Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy

by Josef Steiff

  And there’s no better demonstration of this than Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four.

  A detective’s intentions are clear: to solve the case utilizing knowledge of crime and demonstrable logic; to make meaning out of the traces criminals leave behind. But not all detectives are created equal. A clue isn’t helpful to the case until the detective experiences its intended worth. Clues can be misread and misinterpreted as much as they can be seen clearly. Phenomenological powers extend from a clear understanding of the interplay between the intentions of the detective (subject) and the intentions of the scene of a crime (object). We must transcend the assumed static quality of the objective world, and we must activate the exquisite tool of the mind. Sherlock Holmes, you fascinate me in this regard.

  The Essence of Consciousness

  The mystery and power of Sherlock Holmes lie in the expansiveness of his field of consciousness. No one doubts the extraordinary powers of detection and deduction Holmes commands, but there is more at work here than simply an excellent eye for detail. Sherlock Holmes represents a reality where knowledge lies in the field of consciousness—the event of an object’s perception. What is there to be seen is not all that is there. We must not forget the workings of the detective’s intelligence which beholds the room: an exalted sense of intuition fortified with countless hours of extensive research, experiments, and studying.

  And inversely, there is more to be experienced than what is seen. Something is hiding, lurking in the object.

  My intention is not to romanticize drug use, but to romanticize time spent in, what jazz musicians refer to as, the woodshed. Reading, listening, studying, practicing one’s art, consistently and daily pursuing its exaltation—this is what matters when Holmes reaches the scene of a crime. The fact that Holmes uses drugs speaks more to his intense curiosity and his art of perception—he could not bear to interact with the unremarkable. He is addicted to the complex thrill of the mind intersecting with the outside world across his field of consciousness.

  It is as if his study—Dr. Watson is such a sheepish roommate to let Holmes take over the apartment—is symbolic of his field of consciousness. Maps on the wall, small flames beneath beakers, pillows bundled up and loaded with bullets, candle wax deformities everywhere, books lined up neatly on the shelf and others as if tossed, yet open to excruciatingly specific passages, a home-made hand-collected skeleton, tobacco and pipe, fire roaring—add whatever else you like. Here we have the narrative manifestation of one half of our phenomenological equation—this is what Holmes brings to the table. Figuratively and literally.

  In The Sign of the Four, Holmes lets Watson in on the three qualities of a great detective: Knowledge, Observation, and Deduction (“The Science of Deduction”). These are essential to transcendent detective work, and they mirror what phenomenology means when speaking about the intercourse—do forgive the philosopher Edmund Husserl’s chancy word choice (or our translation of it)—of subject and object as it occurs across the field of consciousness. Knowledge is attributable to the subject—the intelligence which the detective has garnered and can apply to the crime. Observation is attributable to the object—the clues and evidence which the outside world contains, the way in which the scene of a crime is implicated in the crime. A superior detective is able to locate these clues even though they are hidden by the object which holds them—an inferior detective will misread or miss altogether that the beaker shows traces of an explosive substance. And Deduction—this is Holmes’s particular recipe for arriving at truth; it is attributable to the intercourse between intelligence and evidence, subject and object. It is his description of the event which takes place across his field of consciousness.

  Why Dr. Watson Has No Special Powers

  Around this issue of drug use, not only do we gain a deeper experience of Holmes’s intellect and being, but also we quickly see an underlying difference between Holmes and our stories’ narrator, Dr. Watson. It is the differences between the two that amplifies the essence of Holmes’s consciousness.

  At the beginning of The Sign of the Four, Watson walks in on Sherlock Holmes shooting up.

  “Which is it today? Morphine or cocaine?”

  [Holmes] raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. “It is cocaine, a seven per cent. solution.”

  “Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of these great powers with which you have been endowed?”

  Admonishing Holmes for his drug use, Watson’s prudence and practicality are revealed. Qualities which never go hand-inhand with special powers. He does not realize that it is Holmes’s practices in his study that endow him with the acute insights into the observable world.

  Watson at heart, I believe, is a romantic, but prior to having Holmes in his life, all the romance had been drained from his being by the Afghan war—suffering injuries, witnessing his infantry hacked to pieces, and the general malaise that extends from this. He is a doctor, a man of science and medicine—an empiricist to the core who relies on the order of the outside world to define his reality. He does not grow lost in the abstractions of his mind. He is a see-it-to-believe-it type of fellow. He continually challenges Holmes in this manner, though he is fascinated with the workings of the great detective’s mind.

  Holmes’s answer to Watson does not disappoint:

  “My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere, I can dispense then with the stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”

  Watson knows neither transcendence nor exaltation—he offers nothing of his personal being to the objective world, as Holmes offers all.

  But Watson is aware that he’s missing something from his life, and he wishes to learn what this is. He is a character conflicted by the limitations of his empiricism, and driven towards the transcendence of phenomenology. In the first novel, A Study in Scarlet, Watson speaks of his life prior to meeting Sherlock Holmes. Back from the war and still healing, Watson sets up residence in London, but states that something is missing. “There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had considerably more freely than I ought.” A meaningless existence, pursuing the luxuries of the outside world. He realizes he needed to cultivate an interior world similar to Holmes’s study, and he states, “I must make a complete alteration in my style of living.”

  A friend introduces Holmes and Watson, seeing that they were both looking for a new apartment. This is where Watson’s study begins. Having encountered such an unusual man who keeps odd hours, eccentric habits, and strange company, Watson’s curiosity throws him into the middle of Sherlock Holmes’s world. Accompanying Holmes on a case, Watson witnesses his extraordinary ability to thoroughly experience the scene of a crime—all of its details, all of its narratives, as if the room and its clues reverberate communicatively with Holmes’s mind. Watson reflects on this, saying, “I had had such extraordinary evidence of the quickness of his perceptive facilities that I had no doubt that he could see a great deal which was hidden from me.” And this is the mystery: how does one man see what is hidden from another when they are both staring at the same thing?

  To answer this we must continue our examination of the observer and the object observed. Surely, Holmes’s thorough homework allows him to understand what he sees at a deeper level than one such as Watson, who has never studied criminal history. And, according to phenomenology, the objects themselves—the scene of the crime, the murder weapons, footprints—have a life of their own. They appear differently according to the consciousness which beholds them. Holmes compares the mind to a room which we fill with furniture.

  “You see, I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty
attic, and you have to stock it with furniture as you chose. . . . Now, the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brainattic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order.”

  To describe this furniture, as phenomenologists, then this is what we must do.

  Interior Design

  There is a unity of Holmes’s being. A balance which demonstrates his field of consciousness as the seat of his reality. As Dr. Watson points out, Holmes’s body has been disfigured by the intentions of the objective world. He is deformed by his phenomenological powers, something few if any re-tellers of his tales have accounted for in the many visual depictions of Holmes. As Watson relates to us in A Study in Scarlet, his hands are mottled over with pieces of plaster and discolored with strong acids. His skin is invariably blotted with ink and stained with chemicals. His entire being is the meeting ground for the interplay of curiosity and the outside world.

  When describing his courses of study, Watson notes the peculiarity of his specialties, and the gaping holes in his common knowledge. Holmes states that “he would acquire no knowledge which did not bear upon his object. Therefore all the knowledge he possessed was such as would be useful to him.” Purposefully, Holmes has rid his intelligence of the superfluous—sure that no subjective nonsense would get in his way. He could do this only through understanding the nature of his objective: to make acute observations and accurate deductions. Only could he do this through a balance and unity between what one studies and the object of one’s studies. On the other hand, Dr. Watson knows much about many things—sporadic knowledge; a liberal familiarity with many subjects.

  Phenomenological powers begin with interior design of our knowledge. Whether or not we see our mind as an attic waiting to be filled with furniture, as Sherlock Holmes does, we must understand that there is a fluidity between what we study and what we observe. Knowledge in and of itself is not power. If intentional and unified with the objective situation, then power is there because consciousness is in immediate unity with the total situation determining it.

  Reflecting on how he knew that the yet-to-be-captured criminal at the heart of A Study in Scarlet smoked Trichinopoly cigars, Sherlock Holmes tells Watson:

  “I have made a special study of cigar ashes—in fact, I have written a monograph upon the subject. I flatter myself that I can distinguish at a glance the ash of any known brand either of cigar or tobacco. It is just such details that the skilled detective differs from the Gregson and Lestrade type.”

  Sherlock Holmes Eats Roast Beef, Scotland Yard Has None

  “a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it.”

  —Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet

  At the beginning of his career Sherlock Holmes did most of his work from his armchair. Citizens of London or Scotland Yard officers would themselves visit Holmes in his study and ask him to solve a crime through his intellectual powers. As Holmes describes it to Watson, “They lay all the evidence before me and I am generally able by the help of my knowledge of the history of crimes, to set them straight.” Through his powers of intuition, imagination, and deduction, Holmes is able to conjure a facsimile of the case in his consciousness, and see it with a lucidity that those who have seen it first-hand cannot approximate. But what occurs in his consciousness when he gets up from his chair? It is as if every object in every room speaks to him, whispering its secrets.

  To impose order upon the world and to believe that it revolves around your desires can be a frustrating experience in the detective business. And Scotland Yard detectives Gregson and Lestrade know this frustration very well. I compare it to square-peg round-hole—what you want it to be won’t fit what the outside world says it is. Case after case they try so hard to solve, but never can they deal with what the evidence is, nor can they discover the clues necessary to get them on the right track. They do not see all that there is to be seen because they are biased by their theorizing and misconceptions. And because they have little to no knowledge of past cases or forensic particularities—meaning, they have intentions which are out of balance with their objective.

  On the other hand, the scene of a crime is certainly activated through Sherlock Holmes’s intelligence—he has studied enough of precise subjects and their interplay across his consciousness in order to differentiate and make sense of the sensory data he collects. And he’s not afraid to boast about this, “No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done.” Study, certainly, but what can be said of Sherlock Holmes’s self-proclaimed “natural talent”?

  Take A Study in Scarlet. Detectives Gregson and Lestrade quickly exhaust all the forensic and investigation techniques they know, and who do they call on?

  “Dear Sherlock Holmes, . . . There had been no robbery, nor is there any evidence as to how the man met his death. There are marks of blood in the room, but there is no wound upon his person. We are at a loss as to how he came into the empty house; indeed, the whole affair is a puzzler.

  “Yours faithfully, Tobias Gregson”

  After a little nudging from Watson, Holmes decides to offer his assistance, and they hail a carriage. On their way, Watson is perplexed that Holmes is not anxious, concerned, or even speculating about the murder. Watson prods him about this, “You don’t seem to give much thought to the matter in hand.” And Holmes answers, “No data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.” Here is the balance which a phenomenological view accounts for: all theory and no corresponding evidence would be a subjective blunder; all evidence and no corresponding theorizing about how it comes together would be an objective misreading—but Sherlock Holmes, seeks deftly for the phenomenal evidence of his case to trigger the theories and the intelligence to make sense of the evidence—as he experiences it. Not beforehand; not after the fact. While he is doing it. Let’s see an example:

  “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 spoke of.” And I, as well, in the first section. Holmes’s attention is cast in two directions simultaneously: the phenomenal world and the world of his being, his interior chambers. Attention to the objective world and his mind at the same time, producing the event of consciousness. He is absorbed by the moment before him as much as the moment is absorbed by him. After recounting for Watson how he was able to know so much about him in one quick glance, Holmes confesses that this is no trick, “From long habit the train of thought ran so swiftly through my mind that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps.” These deductive conclusions are the interplay of knowledge and evidence occurring across his consciousness.

  And reciprocally, Holmes understands how each of us play out across the physical world. We leave our mark. As Watson shows that he is learning the phenomenological foundations of Holmes craft in The Sign of the Four, “I have heard you say that it is difficult for a man to have any object in daily use without leaving the impress of his individuality upon it in such a way that a trained observer might read it.” Gregson and Lestrade are not trained observers—they do not uncover the clues necessary to solve a case, and what they do see, they misinterpret.

  Let’s return to Gregson’s letter requesting Holmes’s assistance in order to reveal typical Scotland blunders.

  “There had been no robbery, nor is there any evidence as to how the man met his death. There are marks of blood in the room, but there is no wound upon his person. We are at a loss as to how he came into the empty house.”

  They have theorized prior to collecting data—surely, they believe, for a murder to occur, a robbery must be the motive. Because it is thieves who kill, right? Surely if there is blood at the scene of a murder, then it is the victim’s?
And when Lestrade uncovers the letters R A C H Escribbled upon the wall in blood, he and Gregson are of course correct to assume this to be the beginning of a woman’s name—for a ring had been found on the floor near the body, and if not for money than a woman is motive enough for murder. Right?

  Wrong on all accounts. All it takes for Sherlock Holmes to discover how this man met his death is a quick sniff of the lips—poison is foul and lingers upon the object. Ruling out all other possibilities, Holmes deduces that the blood must be from the murderer. Holmes assumes nothing. Through his compulsion to study the crimes of every country, Holmes knows that “Rache” is German. And it means revenge. As far as entry into the house goes, Holmes had that figured out before he entered the scene of the crime—observing the tracks outside instantly revealed all.

  The phenomenal world of the scene of a crime holds all reverberations of the actions which took place; one must only trust the objective world and listen without bias to the intentions of the object, of the room, of the corpse—able to hold ambiguity in the mind without appealing to the false security of presumption. One must practice this talent—time spent in the woodshed, exploring one’s consciousness.