character not a real human being, and his extremes are what make him interesting. They also make him seem human, despite his posture of indifference towards others. Adding pain to his dedication to the work of the mind throws a wrench into it all, because pain can�t be reasoned away. And so he�s a Vicodin addict who also mainlines Morphine. But he�s also a brilliant doctor. It�s an overblown metaphor for how we all are partly just who we set out to be and also partly some insane bag of sadness, joy, and anger that no amount of reason can empty out or make orderly.
So House channels Descartes, which makes sense, since both of them want to rely on the mind instead of the body in order to prove truths of the body. But no one can escape his or her body, and there is a reason why many philosophical meditations begin with the body. It is where we live. And that�s what the patient-shooter-continentalphilosopher keeps adding to the picture. House tries to reason his way through his Cartesian thought experiments in solitude, but he is not free to do so. There is someone else, interrupting him even in his own hallucination. And when you�re human, that matters, that interruption. It changes your thinking, in important ways.
It�s nice that such a good and odd little show didn�t get canceled!
12:19 a.m. - May 25, 2006
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