by Josef Steiff
“Good heavens!”
“Quite. Examining the extent of knowledge itself, which is called ‘Veda’ in Sanskrit. He splits knowledge into four categories which became the four written Vedas, perhaps the oldest writings in any Indo-European language.”
“What was his mode of examination?”
“Vyasa turned his search within, like an ancient Descartes but with a rather different conclusion. The ‘I’ of the “I think” was, for Vyasa, not the true self. As the story goes, he risked it all and lost it all, transcending his own beliefs about who he was and who we are by moving to a depth of his heart which lay outside of word-thoughts. For lack of a better descriptor, he thereby heard the cosmic sound, the vibrations that are the essence of matter. By transcribing this into a language we might understand, the Vedas were penned.”
“This talk of exalted visions and, I imagine, sparse monklike lifestyle does remind me of Holmes, and not a little of you I confess.”
“I thought you were the Holmes character here. But never mind that for now. Have a pinch. You’re on to something vastly more interesting.” I noticed the “oṃ” symbol on the wooden snuffbox Green proffered, as both stood in contrast to his homely and simple lifestyle. Something in this question of identity also rang true, for I had become the narrator.
Green continued, “In Chapter 2 of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna speaks of two distinct paths for conducting investigation, each with its own assumptions and motivation but ultimately leading to the same outcome. The simpler of these involves deductive reasoning. A consequence of this path in various cultures has been versions of Cartesian dualism, such as found in the ancient Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy. An adherent to this is very formulaic in approach, strictly following set steps of inquiry.”
“Somewhat like Holmes, I’d say. Appropriate for dealing with large crimes and academic undertakings.”
“Somewhat. But while the larger crimes may be simple to solve using such methodology, Holmes regarded the finer ones as more interesting. Krishna says Samkhya’s proclivity for formulae springs from the desire to secure better positions in this world and in future lives if such should come about.”
“Why, that’s little else but enlightened self-interest, then!”
“Precisely. However, Krishna considers the desire for material gains to be contrary to the better path. The better path is to do good things because those things are good.”
“On what basis are we to judge which things are good and which lesser?”
“Krishna says both the realization that this is the better path and the understanding of what is good are achieved through meditation. Meditators proceed from the vantage point of selfknowledge and may disregard rules that appear in doctrinal writings, quite a dangerous task considering the institutions that penned and protected the sanctity of those doctrines. Such a person alone, he says, deserved to be called a yogi.”
“I must object that this sounds most anti-intellectual and not at all like Holmes, although he did at times disregard social standards in pursuit of truth.”
“It is only anti-intellectual in the terms historically imposed on this mystery that is consciousness. Although we would be remiss to impose the term yogi on Holmes, let us also admit that Watson awarded him the grade of zero in philosophy, called him eccentric in chemistry, unsystematic in anatomy . . .”
“Yes, and as I recall a self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco,” said Green, grinning at these entries to the list. “Here we come to another Indian version of the prototype for dangerous detectives,” he said. “While Vyasa deals with matters outside of ordinary social acknowledgments, his discrimination makes the extraordinary accessible to the ordinary. This means the “cosmic sound” he heard was not really heard. It was the experience of absolute unbroken monism without the differences that make our reality comprehensible, differences such as you-me, day-night, past-present, material-non-material and so forth. He makes this indescribable experience intelligible through ordinary language that uses such categories. However, in the same Vedas, a different type of dangerous detective appears. These long-haired ones are given to ecstatic flight in the opposite direction. Away from the mundane, their detective work is by way of enduring fire, gazing full on heaven while drinking poison from a cup.”
“This does sound remotely like Holmes. But is this not simply dangerous to one’s well being and ultimately to mental health?”
“We find something of a counterpart in Euro-American literature detective stories, in the psychic detective or psychic who assists the detective. The “existential detectives” in the film I ♥ Huckabees also operate outside methods ordinarily considered logical. The detective in the film Zen Noir proceeds in accord with the modus operandi of the genre before abandoning the noir method upon realizing its shortcomings in terms of examining his life.”
“This intuitive or non-discursive detective indeed differs from the tragic hero, the film noir PI, and from Holmes,” I said. “It reminds me a bit of Monk, from the television series by that name. I’m not sure his is always the logical method. But these people are harmless and nigh-invariably turn out to be frauds, at least in Euro-American writing.”
“Danger sometimes seems to be in the eye of the beholder. In the late 1990s the Chinese government arrested and tortured members of the group Falun Gong on charges of sedition for practicing a mystical form of Tai Chi in the parks of Beijing. It is in a similar vein that the long-hairs of the Vedas appear to threaten the orthodoxy by challenging not only the need for sacrifice which is at the core of Brahmanical social structure, but also the underlying dualistic worldview that most of us share, the view that there is a gap between self and other which Derrida says we can never bridge. Care for that pinch now?”
“The rantings of a few demagogues hardly seem so consequential,” I objected, waving off his snuff box. “Such is not so dangerous to a sound of mind, I should say. Although history might not bear me out, as I think of it.”
“There’s more than that at issue. Consider a counterexample in the most famous of Indian epics, that exemplary case of The Ramayana.”
“Ah yes. Let us call it ‘A Scandal in Lanka’.”
“Let us. You will recall in the story, Rama is set to become king of Ayodhya in northeast India. Before this happens however, his wife Sita is kidnapped by a mysterious man disguised as an ascetic.”
“As with the Bohemian gentleman, Holmes might have deduced this masked man was the king of Lanka in the south of India.”
“For the bulk of the story, Rama forges his way southward through the forests of the subcontinent. On the way he forms alliances with forest dwellers to battle an array of demons and evil doers, all the while gathering clues as to the whereabouts of his beloved Sita. Throughout the story, Rama is portrayed as the representation of order in the world. Indeed he is the very incarnation of order, the manifestation of the supreme god Vishnu, although he forgets this for most of the epic. After a year of subduing the non-Vaishnavites of south India, spreading wide what is represented as righteous social stratification in gender and caste . . .”
“This is generally termed imperialism.”
“. . . he discovers where Sita is being held. In the climactic battle, Rama kills Ravana and regains Sita. The story ends not there however. After their return to the north and subsequent coronation, the people of Ayodhya begin to wonder if Sita was not raped or, what is apparently worse, if she had willingly succumbed to Ravana’s charms. After all, she was with him for over a year.”
“I suppose succumbing to his charms means she became attracted to chaos or at least came to reject certain aspects deemed essential to civilization.”
“You have hit directly upon the matter. The danger faced by Rama, Sita and all of us according to the Ramayana and the Bhagavad Gita, is adharma, the violation of dharma or righteous duty. The motivating factor in the story is the maintenance of cosmic order. It is for this the sacrificer keeps his fire ablaze, the warrior battles even fa
ced with defeat, the householder reproduces society, all for fear of chaos courted by the renunciate, Ravana and the long-haired ones.”
“I now believe your snuff box to be of Lankan design. A reward advance for the present cultural dissemination I surmise. And what of Sita?”
“When Rama asks her of her trials she denies being touched. But the people are not convinced. Rama asks Agni, fire, to test her. Sita is insulted but walks through fire thereby receiving Agni’s testimony on her behalf. Yet Rama and his subjects persist in conventional, civilized cruelty and Rama finally casts out his queen. This tragic event is considered the utmost sacrifice for the sake of social order.”
“It is also punishing the victim, is it not? Which is truly more dangerous, ruling with truth or by upholding a lie to placate subjects? It is a strange application of deontology indeed, this strict adherence to rules at the expense of breaking a few.”
“An alternate outcome to the story appears in the recent Hindi film adaptation called Raavan. The film features two glamorous stars, Aishwarya Rai as a Sita character named Ragini and her real-life husband Abhishek Bachchan as the Ravana persona named Beera, meaning Brave. In the film, Dev, a modern police detective whose name means god, reminding us of Rama, investigates his wife’s kidnapping. This leads him to south India and the criminal Beera he has indicted before. Beera has kidnapped Dev’s wife to show the injustices of the detective past and present, charging that Dev only persecutes south Indians because they are poor and uneducated. As time goes on, Ragini comes to realize the truth in this and sees that her husband’s obsession with Beera is stronger than his desire for her release. As in the Ramayana, once his wife is returned, the detective questions her fidelity and rejects her. But here Ragini returns to Beera. Dev then kills Beera even as Ravana is killed. Again, conventional social order triumphs. But in this case the outsider dies with a smile, the ideological winner for having gained both the love of Ragini and the audience.”
“What of Holmes, then? Does he plummet at Reichenbach Falls with a smile on his face? And, if he does, is it because he has enforced order in society, or because Moriarty’s defeat is also a defeat of the ideology that those who are ‘respectable’ are in fact deserving of respect?”
“Ah, but my dear Doctor Wittkower, you have all the evidence you need to form the proper conclusion, and if I spell everything out for you, we both shall find it so painfully dull!”
Chapter 9
I Suppose I Shall Have to Compound a Felony as Usual
Mihaela Frunză and Anatolia Bessemer
HOLMES: You don’t mind breaking the law?
WATSON: Not in the least.
HOLMES: Nor running a chance of arrest?
WATSON: Not in a good cause.
HOLMES: Oh, the cause is excellent!
—“A Scandal in Bohemia”
Sherlock Holmes is a much better detective than the best of Scotland Yard. So it’s no surprise that Holmes has scant respect for their investigative abilities. As he caustically remarks in The Sign of the Four, “When Gregson, or Lestrade, or Athelney Jones are out of their depth—which, by the way, is their normal state . . .”
But not only does Holmes deride the official law enforcers’ analytic skills, he also feels free to over-ride the typical policeman’s sense of justice, and even to go against the law itself. Holmes often commits crimes and gets away with it. He freely engages in fraudulent deception, breaking and entering, or suppression of evidence, whenever he believes that “the cause is excellent.”
When he pretends to be an innocent clergyman in order to trace the disputed memento of a royal personage (“A Scandal in Bohemia”) he clearly misleads his victims in order to induce them to show what they are trying to hide. (In this case it is Holmes’s client who has done wrong, not the woman, Irene Adler.) Occasionally, he commits trespass on property (“The Greek Interpreter”) in order to accomplish his detective work. Sometimes he fools the authorities in order to protect a lady against a ruined reputation (”The Adventure of the Second Stain”). He has even been known to let persons guilty of a serious crime get off scott-free (most notably in “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” but also in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” and “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”).
By contrast with Holmes, the police seem to always want to stick to the letter of the law. “Now, gentlemen,” says Lestrade, “the forms of the law must be complied with . . .” (A Study in Scarlet). The police in the Holmes canon are dull-witted but honest; we never see them planting evidence or deliberately twisting an investigation to arrive at a particular outcome.
Occasionally the police will indulge Holmes and Watson by permitting something strictly irregular (though not seriously unlawful), as when Athelney Jones in The Sign of the Four, permits Watson, at Holmes’s suggestion, to bring the supposed Agra treasure to Miss Mary Morstan. But much of what Holmes decides to do is never brought to the attention of the police, because he is so much better at concealing crime than they are at finding it.
Whose Justice?
When someone decides to put their own sense of justice above the law, how can we adjudicate? If we may sometimes flout the law, what court of appeal can decide when this is right and when it’s wrong?
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has proposed in his book Whose Justice? Which Rationality? that modern man has lost any common sense of justice. There is no longer a universal tradition which everyone respects, so appeals to justice tend to become mere camouflage for pursuit of self-interest or groupinterest. Conflicts between different conceptions of justice seem to be beyond the reach of any judicial verdict.
There is no standing ground, no place for enquiry, no way to engage in the practices of advancing, evaluating, accepting, and rejecting reasoned argument apart from that which is provided by some particular tradition or other. (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 350)
MacIntyre’s solution to the problem is, not to recapture an all-embracing theory of justice, but to understand each separate tradition of justice. MacIntyre tells us that a diversity of perspectives on justice is not necessarily a bad thing. It is rather the normal way of being. It is not only natural and normal to have many views on justice, those views may be incompatible because they are justified by a certain way of reasoning. And this very habit of reasoning is different from one category of persons to another, and even from person to person.
The Holmes Tradition
But to which tradition does Sherlock Holmes belong? We could link him with the tradition of late-nineteen-century England. But we could also place him in the tradition of fictional private detectives, who have always worked around the law when it suited their own sense of morality.
Holmes has predecessors (Poe’s Auguste Dupin) and famous successors (Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot). These characters and many others belong to the same tradition because they all contribute to a peculiar, independent way of accomplishing justice: not by relying on the tools of external law and its police officers, but by relying on their own logical and physical powers
Holmes claims that “from a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or Niagara without having seen or heard of them” (A Study in Scarlet). The image of the exceptional, almost magical detective has become an icon of the mystery story.
What these fictional characters also share is their passionate commitment to their work. Although both Holmes and Poirot end up by supporting themselves financially from their hobby (Dupin was an aristocrat), they would do this job even in the absence of a material reward, for the sheer pleasure of doing it. This places them in opposition to the police detectives, who are only doing their job, and are not always motivated by an inner impetus. In exchange for a salary, they agree to follow the rules. Hence, different social and economic situations generate divergent traditions.
Holmes’s Law
While prepared to disobey the law, Holmes also often thinks of himself as an instrument of the law, and always
as an instrument of justice.
In “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place,” Holmes coldly informs the baronet Sir Robert Norberton that “my business is that of every other good citizen—to uphold the law.” And after he has heard the baronet’s explanation and is somewhat more sympathetic, he still insists that “the matter must, of course, be referred to the police,” even though Norberton did not kill his aged sister, but merely concealed her death for a few weeks.
The story which gives us the most detailed insight into Holmes’s sense of justice is “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange.” Here we have Holmes’s clear statement that he regrets having brought some criminals to justice, that it is his conscience which induces him to flout the law, and that this conscience is basically utilitarian:
“No, I couldn’t do it, Watson,” said he, as we re-entered our room. “Once that warrant was made out, nothing on earth would save him. Once or twice in my career I feel that I have done more real harm by my discovery of the criminal than ever he had done by his crime. I have learned caution now, and I had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience.”
Holmes gives the official detective Hopkins a vital piece of evidence, but holds back from helping him any further, to put the police on the track of the resourceful killer. Holmes explains to Watson:
“You must look at it this way: what I know is unofficial, what he [Hopkins] knows is official. I have the right to private judgment, but he has none. He must disclose all, or he is a traitor to his service. In a doubtful case I would not put him in so painful a position, and so I reserve my information until my own mind is clear upon the matter.”