Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy

by Josef Steiff

  But, what is a game, exactly? Why this particular term to describe an activity that, on first blush, might appear like a form of playful scholarship? Are “games” and “work” necessarily that different from one another?

  . . . Afoot!

  Many of us have some implicit understanding of the term “game,” one that often comes from our experiences in childhood, and the often conflicting relationships of “play” versus “work” that permeate our lives. Baseball, chess, Team Fortress 2, canasta, The Settlers of Catan, bingo, Bejeweled, lacrosse, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Texas Hold’em, xiangqi, Halo: Reach, soccer, Munchkin, cricket, go, and craps—all of these are commonly classified as games, all commonly considered fun, playful diversions. But, for some players, each of these has become a serious devotion, worthy of hundreds or even thousands of hours of play and study, much thought, and consideration. And, in some cases, developing expertise within them has become the project of a lifetime, worthy of devotion much like Holmes to his method. Historically, this has been more often seen with chess than with Super Smash Bros., but times are changing. Like the world of Holmesian scholarship, games in general are simultaneously entertaining, diverting, and fun while also containing the potential for intense, driven study, and analysis. That games are entertaining by no means indicates that games are necessarily frivolous or without significance for those who play them.

  The blurry boundaries of the term have long been a point of serious study by philosophers, game designers, and others who study knowledge and culture. In his classic Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein famously illustrated the difficulty in defining the very notion of a “game.” As a part of his larger project of language-games, formal definitions of concepts such as “games” were not insignificant. Rather, the notion of a “game” was extraordinarily important for illustrating his notion of family resemblances. For Wittgenstein, games presented an interesting case where no clear definition of the term was feasible, yet there were a number of overlapping similarities between many games that could be used to classify them as an intelligible, meaningful category. That is, rather than looking for a common feature present within all games that can describe them as a unified “thing,” Wittgenstein argued that there was no such feature, only sets of similarities.

  So, let’s take Wittgenstein for granted for a moment and explore this notion’s implications for our understanding of how the world of “games” might inform our thoughts on the Holmesian “Game”—if Wittgenstein is right, how do we understand the legitimacy of using the term “game” to describe an activity that many would find at least somewhat similar to the interpretive, argumentative “work” of academics?

  Games are, for Wittgenstein, connected by their similarities to one another. What might work to link them are similarities in structure and intent of the players—an understanding of games as rules-based, as involving goals that can be achieved by players, and that serves to pull players out of their everyday concerns.

  This leads to another interesting set of connections with the emerging field of “Game Studies.” While used loosely and playfully by the Sherlockian scholars who play The Game, the term “game” itself has been the font of much thought and exploration over the last century, through a variety of fields of intellectual inquiry beyond philosophy. How do we conceive of a “game” separate from related concepts such as ritual, play, or even toys? Why might games and the use of games permeate human societies (as David Parlett so effectively cataloged in his classic Oxford History of Board Games)? Was Wittgenstein correct in describing the folly of attempting to discern the features that characterize a term that is used today so widely as to be applicable to fantasy football, The Legend of Zelda, and sharpshooting?

  . . . Play.

  Wittgenstein’s similarity argument notwithstanding, the field of “game studies” has emerged in recent decades to better understand these issues and try to refine our thought on what games are and games aren’t. As the role of games has risen in Western popular culture—from the predominance of card games in the suburban America of the 1950s to the pervasiveness of Facebook games in the 2010s—scholars have sought to better understand what these are, how they work, and what meanings players draw from them. This is at once a pragmatic issue as much as a theoretical one.

  Distinct from the mathematical endeavor of “game theory,” this field has taken a largely socio-cultural bent, meaning many of the dominant theorists rose out of traditions in the mid-twentieth century that led them to considering games as cultural artifacts and social systems. In particular, one of the foundational texts for the new Game Studies came in the form of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (or “Man, the Player”), originally published in 1938. Huizinga connected games to a much deeper cultural context than even Wittgenstein attempted—linking games to many other “high” and “low” culture activities. Huizinga stated:

  All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course… The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e., forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain.

  Somewhat surprisingly, contemporary Game Studies scholars have taken Huizinga to task for one of those terms tucked away within the litany of forms or sites of play: The “magic circle.” And it’s this very notion that brings us back to the Sherlockian “Game”—what are the borders between the play activities within a game and the “real world”?

  . . . Real?

  In Homo Ludens, Huizinga described games as firmly circumscribed, with a clear line between the space of a game and the rest of human activity, which contemporary games scholars have now labeled “the magic circle” (though it is still unclear if this is exactly what Huizinga meant by the term; Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s 2003 book Rules of Play is often credited for reviving and perhaps misinterpreting Huizinga’s use of the term). Regardless, the “magic circle” notion has taken hold to describe a theorized separation between games and “the real world.” But has this ever really been true? Can we delineate what counts as a game from what counts as the social and cultural world outside the game? Can we see such a firm line between the Sherlockian Game and the rest of the world?

  The barrier between everyday life and the world of the game has come under question, and in books like World of Warcraft and Philosophy, The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy, and Halo and Philosophy, that barrier has been more-or-less knocked down. Games demonstrably matter in everyday life, can be used to illustrate how humans make meaning, and provide an important lens by which we can understand not just the nature of media, but how we engage with them. Games, regardless of how we formally classify or define them, are complex, multifaceted engagements with the real world and with cultural systems.

  In the case of the Sherlockian Game, it turns out, a blurring of lines between the “real world” and the “Game world” has been there since the very beginning. The study of games helps us to understand the ways that Holmes’s admirers have been “playing” with the Holmes Canon, while at the same time, the example of “The Game” can help to better illuminate how and why hard declarations of a “magic circle” simply don’t work. So maybe it’s time to explore this idea a bit further, taking a look at the origins of The Game, as well as its role in defining a century’s worth of Holmes fandom.

  . . . Serious Business!

  The better we understand the history of “The Game,” the better we might be able to make sense of the ways that Holmes fans have long blurred the lines between “play” and “serious, intellectual activity.” Unlike many other moments in fandom around other media texts, the historical genesis of The Game is clear. The publication of this very book in 2011 is fortuitous timing, in fact—this year, Holmesians and Sherlockians celebrate the centenary of The Game, as initiated by the classic essay “Studies in th
e Literature of Sherlock Holmes” written by Ronald Knox, delivered in 1911. Monsignor Knox, a British theologian, intended to parody the literacy analysis of the era by taking the much-loved “low” text of the Holmes Canon, and giving it a royal treatment typically only afforded “serious” works of literature.

  Knox began the essay with this passage:

  If there is anything pleasant in life, it is doing what we aren’t meant to do. If there is anything pleasant in criticism, it is finding out what we aren’t meant to find out. It is the method by which we treat as significant what the author did not mean to be significant, by which we single out as essential what the author regarded as incidental. Thus, if one brings out a book on turnips, the modern scholar tries to discover from it whether the author was on good terms with his wife; if a poet writes on buttercups, every word he says may be used as evidence against him at an inquest of his views on a future existence. On this fascinating principle, we delight to extort economic evidence from Aristophanes, because Aristophanes knew nothing of economics: we try to extract cryptograms from Shakespeare, because we are inwardly certain that Shakespeare never put them there: we sift and winnow the Gospel of St. Luke, in order to produce a Synoptic problem, because St. Luke, poor man, never knew the Synoptic problem to exist.

  There is, however, a special fascination in applying this method to Sherlock Holmes, because it is, in a sense, Holmes’s own method. ‘It has long been an axiom of mine,’ he says, ‘that the little things are infinitely the most important.’ It might be the motto of his life’s work. And it is, is it not, as we clergymen say, by the little things, the apparently unimportant things, that we judge of a man’s character.

  Here, Knox explicitly makes a number of interesting connections—between “delight” and the pulling of unintended meaning out of Aristophanes’s texts, the contradiction of knowing that Shakespeare never considered cryptograms but that we still “extract” meaning regardless, and, of course, that this “method” applies most clearly to Holmes, for it is a variant of the character’s own. These are telling statements, and sets up Knox’s essay on exactly the right notes. For Knox, playing with texts is something to delight in, something that involves our own creative capacities, and one that may connect us meaningfully with the themes of the original texts. Playing a game with literature may reflect the silly overextensions that some scholars engage with in their readings of other texts, but with Holmes, it actually seems oddly appropriate.

  Given that the players of The Game have taken Knox’s original, satirical essay as the starting point of their enterprise, we might then think of The Game and this form of gaming as an enterprise that’s somehow hermeneutic in nature—the blurring of the “magic circle” in the Holmesian Game is reminiscent of the ways many fields have treated the interpretation of their core texts, be it religion, history, or comparative literature. The Game is treading that line between interpretation of a text and creation of new meaning from a text that may have not been originally intended by the author. The Game is a means to make sense of the source text, sure, but Knox’s satire also points out that there’s a creative act involved with the “gaming” of these texts—engaged scholars (and, nowadays, everyday fans) can insert their own meaning when diving into the interpretation of a text. For some, this perhaps makes problematic where the meaning actually resides in something like the text of the Sherlock Holmes Canon (or Aristophanes’s plays or Shakespeare’s sonnets), while for others it may only be problematic if we assume a singular conception of meaning within these kinds of texts.

  . . . Not Just a Magic Circle.

  For Knox, his satire of Holmes scholarship seems to indicate that he might assume Game-players are inserting too much of their own will into the Holmes texts, but for his followers (players of the Sherlockian Game), it certainly doesn’t seem to be. Game-players in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have gone to great lengths to both illuminate and expand upon Conan Doyle’s original stories. The task of making meaning out of the Holmes texts is like the task of making meaning in any other textual interpretation. The “magic circle” between the game and the out-of-game activities is permeable, sharing common meaning-making practices with the rules of “The Game” being potentially shaped by out-of-game concerns.

  As we consider the historical roots of The Game as well as challenges to Huizinga’s (or, at least, Salen and Zimmerman’s characterization of Huizinga’s) conception of games, we’re left considering how exactly the out-of-game desires, intents, and practices of Game-players impact the in-game activities, and vice versa. For some Game-players, playing The Game means adopting a role similar to Holmes himself, even going so far as to adopt a “Canonical name,” as is done by the fan society Baker Street Irregulars and members of its scion organizations. In the spirit of full disclosure, my Canonical name is “Silver Blaze” as a member of the Madison, Wisconsin, scion society The Notorious Canary-Trainers—as Knox pointed out, one of the draws of such playful analysis of the Holmes texts was to put one’s self in Holmes’s shoes, and I can’t deny that doing this myself has been a lot of fun.

  So, is that what this comes down to? A sense of belonging to a social group, a sense of connecting one’s self to the Canon, or developing an identity as one who can walk in the same footsteps as Holmes? Perhaps, but we should note that this also is not without epistemological consequence. As with many contemporary fan communities, players of The Game see texts as malleable, open to interpretation, and available for them to insert their own agency into. Knowledge and meaning do not reside purely within the “text” of the Holmes Canon for Game-players; far from it, perhaps Game-players see their task as playfully shaping knowledge at the same time as uncovering it. In the grand scheme of things, this is still playing games with stories; the knowledge created and uncovered in The Game is of a relatively inconsequential sort, but one that has, for over a century, driven fans and scholars to pick apart texts, connect their meanings to the real world, and then also augment or reshape Doyle’s original stories.

  . . . Blurring the Boundaries.

  And yet, when stated like this, playing The Game again sounds quite a bit like some kind of academic exercise, or something that mirrors the kinds of work that academics (such as this author) often value. We’re left thinking again about The Game and its relationship to “games” in which the “magic circle” seems to be inapplicable: Players of The Game blur the line between work and play, between informal and formal knowledge construction activities, and between analyzing Holmes and emulating him. To understand the epistemological implications of The Game, we necessarily need to undertake an analysis of the adventures of those Baker Street flatmates and how they were “picked up,” retooled, and re-interpreted by others.

  Since the beginning, partaking in The Game has meant “flexing” intellectual muscles and epistemological stances that hadn’t seen much use in how everyday folks interacted with the popular literature of the era. But, beyond this, The Game shows us that the forms of knowledge, argumentation, and (most importantly) meaning made from popular texts helps us to understand that we can learn much from “gaming” the Holmes Canon. The Game is fun, it’s diverting, and it’s certainly a sign of devotion—but beyond that, it challenges us to rethink whether “magic circles” exist between authorship, texts, and knowledge. The “work” and “play” of Game-players’ creative connection of the Holmes Canon to the real world means that as we attempt to understand the philosophical implications of media fandom, we need to wrestle with how meaning is made through playful communities such as these.

  Chapter 33

  The Final Final Problem

  Magali Rennes

  L’homme c’est rien. L’oeuvre c’est tout. (“The man is nothing; his work, everything.”)

  —Gustave Flaubert to George Sand, misquoted by Holmes in “The Red-Headed League”

  A last unresolved mystery involving Sherlock Holmes? Ah, yes, dear Reader, despite our long and intimate acquaintance with this
incomparable consulting detective, a single, all-important proposition lingers in the air like the smell of fetid ash from an Indian lunkah: Holmes is the greatest detective of all time. The question—and our final mystery—is why?

  First responses praise him as the father of forensic science, the prince of personalized methods, the king of observation and deduction.

  Indeed he is.

  And yet many detectives who have followed in his wake have rivaled his abilities. Modern television and popular fiction have hijacked and proliferated the detective and crime drama genres—brandishing more precise forensics (CSI), more advanced reasoning (Numb3rs), and more stylized—and even more idiosyncratic—supersleuths (Poirot, Sam Spade, Columbo, Monk, Brenda Lee Johnson), all without producing anyone to rival our dear Holmes.

  So why, more than a century later, does Sherlock still reign as king? Perhaps there’s more to Sherlock’s method than his hawk-like eyes and razor-sharp mind. Yes, dear Reader, perhaps Sherlock reigns not simply because of his abilities to observe and deduce, but (indulge here my methods and invoke your imagination) precisely because of another, overlooked, more important talent—his ability to play. If we examine Mr. Holmes through the eyes of theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, we see that Sherlock transcends official convention by claiming the timeless, universal, unofficial spirit of the folk.