Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy

by Josef Steiff

  Eventually, the outlines of Holmes’s rules of discovery look like this: collect as many facts as you can, search for unique features, be attentive to seemingly unimportant minutiae, work out their possible implications and antecedents (this is the phase where abduction plays an important role), turn facts into evidences by organizing them into narrative scenarios whose conclusion is the mystery to be solved, collect further facts for finding and eliminating impossible scenarios and then you have the solution.

  “The Man with the Twisted Lip” is an excellent illustration of this method. Neville St. Clair, a comfortably-off and respectable businessman, disappears in an opium den, and despite the fact that St. Clair’s body is missing, a beggar, Hugh Boone is suspected of being his murderer. Holmes’s first scenario, which he sets up after initial fact-collecting, is that Boone pushed St. Clair through an open window into the river underneath. Only St. Clair’s coat, with its pockets filled with coins, remained in the room. Holmes sketches a scenario of how things might have happened:

  Suppose that this man Boone had thrust Neville St. Clair through the window, there is no human eye which could have seen the deed. What would he do then? It would of course instantly strike him that he must get rid of the tell-tale garments. He would seize the coat, then, and be in the act of throwing it out, when it would occur to him that it would swim and not sink. He has little time, for he has heard the scuffle downstairs when the wife tried to force her way up, and perhaps he has already heard from his Lascar confederate that the police are hurrying up the street. There is not an instant to be lost. He rushes to some secret hoard, where he has accumulated the fruits of his beggary, and he stuffs all the coins upon which he can lay his hands into the pockets to make sure of the coat’s sinking. He throws it out, and would have done the same with the other garments had not he heard the rush of steps below, and only just had time to close the window when the police appeared.

  This story is consistent with the facts, but some questions remain open, like: What was St. Clair doing in an opium den? And a question Holmes does not even bother to ask: Why did Boone kill him? Nevertheless, he sticks to this version even when he’s presented with conflicting evidence: a letter most probably written by St. Clair to his wife after the time of his suspected murder. But eventually, the new fact leads Holmes to rethink the case, as “Sherlock Holmes was a man . . . who, when he had an unsolved problem upon his mind, would go for days, and even for a week, without rest, turning it over, rearranging his facts, looking at it from every point of view until he had either fathomed it or convinced himself that his data were insufficient.”

  As a result of rearranging the facts, Holmes realizes that St. Clair and Boone may be one and the same person. From this angle his earlier story or hypothesis is obviously misplaced. The facts are to be seen in an entirely different light, they count as different pieces of evidence supporting different conclusions. For example, the pockets filled with coins cannot count as evidence towards Boone’s alleged intention of getting rid of St. Clair’s coat.

  So the very same fact is turned into different evidence in a different narrative. The elimination of the initial story is, in this case, due to some inconsistencies and a new scenario emerging from the imaginative recombination of available facts. The brute fact that St. Clair is missing is reinterpreted. Instead of being killed, he is in hiding. This brings along a different distribution of significance among the facts collected so that they contribute to the conclusion differently, and in this case even the conclusion is reinterpreted during the investigation.

  After the initial phase of fact collecting, any further collecting and interpreting facts relies on the scenario Holmes accepts as his actual working hypothesis—until, of course, he decides such a working hypothesis needs to be reworked, and then he can look for a new item of evidence, demonstrating that that Boone and St. Clair are the same person.

  An Inexact Science

  Despite the key to Holmes’s method being his narrative imagination—more art than science—he nevertheless takes pain to emphasize that his method is thoroughly scientific. This is his official ideology, which represents his actual practice in a distorted way.

  Watson is inclined to paint Holmes’s adventures in a way more colorful than Holmes would accept as appropriate. He comments on Watson’s recounting of the events in A Study in Scarlet as follows:

  “Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.”

  But while Holmes would prefer a reconstruction closer to scientific or even geometrical ideals, because that is how detection ought to be done, Watson insists that his presentation of the actual process of investigation was accurate: “But the romance was there . . . I could not tamper with the facts” (The Sign of the Four). Now the question is whether the public image Holmes would prefer for himself or Watson’s perception is closer to truth. By now, you should not find it surprising that I side with Watson in this respect.

  It seems that sometimes Holmes himself is inclined to admit that his capacities are in important respects imaginative and creative rather than deductive, and they cannot be acquired through systematic training. He even goes so far as to suggest that a hereditary gift is the basis for his unusual ability. When, in clear concert with what Holmes likes to think, Watson says: “it seems obvious that your faculty of observation and your peculiar facility for deduction are due to your own systematic training,” Holmes very tellingly answers:

  “To some extent. . . . My ancestors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class. But, none the less, my turn that way is in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”

  And when Watson asks why he thinks his talent is hereditary, Holmes responds thus: “Because my brother Mycroft possesses it in a larger degree than I do” (“The Greek Interpreter”). This passage clearly suggests that Holmes’s method is at most only partly founded in a strictly logical approach to mysterious cases.

  In a similar vein, Holmes’s well-known preference for taking drugs, mostly cocaine, fits fairly well with the central role of creative imagination in his approach to criminal cases. Were it only for rigorous deductions and logical connections, it would be far from obvious why he needs this stimulation: while it can enliven the imagination, it could hardly have a similarly positive effect on reliable logical capacities. Holmes is fairly clear that taking cocaine is relevant in the context of stimulating brainwork while arranging and rearranging facts, and as such, it has an effect similar to Watson’s questions and objections to Holmes’s scenarios.

  But why is it then important for Holmes to maintain the “scientific” ideology of his practice?

  On the one hand, appealing to the authority of modern science, as it was understood by Victorians, contributes to the legitimacy of his role as a consulting detective. His persona does not fit easily into the institutional framework of criminal investigation. Emphasizing the scientific character of his method lends him more credibility and makes his role more tolerable in a less than hospitable professional environment.

  On the other hand, this ideology makes it possible for him to improve the skills and knowledge of fellow detectives. If Holmes were emphasizing his unique talents there would be no way for him to urge professional detectives, albeit in a sarcastic way, to be more careful in their investigations, more attentive to minutiae, and more systematic in reasoning. This educational aspect of Holmes’s ideology has a potential for improving the existing practices of criminal investigation.

  And criminal investigation is, after all, what he does.

  HOLMES IS A LITTLE SCIENTIFIC FOR MY TASTES

  Chapter 20
/>   Resisting the Siren Song of Rationalism

  Jim John Marks

  Sherlock Holmes was not the first fictional account of a modern detective. He was predated and influenced by Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin and Emile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq, to name the best known. He was, however, the first to become a household name and to endure through several generations of fans. I believe that it is no accident that he was created, and experienced this singularly extraordinary publishing success, specifically in late nineteenth-century England.

  Holmes, as detective par excellence, was by necessity the paragon Victorian. Holmes’s complete faith in the power of the human mind, in the natural sciences, in technological progress, in hierarchical civilized society and in strict morality despite a nominal interest in matters of faith and the waning role of religion act as a nearly flawless mirror for the Victorian Era (subjects of the English Queen Victoria, who reigned from 1837 until 1901) in which he lived and worked. This is the Sherlock Holmes who, with outrageous style, taught me as a young man that critical thinking could benefit society, if properly applied.

  We Meet a Man, the Epitome of His Era

  Unexpectedly, for all his faith in deduction and absolute, objective facts, Holmes seems to have understood the limits of the human intellect. Let us not forget, Holmes rarely prevented crimes from being committed, he merely solved the mysteries of how they were accomplished and who was behind them, frequently preventing ultimate success by the criminal while many a dead body remained just as dead. On one such an occasion, at the conclusion of “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box” (published in 1892), he exclaimed, “What is the object of this circle of misery and violence and fear?” (He means life itself.) “It must have a purpose, or else our universe has no meaning and that is unthinkable. But what purpose? That is humanity’s great problem to which Reason, so far, has no answer.”

  The very phrasing of the sentiment betrays Holmes’s sharing of the fearful suspicion that had begun to creep into the collective conscience ever since Friedrich Nietzsche, the noted Modern (nineteenth-century) German philosopher, had spoken so unflinchingly about the impact that rapid secularization (removal of religion from civil society) would have on humanity’s capacity to find meaning in the Cosmos. Victoria was not only the English queen, she was the head of the Church of England. In a society so explicitly intertwining Religion and Civics, how could one help but feel a certain fear when staring into the unknown of a society constructed on secular philosophies?

  It is no coincidence that Nietzsche’s notorious claim that “Gott ist tot” (God is dead) was published in its most complete form, in The Gay Science, in 1887—the same year that Holmes first made his appearance on the pages of The Strand. In fact, much of Modern philosophy was entirely focused on trying to reconstruct ethics, morality, justice and the social order once God, or rather Religion in general, for which God often stood in as a personification and scapegoat, was removed from the equation. Only a few decades before Nietzsche, Karl Marx had written “Religion is . . . the Opium of the People,” and Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species (1859), which, through his theories about biological evolution, continued the trend of Natural Science displacing Religion as the final word of explanation.

  European, and particularly Victorian English, society was fundamentally and inherently Christian in its foundations. It is easy to understand why so many of these Modern thinkers concluded that the social order would collapse entirely without the cohesive “glue” of Religion holding it together. Depending on how we choose to read the history of the first half of the twentieth century, we might conclude that it indeed did collapse. From Holmes’s point of view in 1892, society might not be collapsing, but Reason (science, technology, reasonable discourse and information) was certainly failing to provide much comfort in the way of demonstrating either purpose or meaning to life. If one of the primary goals of philosophy is the pursuit of the knowledge necessary to construct a moral, ethical and just society, we might have to conclude that the secularization of society was not a very good idea, at least not from the philosophical point of view.

  Fear at the Brink of Tomorrow, Even for a Genius

  Holmes’s reflection of Victorian society goes beyond the selfassured confidence we see on the surface to expose all the doubt, uncertainty and frustration which was lurking just below the surface. We can see that Holmes captures both the enthusiasm for progress and the paranoia of hurtling into the unknown which were the very fabric of late nineteenth-century Europe. Holmes’s love of avant-garde composer-performers such as violinist Pablo Sarasate, and Watson’s distaste for the same, help us see that when meaning and purpose come into question, aesthetic notions like beauty and taste begin to border on meaningless.

  Holmes’s use of cutting-edge pharmaceuticals such as cocaine, which he claimed cleared his mind and allowed him to think all the more clearly, contrasted with his abhorrence of the use of opium, which he always characterized as reducing people to useless dreamers—a completely individual morality, not rooted in any communally agreed upon norms, not even shared by his closest friend. His distaste for the traditional countryside which he frequently described as substantially more dangerous than London’s darkest alleys, his accident-prone advances into the then dubious field of forensics, his fanatical devotion to the printed word, shows Holmes to be at the cutting edge of understanding that up-to-date, accurate, thorough information was essential for the kind of work that we are so often promised that science and technology can do.

  Holmes made frequent use of the British railroad network, not only to reach the scenes of crimes, sometimes without a moment to spare, but also because their well structured time tables helped establish or refute alibis for witnesses and criminals. As the nation was tied together not only by railroad tracks but also telegraph wires, and as tariffs and taxes were reduced on the necessary supplies, the newspaper industry grew rapidly both in scale and in importance in British society. These baby steps towards what we would eventually call the Cloud Network had a seismic impact on the extent to which citizens were able to develop informed opinions about the world around them. Watson frequently complained about Holmes’s refusal to ever dispose of anything printed and the controlling manner in which he insisted documents be filed and stored, and yet many a mystery was solved by the consultation of near-to-hand back editions and the ultimate success of a few crimes was prevented through details of information pulled from the evening edition, just off the presses. My own computer programming background sees this analog, proto-database as truly well ahead of its time, even simply as a conceptual technology.

  These habits combine to give the stories their sense of fastpaced adventure which must have been truly breathtaking at the time they were first published. As the reality of such startlingly modern criminals as Jack the Ripper (London) and Herman Webster Mudgett (Chicago) exposed the fragility of civilized society, these fictional stories must have acted both as reflectors of reality and also as amplifiers of the sense of unease that permeated society. In 1883 (the earliest time setting for a Holmes tale, publication began in 1887), horse drawn carriages still dominated London streets and the smoke of wood, coal and tallow still dominated the skies overhead. While it’s true that mechanized trains were commonplace both for mass transit and mass commercial transport, the Benz Patent Motorwagen (the first production internal combustion engine automobile) did not become available to the German public until 1888, and the Daimler Motor Company (England’s first automobile production company) did not begin selling to the British until 1896.

  Even the “safety” bicycle (the first style sold as usable by the mass public, including women) was a revolution in personal transportation so powerful that the consequences of the individual freedom it created, most notably for young, unmarried women, were at the very heart of one of the mysteries Holmes solved (“The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist”). And yet, by the time His Last Bow is published in 1917, the First World War ha
d ushered in not only motor vehicle travel, but motor vehicle warfare and tank warfare, not only powered air travel, but aviary warfare, not only petrochemical production, but chemical warfare. That collapse which the philosophers had predicted certainly seemed to have begun.

  Humanity was literally thrilling itself to death with its capacity to harness the power of the mind to analyze data, innovate creative solutions to problems, and then to convert those solutions into mechanized slaughter. Surely this was all anathema to Holmes. Holmes loved the human capacity to deduce and reason precisely because it helped to retain law, order and civilized society. For all his Victorian bigotry (Englishmen of this era were notoriously racist, classist, and sexist by today’s standards and neither Holmes nor Watson were an exception), Holmes is on the whole a humanitarian. He admired the French recognition of, and lenient sentencing for, “the crime of passion” and took as much pleasure in helping to free those wrongly accused as he did in bringing to justice the genuinely criminal. Is it any wonder that in the wake of such realizations about how distorted the pursuit of Science can become that Holmes enters quiet retirement to study something as banal and practical as bee husbandry? This is a Sherlock Holmes all too keenly aware that failing to understand the limits that The Cosmos imposes on us can have catastrophic consequences and wary of human arrogance.