by Josef Steiff
Two into One
One of the earliest sources for philosophical reflection on love is Plato’s Symposium, a dialogue that depicts a Greek drinking party in which the participants take turns singing the praises of the god of love. Although Socrates is usually the hero of Plato’s work, here the Greek playwright Aristophanes has the scene-stealing speech. According to his tale, we humans were once quite different from what we are now; as originally created, we were spherical beings with four arms, four legs, and a single head. But when our human ancestors offended the gods—and don’t humans always end up offending the Greek gods in some way or other?—Zeus decided to teach us a lesson by splitting each of us in two.
Humanity might have been better off had we just been punished with the usual thunderbolts. Having been bisected into the two-legged creatures we are today, we are left feeling desperately incomplete and always yearning for our missing half. As Aristophanes concludes his paean to Love: “The happiness of the whole human race . . . is to be found in the consummation of our love, and in the healing of our dissevered nature by finding each his proper mate.” In love, we attempt to restore ourselves to our former natures, “to make two into one, and to bridge the gulf between one human being and another” (Symposium, p. 544).
As much as we might want to reintegrate ourselves, however, doing so is not always easy. Even after two years of marriage, Holmes and Russell are each still adjusting to their partnership—a partnership that far transcends the marriage bed into every area of their lives together. As he tells her, in terms strikingly reminiscent of Aristophanes’ tale, “I still find it difficult to accustom myself to being half a creature with two brains and four eyes. A superior creature to a single detective, no doubt, but it takes some getting used to” (A Letter of Mary, p. 85).
Holmes’s quiet declaration startles Russell. Having known him for over a third of her life, she has long recognized how much she has been shaped by him. But what she is now only coming to realize is that she, too, has been shaping him.
Crazy Love
Philosophers interested in theories of personal identity—the question of what makes an individual the same person over time—are known for inventing unusual and often outlandish cases in an attempt to test our intuitions. Would you still be the same person if your body were completely disassembled and the molecules beamed across space, later to be reassembled in their original configuration on Mars? What if we took a detailed imprint of your complete molecular configuration, destroyed your physical matter here on earth, and then imposed that molecular configuration on completely new physical matter on Mars? Would the Mars human be you? Or what if we imposed the molecular pattern on the completely new physical matter on Mars without destroying your body here on Earth? Would the being newly created on Mars be you? But then who’s on Earth? Are you somehow in both places? Holmes might never have needed cocaine to keep himself stimulated in the downtime between cases had he only turned his mind to reflection of these sorts of cases!
A different outlandish case, and one more relevant to our purposes here, is raised by philosopher Derek Parfit in his influential discussion of personal identity. Imagine a world in which fusion was a natural process: “Two people come together. While they are unconscious, their two bodies grow together into one. One person then wakes up” (Reasons and Persons, p. 298). Different people value autonomy differently, and some people accord a greater sense of importance to their sense of individuality than others do, but it’s hard to believe that any of us would fail to be anything but completely horrified by a world in which this kind of fusion was commonplace. Parfitian fusion looks remarkably like death.
But this presents us with something of a puzzle, because romantic love itself is often understood as a kind of fusion. Granted, lovers—even in the very act of love—do not literally become a single physical entity. We do not literally achieve the kind of reintegration that Aristophanes claims we’re searching for. But the merger that occurs between lovers, both physically and psychologically, is not just metaphorical. When we fall in love, we are no longer fully separate and independent beings.
In love, as the song lyric says, two hearts do beat as one. Our desires, values, and interests change in accordance with those of our lovers. We no longer make decisions individually. We make joint plans and coordinate our activities. We find ourselves thinking differently about things. We are as highly sensitized to the moods of each other as we are to our own moods, if not even more so. As Russell herself finds, “Marriage attunes a person to nuances in behaviour, the small vital signs that signal a person’s well-being” (A Letter of Mary, p. 27). Simply by noticing that Holmes has not read the newspaper for three days, for example, Russell can tell that something is troubling her husband.
Many philosophers have taken the fusion of identities to be central to the very notion of romantic love. For example, on Robert Nozick’s view, love involves wanting to become a we rather than merely an I, and this involves the creation of a new, joint identity. Neil Delaney argues that lovers want to merge with one another in profound psychological and physical ways. One identifies with a lover; one takes the needs and interests of one’s lover to be one’s own. Roger Scruton too talks of the union of interests achieved by lovers; when we are in love, the distinction between my interests and your interests is wholly eroded. And Robert Solomon argues that in romantic love the self expands to include another. As he puts it, “shared identity is the intention of love.”2
The psychiatrist Willard Gaylin is perhaps even more explicit than these philosophers about love being a kind of fusion. On his view, all love involves the blurring of boundaries between individuals, the merging of the self with another individual to create “a fused identity.” Moreover, the notion of fusion here sounds eerily like Parfitian fusion:
The concept of fusion as I will use it literally means the loss of one’s identity in that of another; a confusion of ego boundaries; the sense of unsureness as to where I end and you, the person I love, begin; the identification of your pain with my pain and your success with my success; the inconceivability of a self that does not include you . . . (Rediscovering Love, p. 103)
But here something seems to have gone awry. Although there’s something deeply plausible about the understanding of love as a kind of fusion, once the account gets spelled out in detail, it starts to seem more puzzling. How can a loss of identity be a good thing? As even Gaylin himself notes, an uncertainty about the boundaries of one’s identity is a feature of psychosis. Watson may have been right that Holmes once viewed emotions such as love as incompatible with the achievement of a properly balanced mind, but surely even Holmes wouldn’t want to suggest that falling in love means literally going insane.
From I to We
Just a couple of weeks after turning twenty-one, while involved in a difficult investigation, Russell is kidnapped by a band of criminals, held captive for ten days, and repeatedly injected with opium against her will. In a noble effort to keep her mind clear, she forces herself to engage in a variety of forms of “mental gymnastics.” She conjugates verb forms in the many languages she knows, works on difficult mathematical problems, and tries to solve logic puzzles. Eventually, however, her mind turns to a more personal puzzle: Her relationship with Holmes.
She has been working by his side for six years, first as his apprentice and then as his equal. Trapped in her basement prison, she finally comes to acknowledge the depth of her affection for him: “I loved him, I had loved him since I met him, and I doubted not that I should love him with my dying breath.” What shape, exactly, does that love take? It’s not a love of frenzied infatuation. But that’s not to say that it’s not impassioned. Rather, as Russell comes to realize, “For me, for always, the paramount organ of passion was the mind. Unnatural, unbalanced, perhaps, but it was true: Without intellect, there could be no love” (Monstrous, p. 266).
Theirs may be a passion born of the intellect, but that’s not to say it was a purely intellectual passion
. Once married, they do engage in the activities rendered legal by their marital status (Moor, p. 7). But what’s critically important about their relationship for Russell is that she not “lose herself ” in love—thereby hitting upon precisely what seems problematic about the fusion view of love. If, in becoming a we, I have to give up my very autonomy as an individual—if, in becoming a we I can no longer be an I—then falling in love would be a loss of self. So if, like Russell and Holmes, we value our individuality, our autonomy, our very identity, then love would be simply unthinkable.
But perhaps there’s away of understanding the fusion involved in love that allows us to avoid these unpalatable consequences. Nozick tries to ward them off when he suggests that being part of a we “involves having a new identity, an additional one. This does not mean that you no longer have any individual identity or that your sole identity is part of the we. However, the individual identity you did have will become altered.” But Nozick doesn’t do much to help us understand what this means. To spell it out in more detail, we might look to an intriguing suggestion by Delaney that the merger involved in love be understood as akin to what happens when a group of sovereign states opt to come together into a republican nation.
In a discussion of the potential threat to autonomy posed by romantic love, Marilyn Friedman develops this suggestion of Delaney’s. When states come together in a federation, they combine without ceding all of their previous powers. The states themselves continue to exist as states, even as a new joint entity—their federation—comes into being. On Friedman’s view, we should say something similar about romantic joinings. In the merger that is love, there is indeed the emergence of a new entity, a new we, but our own identities are not themselves wholly submerged by it. The merger is thus both partial and flexible:
Each lover remains, in some sense and for some purposes, a separate self with her own capacities for the exercise of agency. On this view, a romantic merger does not obliterate the separate existence of two lovers. Instead it produces a new entity out of them, but only to some extent, only at some times, and only for some purposes—while leaving them as two separate selves. Each lover remains, like each state in a federation, a separate self with capacities to make choices and to act on her own. (Autonomy, Gender, Politics, p. 119)
For Friedman, then, love is best understood as involving a sort of threesome—though not of the kinky variety. In becoming we, neither you nor I cease to exist. The two individual lovers continue to exist along with “the flexible romantic ‘federation,’ or merger, that they become,” and these three entities co-exist in “a dynamic, shifting interplay of subjectivity, agency, and objectivity.”
Our identities are shaped and shifted by all sorts of activities in which we engage, love among them. And there’s nothing wrong with that. In living our lives, we’re constantly engaged in the shaping and reshaping of our own identities, whether through education, exercise, or analysis. The psychotherapy that Russell undergoes after the car accident that kills her parents, and the hypnosis employed by her psychoanalyst over the course of the therapy, enables her to get past her own guilt at having caused the accident. Clearly her identity was shaped both by the accident and by the resulting therapy. But although she became in some sense a new person as a result of those experiences, we don’t see them as a threat to her very selfhood. As long as what’s involved in a romantic fusion is the shaping of an identity, rather than its obliteration, we have nothing to fear from love.
Granted, as Friedman notes, this can’t be the end of the story. Not all mergers of identities are mutual mergers, and thus not all of them are fair. An unfair merger robs us of our autonomy and drains us of our individuality. In contrast, a fair merger is both nurturing and affirming, and it promotes our autonomy and individuality rather than denigrating it. To love well, then, we have to make sure to hold on to ourselves.
Perhaps this is why Russell doggedly persists in her pursuit of theology. It does occasionally cross her mind to wonder whether she’d chosen a course of study that Holmes regarded as an “irrational pseudodiscipline” in part to maintain her identity “against the tide of Holmes’s forceful personality” (A Letter of Mary, p. 29). Perhaps it’s also why she prefers to be addressed as “Miss Russell” rather than as “Mrs. Holmes,” and why she finds it so irritating when the Dartmoor locals, who affectionately refer to Holmes as “Snoop Zherlock” give her the nickname “Zherlock Mary”—a nickname that doesn’t reflect her identity in her own right, but rather fuses her with her husband (The Moor, p. 132). And perhaps, in a way, it also explains why Holmes gives the advice he does to one of those same locals who has just been abandoned by his fiancé: “You look around for a woman with brains and spirit. You’ll never be bored” (p. 70). Upon hearing this advice, Russell isn’t sure who was the more nonplussed: the young lad or herself.
Surviving Fusion
Even if Watson had been a woman, Holmes could never have loved him the way that he loves Mary Russell. As Watson himself admits, he was hardly a partner to Holmes in any real sense of the word. He may have in some sense served as a “whetstone” for Holmes’s mind, but that’s more a matter of his mere presence than any positive contribution that he made. In fact, conversations between Holmes and Watson are really best described as instances of Holmes’s thinking aloud:
His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me—many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead—but none the less, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject. If I irritated him by a certain methodical slowness in my mentality, that irritation served only to make his own flame-like intuitions and impressions flash up the more vividly and swiftly. Such was my humble role in our alliance. (“The Adventure of the Creeping Man”)
No, for Holmes to fall in love, he needed to find someone who could be a true partner to him—someone who could fuse with his strong personality, and still remain herself. Her ability to do so is important not only for her own sake, but for Holmes’s sake as well. Marriage to Mary Russell does indeed change Sherlock Holmes, but just as he does not sacrifice his identity to their pairing, neither does she sacrifice hers. And it’s for precisely this reason that their partnership, however surprising and unconventional it may be, is a successful one. It’s even—dare I say?—elementary.
This chapter is dedicated to the Holmes to my Russell, Frank Menetrez.
Chapter 13
A Study in Friendship
Ruth Tallman
From their first meeting in A Study in Scarlet, in which they each run through their laundry list of flaws to determine if they’ll make compatible roommates, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are a match made in . . . well, they’re a match, anyway. Watson grumbles about Holmes’s slovenly habits, and Holmes usually maintains his “too cool for emotions” veneer, but anyone who has followed the pair through adventure after adventure intuitively recognizes friendship in both men’s actions.
Despite the fact that Holmes and Watson obviously seem to be friends, the long-standing gold standard for a philosophical account of friendship comes from Aristotle, and on his account, it turns out that Holmes and Watson are not friends at all. This leaves us with two mysteries: first, what clues can we deduce from Aristotle’s account of friendship that will help us learn why he thinks Holmes and Watson cannot be friends? Second, who is the better friend, Holmes or Watson?
Good Friends?
Aristotle was the first philosopher to offer a systematic account of friendship, and he deserves credit for getting a whole lot right. He recognized that we often use the word ‘friend’ loosely, and that many people that we casually call friends are at best fair-weather friends. These are people that spend time together because it suits their self-interest, but they part ways when one or both of them cease to benefit from the relationship.
True friends, Aristotle explains, bear some resemblance to this other, lesser type of friend, but true friendship is markedly differe
nt. True friends can be distinguished from the other types of friendships, according to Aristotle, because true friends want what is good for their friend, even when that good comes at the expense of their own good (Rhetoric, lines 1380b35–1381a).
So far, Aristotle’s description of true friendship seems perfectly in accord with the relationship between Watson and Holmes. Both men have risked their own lives for the other, the pre-eminent example of putting another’s good before your own. What’s more, they clearly have genuine affection for each other. While Watson wears his heart on his sleeve—and chronicles his affection for the detective faithfully in his writings—Holmes also demonstrates his love of Watson, generally in more subtle ways, such as the care he takes to explain the steps in his reasoning process that allow him to solve mysteries.
The usually impatient Holmes is always willing to take the time to help his friend understand what is intuitively obvious to himself. Probably the clearest instance of the demonstrated recognized reciprocity of the friendship is shown in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” when Watson suffers a gunshot wound, and Holmes fears he has been killed. In his moment of panic, Holmes’s normal reserve is dropped, revealing deep raw emotion for his friend. That unguarded revelation was, to Watson, “worth many wounds . . . to know the depth and loyalty of love” his friend feels for him.