Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy

by Josef Steiff

  Then again, we talk of “my things,” but never “my objects.” Is a thing a possession and an object something still to be purchased? But can the purchase of something really expensive, such as the Mazarin stone, ever reduce it to a mere thing?

  His ruminations reminded him of how much he and Holmes had, in the course of their many adventures, lived in a world of things, but still, in the end, he confessed himself defeated in the attempt to come up with a consistent theory concerning them, and he wondered whether it were not all ineffable twaddle. He could not say whether objects and things were the same or whether they deserved such a thing as a theory at all. He could not even say with any certainty, what a thing was.

  “Holmes,” he asked, “do you think one can assert that a thing is always—well, always the same thing? Was my umbrella, for example, the same thing that I used to shelter from the rain, when you used it as a tool to dredge a moat? And then, can something powdery, such as tobacco ash, of which you have made such an extensive study, really be either a thing or indeed an object? What about that important clue, a footprint, which is really only a hole in something else? Or do you think that perhaps the term ‘thing’ should be applied to everything material, and we should save the expression ‘object’ for something mythical, such as, say, the Devil’s Foot?”

  The Adventures of Things and the Things of Adventure

  Holmes, after letting Watson talk, stated his own position decisively. There was a distinction of the most elementary sort. As far as he was concerned, a thing was a thing of no consequence; an object was a thing transformed into a clue.

  A thing is usually first transformed into a clue through an insight into its relation with the human body. Just as the footprint implies the foot, and the ash the smoker’s hand, so does almost every thing conceal the story of how it was touched or abandoned. When we force it to tell its story, it no longer exists simply in the present. It opens up vast vistas into both the past and the future. It makes us aware of what is absent in even greater measure than that which is present.

  His own peculiar genius, he now asserted, was no more and no less than the awareness that every thing was not merely a thing, but a thing which could, in the twinkling of an eye, undergo a metamorphosis into an object. (Here, by way of demonstration, he seized his slipper and placed it on the mantelpiece.)

  For the detective of genius, he declaimed, reaching now for his violin, the whole world of thingness forever trembles on the brink of true objectivity! His relation with the thing is such that he understands very well why only a single letter divides the words think and thing.

  Watson, knowing his friend to be badly read in philosophy, is astonished at this kind of idealistic language, and looked around uneasily for signs of the hypodermic needle. Then he asked Holmes if he could perhaps illustrate the matter further using one of the stories from the tin box, or perhaps one of the adventures that he had himself committed to writing?

  “Nearly all our adventures could be used as illustrations,” said Holmes. “Sometimes our difficulty is to crack a cipher and find meaningful words, sometimes to discover the things certain words refer to, as in ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band,’ where, half-convinced that the dying woman’s words were a reference to a group of gypsies, we overlooked the possibility that they might refer to a poisonous snake. But more often we begin with the things themselves, do we not? We have the things in our hands, and it is only a question of interpreting them correctly, is that not so?

  “However,” continued Holmes, “I can think of no event which better illustrates my point than the adventure that you have already brought to mind through your reference to moatdredging, a certain story of a candle—”

  Birlstone Manor Revisited

  “A candle?” exclaimed Watson.

  “Yes, of a very memorable candle,” said Holmes. “I am amazed that you can have forgotten it. But you did not let me finish. I was about to say: a certain story of a candle and of a dumbbell!”

  “Are you referring,” cried Watson, “to the candle in the study in Birlstone Manor House?”

  Holmes nodded, and lit his pipe.

  “Sometimes a candle is only a candle,” he mused.

  “Like a cigar?” asked Watson.

  “Precisely,” said Holmes. “But sometimes it sheds a great deal more light—”

  “Than it emits physically?”

  “Indeed, Watson. That is why, if you had grasped the essentials of the matter, you would have avoided the fancifully romantic title, The Valley of Fear, and called your report The Adventure of the Candle and the Dumbbell. In recording other adventures, you were good enough to make things, or perhaps I should say, objects, the true heroes, though you did not always select the right ones. For example, ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ might more appropriately have been called ‘The Adventure of the Bowler Hat,’ and—”

  “I seem to recollect that we have had this sort of conversation before. One must make some concessions to popular taste. But to return to the candle . . .”

  “You are well acquainted with my methods. You will recollect that upon entering the study where we believed the corpse of Mr. Douglas (as we then thought him to be called) was lying, I noticed, among other things, a candle that had been extinguished before much of it had burned away. This immediately led me to two conclusions: firstly, that the dead man’s interview with his assailant had been brief, and secondly, that Mrs. Douglas and her husband’s best friend, Cecil Barker, were giving a false account of events when they claimed that they had raised the alarm immediately after discovering the body. For, though it is conceivable that a man who had just discovered his best friend’s body would have lit a lamp in order to view the scene better, it is unlikely that he should have thought about saving candle wax.”

  “And there was also the question of the missing wedding ring,” said Watson. “If Barker’s account was correct, there was no time for the assailant to remove it after the shooting, and the candle proved that there was no time for it to have been removed before!”

  “And the ring was another thing, Watson. A thing which became an object! But to return to the candle. What is behind the use of that candle, indeed of any other candle?”

  “The desire for light!”

  “Indeed, Watson. But behind that desire for light in the house there is something else. Fear, Watson. Fear of darkness, and of what may lurk therein. Fear of bumping into familiar household objects—which then seem to us no longer objects but things! Yes, and the worse fear of encountering the unfamiliar!”

  “It was the fear of fire which made Douglas go the rounds of his property every night. Or so we then believed. It was more likely his fear of his old enemies, the Scowsers!”

  “The fear of death is behind both of them, Watson. Perhaps the two were connected in his mind. The mining valley where he first had dealings with the Scowsers was also a place of fire, an infernal landscape, as I believe you describe it.”

  “Yet he met his fate by water in the end.”

  “Indeed. In the end, there is escape for no-one.”

  Holmes sighed deeply, doubtless thinking of the role Moriarty had played in this, and of his own failure to prevent it.

  Then he continued, “Yet once we understand the extent to which fear and anxiety underlie ordinary human actions, we can all the better understand how men and women act in exceptional ones. Nowhere is this truer than in our relation to so-called things, Watson. We are motivated by fear, or by care, which is fear under a softer name. And that is how these things become objects! We light candles from the fear of darkness, we extinguish them from fear of fire or fear of poverty. We cast them aside when a greater fear makes it necessary to reach for a weapon!”

  “As Douglas did when he reached for the hammer, in order to grapple with his old enemy, Ted Baldwin!”

  “The presence of the hammer on the floor testified to that, Watson! As surely as if it had taken an oath in court. That hammer would not have remained
in such a position otherwise. A tool or piece of equipment is nearly always removed from the floor by servants, prompted by the fear of losing their livelihood! And such a dismissal could doubtless be traced to their master’s primordial fear of tripping over something. But more significant yet was my discovery of the single dumbbell. As I said at the time, no-one uses a single dumbbell, Watson, unless they wish to condemn themselves to curvature of the spine! Such a fear would, in most cases, I believe, outweigh the fear of decrepitude which motivates us to use a dumbbell in the first place. And, as previously stated, in an orderly household, with a fair-sized domestic staff, such items are unlikely to be allowed to wander around, as it were of their own freewill, as they sometimes do in the rooms of a bachelor of irregular habits.”

  “Indeed, Holmes, had you owned a pair of dumbbells, I should not have been surprised to find one of them in the coal scuttle and the other on the mantelpiece.”

  “If you had, Watson, there would have been a good reason for it, and behind that reason, would, doubtless, have been the fear of losing my intellectual faculties through simple want of stimulation. But to continue. In seeking to account for the missing dumbbell, again I looked at the problem from the perspective of linking it to the human body and to human fear. That dumbbell had been moved by a human hand. It was not the murder weapon. If it had been used in self-defence, as we later learned the hammer was, then, why should it have been removed when the other weapons were not? Yet fear is the most likely reason for its removal. Fear on the part of the guilty person that their guilt would be revealed and that they would end on the gallows! So, what was the fear? If the dumbbell were not removed for its own sake, it must have been used as the means to remove something else. And the nearness of water strongly suggested—”

  “That it was used as a weight to sink that something else!”

  “As was proved to be the case, Watson, with the aid of your excellent umbrella, which you imagined I had taken as a weapon. And in a sense that was true! A much more dangerous weapon than if I had banged on the man’s head with it! For, mark, Watson, I was not content in having located the mere presence of that dumbbell and that which it had been used to conceal. Having looked into its past, I was also in a position to predict the thing’s future. It was no longer a mere thing. It was an object! I knew that just as fear had buried it in the moat, so fear would resurrect it when I circulated the false rumour that the moat was to be drained and searched for evidence. Fear, using the agency of a human hand, Watson.”

  “And thus were Ted Baldwin’s clothes and dagger discovered, and we made the even more important discovery that it was his mutilated body, and not that of Douglas, which was discovered in the study! And that the fair Mrs. Douglas was both a deceitful witness and a faithful wife!”

  It was now Watson’s turn to sigh a little.

  “And with the aid of the pamphlet relating the history of the house in the seventeenth-century, we caused Mr. Douglas, wearing the wedding ring he could not or would not remove, to step forward from the hiding-place, which had once held the fugitive Charles II. See how mere things can be gathered together and woven into a net! It is then as if they have become a single object. Did you know that the Vikings called their Parliament a Thing, and that that meant a Gathering? Etymologies are important, Watson!”

  “Would they not have done better to call it an Object, Holmes?”

  “We cannot expect such distinctions of abstract thought from them, Watson.”

  “But Holmes, when we consider the things that we weaved together into our net, we should really have called our adventure the story of the candle, the dumbbell, the hammer, the ring, and the pamphlet!”

  “That would not be so pithy,” said Holmes.

  “I stand by my original title,” said Watson. “According to your theory, are not the past and the future both valleys of fear, valleys of the shadow of death? And do not the most innocent of things and the most complex of objects continually lead us into those valleys?”

  Holmes said nothing.

  Postscript

  I am a very old man in this chilly spring of 1926, and perhaps I no longer think as clearly as I once did. Yet, hearing a friend of mine (my closest friend since the sad death of Sherlock Holmes)—a friend who is a great specialist in German philosophy—talk at great length of, and even go so far as to read me some extracts from, a new book which has been published in Germany, by one Martin Heidegger, it seemed to me that some of his ideas owed more than a little to my old friend Sherlock Holmes, though he uses a much more complicated terminology than Holmes’s lucid distinction between the thing and the object!

  Here is a philosopher, it seems, if I have understood him aright, who does not want to leave things lying about in the present tense. He wants to open what he calls Being up to the past and the future. What his purpose is in so doing, is far from clear to me. It has nothing to do with bringing the perpetrators of crime to justice. I fear much of what he says may be ineffable twaddle. And I distrust the Germans since the last war. Yet here and there, flashing out like jewels among all that incomprehensible Teutonic verbiage, are Holmes’s very ideas, the ideas which motivated his scientific practice and his transcendent success!

  This philosopher also understands that we are forever in the grip of care and anxiety, of how the human being, whom he rather fancifully calls Being here or Dasein, always directs his attention to his coming death, and directs himself towards things as a means of avoiding it for a time! He even talks about directionality as one of the attributes of this Dasein. And if I follow him correctly, he thinks that we understand all this better if we also understand the important distinction between those unused things that we do not even think about using, those things which are merely present at hand as he calls them, and things which are ready to hand, those things which Holmes would have called objects!

  These ready to hand things tend to have the character of equipment, equipment which is meant to help us in our daily struggle to stay alive! When they get broken and useless, they become ordinary present at hand things again. I would once have thought that this difference was too obvious to concern a great philosopher. But now that Sherlock Holmes is gone from the world, I understand exactly how much his genius depended on this simple ability to see everything in it as ready to hand, as something which could really be grasped! It was not just that he saw how others had grasped hold of the world in the past. He grasped it himself. The simplest displaced pebble could become his equipment and his weapon in the struggle against crime and the even greater struggle against our ignorance of the causes of things!

  And when this German philosopher actually devotes a paragraph to speaking of equipment as something which either has its place or else is left lying around, I can only think of the significance of that hammer left lying on the floor in the study of Birlstone Manor, and that displaced dumbbell submerged in the moat . . .

  If Holmes could have lived to see this, would he have sued this Heidegger for theft of intellectual property? I trust not. He was always willing to let others take the credit for his intellectual labours.

  I think, in any case, that we have not heard the last of theories of things. They will probably grow to keep pace with all this newfangled equipment which proliferates in the modern world. And this German professor, who is doubtless a genius in his own way–God grant he be not another Moriarty in the making!—will, I dare say, develop his own ideas more in the future, though I shall not live to read them. Perhaps he will, in the mystical German manner, ponder that connection between the words ‘think’ and ‘thing’ which so intrigued Holmes. Perhaps one day he will even find a way of speaking of things which is not relentlessly related to our mortal fears, a way of just letting them be. At any rate, it seems to me that this philosopher is like my old friend in his quest for truth. For me the truth has always resembled the solution to a crossword puzzle. But for Holmes, for all his cold scientific ways, it was something much more concrete, something that had to be
violently uncovered and dragged into the light.

  —JHW

  Chapter 5

  Action Man or Dreamy Detective

  Sami Paavola and Lauri Järvilehto

  Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were waiting for Miss Violet Hunter to contact them. The young woman had accepted the post of governess at the Rucastle household under the most curious conditions. The master sleuth’s intuition told him something was amiss with Miss Hunter’s case, but he could not pinpoint what it was.

  “Data! data! data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.”

  —“The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”

  Sherlock Holmes is renowned for his capacity to single out the essential from a bewildering array of trifles and so crack even the hardest of cases. This capacity has lent the detective an air of the supernatural. Holmes himself, however, would object to such interpretations. For the master detective, his power lies in his methodology.

  How does Holmes come up with novel ideas? What’s the secret of his masterful problem-solving skills? If he really has invented a method, can it be used for solving problems or making discoveries outside of the field of crime?

  Holmes is, he tells us, about to write a textbook on the subject. He often complains that when reporting the cases Watson put too much emphasis on the story instead of instructive and rigorous demonstration. When Watson asks in annoyance why Holmes is not writing on the cases from this angle, Holmes remarks:

  “I will, my dear Watson, I will. At present I am, as you know, fairly busy, but I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook, which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume.” (“The Adventure of the Abbey Grange”)