Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy

by Josef Steiff

  Like his gay contemporary Oscar Wilde, Holmes lives an artist’s life in the realm of ideas. His methods are better thought of as the work of a true artist and aesthete, and Plato might say that Holmes sees only the perfect forms on which all reality is based. That’s why Holmes’s perceptions are rarely inaccurate whereas his sidekick Dr. John Watson is a philistine who fails to the see the ingenious master plans behind the crimes he helps Holmes investigate. Sherlock Holmes is an aesthetic philosopher and scientist of beauty who can appreciate the poetic nature of things, however perfect or perverse. With his super powers of aesthetic sight, he sees the bigger picture in all the details.

  Aestheticism is the science and philosophy of beauty, poetry, and fine arts. The word aesthetics comes from the Greek word aísthēsis, meaning perception. A true aesthete as Doyle’s contemporary Walter Hamilton defines it in The Aesthetic Movement in England is one who can recognize true beauty and agrees upon standards that govern the perception of what is beautiful.

  What makes Holmes, like Wilde, so revered is his ability to see beyond the surface and find connections, meanings, and stories told by clues and circumstances. Both Holmes and Wilde understand that things are much more than what they seem. Holmes recognizes the most beautifully crafted criminal master plans. He points out flaws and imperfections in the best crimes and never stops searching for the criminal who is a better aesthete than he. It’s not surprising that Holmes never marries because he is rarely equaled. In “The Final Problem,” Holmes meets his match, Professor James Moriarty, “the Napoleon of crime” who had to resign from a small university in provincial England because of “dark rumors” and “hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind.”

  And it is these hereditary tendencies that empowers these queer beings of detective fiction with such extraordinary senses for sniffing out criminals or committing their own crimes.

  Holmes admits that his brother Mycroft Holmes, “one of the queerest men,” has greater powers than his own. Unlike Sherlock, Mycroft lives out all of his days working and lodging in the same few blocks radius and spending leisure time in the unsociable Diogenes club where many London men “some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows.” Holmes calls it the “queerest club in London,” and Graham Robb writes in Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century that the word “queer” had taken on its modern sense by 1894.

  The Holmes brothers’ grandmother was supposedly the sister of the French painter, Horace Vernet (1789–1863)—as Holmes says to Watson, “Art in the blood is liable to take the strongest forms.”

  The work of every artist, including gay artists, relies on superficial details and appearances to convey the deeper messages of their work or, in Holmes’s case, to solve a mystery. Holmes detects great criminal minds whose strange motives and queer natures reveal the qualities of aesthetic masterminds whose art Holmes admires and seeks to decode with every mystery he untangles.

  A Wilde Guess

  Holmes himself is as queer in every sense of the word as his enemies and clients: his drug habits, sexuality, and supernatural powers of deduction translate into as acute an ability to perceive the true nature of people and things as Oscar Wilde. You may be aware that Holmes was inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s mentor Joseph Bell, but it may come as a surprise to learn that Oscar Wilde was also Doyle’s inspiration for the character. The two were colleagues and great admirers of each other’s writing, and Doyle took Wilde as a muse. The 2010 documentary Searching for Sherlock visits the Langham Hotel where, in August 1889, Wilde and Doyle met. Doyle very much looked forward to Wilde’s opinion of the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, and a year after their meeting, Doyle’s second Holmes story was published in Lippincott’s Magazine. According to scholars Graham Robb and Melissa Hope Ditmore, that meeting led to the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott’s Magazine as well.

  Holmes’s super powers of deduction are comparable to and perhaps not so different from Wilde’s poetic sense. Wilde stuck up his nose at bourgeois English society the way Holmes belittles the same people for being philistines, and both made critics eat their words. Wilde followed the nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement of fine artists and literary figures who endeavored to cultivate, define, and aspire to standards of taste.

  Holmes might seem too morbid and sociopathic to be an aesthete, but as Wilde wrote in the preface to Dorian Gray, “No artist has ethical sympathies.” He continues, “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” If you look closely, Holmes has an affinity with artists that can’t be explained by other theories of who it was that inspired Doyle’s creation: Holmes’s musical talent with the Stradivarius violin, for instance, and his admiration of androgyny—Irene Adler dons a male disguise to thwart the detective’s plan to return a piece of evidence incriminating the King of Bohemia in “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

  Always at play in the stories and adaptations of Doyle’s detective is the likelihood that Holmes may be, like Oscar Wilde, gay. The physical parallels are easy to miss but almost impossible not to see. Doyle’s biographer Russell Miller compares Watson’s description of Holmes in A Study in Scarlet to Doyle’s revered teacher at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, but the physical description incidentally fits Wilde: “six feet,” “so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller,” “sharp and piercing” eyes, “thin, hawk-like nose,” prominent, square chin, and ink-blotted and chemical stained hands. Wilde’s hair length is considerably longer and he appears younger than early Sidney Paget illustrations of Holmes in Strand Magazine, but in the story of the “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” Holmes assumes a position Wilde was photographed in and later immortalized as a statue lying against a boulder in Merrion Square, Dublin: they are both lying across a day bed in their housecoat.

  Watson mentions another intimate detail, which implicates his own queer sensibilities while insinuating that Holmes’s delicate intellectual nature is commonly associated with such flamboyant men. Watson calls attention to the frequent occasions he saw Holmes “manipulating his fragile philosophical instruments.” It sounds as if his hands were an extension of his aesthetic super-sight, instruments of a philosopher, more than just a detective’s dirty fingers.

  Sherlock Holmes is a fusion of the two influences in Doyle’s life with a strong resemblance to both Bell and Wilde. Doyle’s imbuing Holmes with keen aesthetic sense and artistic nature combined with a voracity for science and reason produced one of the most enduring and significant early private eyes.

  Graham Robb suggests that the elevated awareness in Holmes is a trait similar to that identified by the first sexologists. These scientists took pleasure in studying “Homosexualität”—as least once the German word entered the wider vernacular. They behaved like detectives themselves, investigating into their clients’ lives and fellow homosexuals. These sexologists, as Robb imagines, philosophized about the nature of homosexuals, “What was the secret sense that allowed these alien creatures to recognize one another at a glance and yet remain undetected? Was it innate or acquired? Could a normal person learn to identify them?” The questions are the same as to what gives Holmes his “secret sense” to identify those who demonstrate perverse nature. Edgar Allan Poe’s earlier detective Dupin could see through “windows” into the hearts of men, a quality the narrator of “The Murder in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin’s dandy friend D., chalked up to a “diseased, intelligence” not unlike Professor Moriarty’s diabolical hereditary tendencies.

  The Aesthete and the Philistine

  Watson’s philistine nature makes him curious and practical but not especially clever or insightful. While Holmes tries to minimize his aesthetic sight as “elementary,” Watson fails to see what, for Holmes, is self-evident. On a leisurely afternoon in A Study in Scarlet, a bored Wa
tson leafs through a magazine article entitled “The Book of Life” by none other than Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

  Watson recalls the gist of the passage:

  It attempted to show how much an observant man might learn by an accurate and systematic examination of all that came in his way. . . . The reasoning was close and intense, but the deductions appeared to me to be far-fetched and exaggerated.

  The writer claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts.

  When he comes to the infamous Holmes’s remark “From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other,” Watson cries out “What ineffable twaddle!” Without the slightest grain of an aesthetic sense, Watson simply rejects Holmes’s preposterous “rules of deduction” theories altogether. When Holmes reveals that he is the author, Watson is taken by surprise. He learns to trust Holmes’s “intuition” as the detective calls it in later stories, but this first serious conversation between the new roommates that sets up the dynamic of their relationship for the entire saga.

  As Wilde did during his famous libel trial against the Marquis of Queensberry, father of the author’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, Holmes sticks up his nose at bourgeois English society and makes his skeptics eat his words. But unlike Wilde, Holmes was never imprisoned for “unnatural habits, tastes and practices” (otherwise known as sodomy). He rarely curtails his criticism of even the most prominent clients such as the King of Bohemia. Holmes throws around blatantly ugly remarks about his contemporaries, clients, and women, caring little if he offends anyone’s philistine nature.

  His relationship with Watson is peculiar not only because of the homosexual tensions but because Watson’s philistine nature and Holmes’s aesthetic sense are always at odds. The pair we know and love are polar opposites who debate like philosophers but deeply admire one another. Watson sees Holmes’s cigar experiments as the work of a mysterious scientific genius, but, for Holmes, the cigar ash could be the clue to the character of the cigar smoker.

  Finding the whereabouts of a criminal’s identity is easily exposed by Holmes’s aesthetic sight but it isn’t enough to prove his conviction to the philistines who surround him. He must prove to the police, to the client, or to Watson, using hard evidence or eyewitnesses. Almost every story and adaptation leads us to the conclusion of a mystery, but Holmes always arrives there first in his mind, before Watson or we philistine readers figure it out for ourselves.

  That Far-Away Look

  In BBC’s The Case of the Silk Stocking, openly gay Rupert Everett, as Holmes, shows up at the London morgue having heard through the grape vine of a recent murder possibly in connection with an aristocratic missing person, Lady Alice, daughter of the Duchess of Narborough. Holmes puts his aesthetic sense to work by noticing that the clothes the victim is dressed in were not her own, and, in fact, belong to a first undiscovered victim. He presses his fingers along the young girl’s dead hands as an acupuncturist would check your vital organ functioning. His observations are mostly about Lady Alice’s beauty and her well-groomed hands and feet, which later leads him to the conclusion that the killer seeks only flawless and untainted feet to fondle. Though Holmes doesn’t blurt out this conclusion early on, the camera reveals the clues. The camera pans past worn dead women’s feet before stopping at Lady Alice’s body whose feet are well pedicured.

  To gather more from the scene of Lady Alice’s kidnapping, Holmes requests to see her bedroom. He enters with inspector Lestrade behind, and snaps into what Watson describes as that “vacant expression in his eyes” during his cocaine drug trips. A musical refrain starts playing that we only hear when Holmes is in this trance, hot on the trail of a criminal. We get a private showing of his aesthetic sight as the camera closes in on Holmes’s face and our perspective switches to first person. He swiftly scans the room with his eyes and settles on the windowsill. Holmes mounts a bench and slides open the window. He climbs out and within seconds finds evidence that the young girl was seduced: a coat borrowed from the Dutchess, alcohol bottles, and smoked cigars. Holmes deduces that one cigar was put out by a lady’s shoe and the other was left to burn out by a man.

  Another victim is found shortly after Holmes finishes interrogating everyone in the Dutchess’s mansion. Lady Georgina, daughter of Sir Massingham, is snatched from her bed in the middle of the night. In another showy demonstration of Holmes’s aesthetic sight, he asks for a moment alone in the room. The return of the musical score from the first crime scene indicates Holmes’s aesthetic sight is engaged. He hones in on the crumbs of clues left behind by the criminal: plaster from a ceiling tile, removed to enter Georgina’s room unseen, the smell of chloroform sticks to the air, the same chemical used to sedate Lady Alice.

  The climactic scene in which Holmes has tracked the serial killer to his lair is highly explicit and unsteadily straddles the line between suggesting that either Holmes’s sexuality or his drug addiction help him identify with this criminal. Holmes tries luring the killer away from Roberta, the kidnapped fourth victim who is still alive. He admits his own cocaine addiction and relates it to the killer’s fetish for feet and shoes. The atmosphere becomes very eerie when Holmes identifies himself with the criminal, yet this quality makes him a brilliant detective, like Dupin, who could see into the hearts of men.

  The creators of Sherlock—starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman—imagine Holmes’s aesthetic sight much like the Everett version. Upon Holmes’s arrival at a crime scene, the point-of-view switches to first person. Our perspective joins with his, and we experience a taste of his heightened perception. His field of vision becomes narrower, more acute. We see some logic come into play visually in Sherlock, represented by numbers, algorithms, and words crisscrossing the screen, but Holmes’s instinct to connect the dots to the killer make him invaluable to Scotland Yard.

  After the fifth suspected suicide in “A Study in Pink,” the first episode, Inspector Lestrade finally invites Holmes to lend his expertise. Holmes blusters through the police officers monitoring the perimeter of an abandon building with Watson hobbling in tow. Refusing to wear any protective gear except for a pair of latex gloves, he enters the top-floor bedroom of the skeletal house and gets to work. Lestrade and Watson stand aside silently while the camera closes in on Holmes’s inquisitive face and the score signals he has entered the same trance-like state Everett displayed in Silk Stocking. Extreme close-ups force our perspective into Holmes’s point of view as he deciphers a word the victim scratched on the floor, “Rache . . .” We close in on Holmes’s hands feeling the wetness under her coat collar, examining her dry umbrella, polished earrings, necklace, and unpolished wedding ring. For each item, text descriptions and analyses blink onto the screen as if accessing a computer database in Holmes’s mind.

  When he comes out of the trance, Holmes concludes that the woman was unhappily married ten years, packed a small suitcase which is missing from the scene, and removed her wedding ring many times during affairs revealed by the polish on the inside but not the outside. All Watson can say is “Fantastic!” and “That’s incredible!” We get the idea that Holmes is interested in keeping Watson, his new roommate, primarily as an admirer and not yet a protégé.

  Watson does make some keen superficial observations of Holmes’s investigative behavior in A Study in Scarlet that visually match with how Holmes’s methods are so faithfully portrayed in the two BBC adaptations mentioned here: “As he spoke, his nimble fingers were flying here, there, and everywhere, feeling, pressing, unbuttoning, examining, while his eyes wore the same far-away expression which I have already remarked upon. So swiftly was the examination made, that one would hardly have guessed the minuteness with which it was conducted.”

  Holmes makes another flashy demonstration of his aesthetic sight in the second Sherlock episode, “The Blind Banker.” Watson tags along with Holmes to the Shad Sanderson investment bank
where an anonymous, as of yet, indecipherable message was left in yellow spray paint across an antique framed portrait of the bank’s former chairman. Holmes takes a few minutes to stand in every vantage point in the office, searching for the first person to have seen the painted message. He finally settles on the office of Edward Van Coon whom Holmes tracks down at his condo where the man is found shot. A young Detective Inspector Dimmock who now works with Lestrade shows up at the scene and immediately judges that it’s a suicide. Holmes scoffs at his weak opinion and explains, “It’s one possible explanation of some of the facts. You’ve got a solution that you like, but you’re choosing to ignore anything you see that doesn’t comply with it. The wound’s on the right side of his [Coon’s] skull. Van Coon was left handed.” As usual, Holmes’s observations are at first written off as insincere and absurd, but they inevitably lead to a Chinese murderess seeking a precious nine-million-pound hairpin Van Coon bought for his secretary.

  While Holmes does offer an explanation linking facts, he fails to reveal how he concludes a case before gathering evidence. His penetrating aesthetic sight is enhanced by the details of a case, but the facts, testimonies, and clues do not produce answers on their own. Holmes applies his keen aesthetic sense to the case and draws out the true nature or motive behind a crime. He is both aware and clueless of his own ability.

  He claims in “The Final Problem,” “Of late I have been tempted to look into the problems furnished by nature rather than those more superficial ones for which our artificial state of society is responsible.” This is all preposterous because Holmes is driven by the rare brilliance of his enemies and competitors, Dr. Moriarty, Inspector Lestrade, Mycroft, and the many criminals Holmes takes pleasure in analyzing.