Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy

by Josef Steiff

  Holmes’s entire plan is based on gendered generalizations. Holmes task is to get the picture away from Adler. To do so, he needs to know where she keeps it. He feels it is safe to assume that it will be in her home because, “Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.” Having assumed she is like all other women, Holmes thinks he can trick her into letting him into her house and into showing him where she keeps the picture.

  Of course, Watson—judging character from outside appearances as always—feels guilty about tricking her since she’s a pretty woman: “I never felt more ashamed of myself in my life when I saw the beautiful creature against whom I was conspiring.”

  The trick appears to work as Holmes does get into Adler’s home. Once in her home, Holmes’s ruse takes form. Holmes continues to think he can draw conclusions about any woman from past experiences of other women: “When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most.”

  When Holmes returns to her home the next day, he’s shocked to find that Adler not only knows who he is, but also has left a note for him. Though Holmes uses his disguise to trick Adler, he does not realize that she has been using a disguise of her own to trick Holmes. She actually wished him “Goodnight” while dressed as a man. Adler out-prepared Holmes, and when he came to trick her, she was ready for him, and he is unable to get the photograph for the King of Bohemia.

  The Honorable, the Woman

  This moment—where Adler outwits the greatest detective in literary history—is incredibly important as a response to the dangerous gendered generalizations we have been discussing. If Holmes and Watson always got away with their gendered generalizations, that would be a problem. If the female characters always confirmed their negative stereotypes of women, we would have to think that Doyle himself created a sexist fictional universe. But the exception not only proves the danger of hasty generalizations, but it also indicates that Doyle was aware of this danger.

  In Irene Adler, Doyle created a proto-feminist: a strong female character who was just as smart as the smartest man—a female character that stood for everything any woman is capable of. For this reason, it makes sense to refer to her as “the woman.” She is not only the woman who beat Holmes, but she is also the woman who shows why it is always wrong to treat women as a group instead of treating them as particular individuals. Each woman, of course, deserves to be referred to in singular terms to capture her unique personal traits that set her apart as a real individual who cannot be judged simply by her sex or outer appearances.

  Notice how important this point is, historically speaking. “A Scandal in Bohemia” is published in 1891, and yet it presents a female antagonist just as intelligent as Sherlock Holmes. It is incredibly difficult to find a female antagonist going head-tohead against a great male hero, and coming out on top. Over thirty years after Holmes’s defeat, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot goes up against Countess Vera Rossakoff, but he easily sees through her framing of another man and collects the jewels she stole. Forty years after Doyle’s “Scandal,” Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade goes up against Brigid O’Shaughnessy, but she ends up falling in love with Spade who turns her over to the cops. Fifty years after Irene Adler’s tale of success, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe goes up against Helen Grayle, who manages to escape Marlowe’s clutches, but ends up killing herself.

  Clearly, Doyle was ahead of his time in appreciation for the ability of a woman to equalize his great detective in an intellectual dispute. His characters may have lagged behind him with all of their inductive arguments that moved from previous experiences with women to a conclusion that the next woman would be the same. But, surely, they learned their lesson when they were bested by the woman. As Watson says:

  the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honorable title of the woman.

  THERE ARE UNEXPLORED POSSIBILITIES IN YOU

  Chapter 16

  The Many Faces of Deception

  Don Fallis

  If, like truth, the lie had but one face, we would be on better terms. For we would accept as certain the opposite of what the liar would say. But the reverse of the truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.

  —Montaigne

  Why are they lying, and what is the truth which they are trying so hard to conceal? Let us try, Watson, you and I, if we can get behind the lie and reconstruct the truth.

  —Sherlock Holmes, Esq.

  Sherlock Holmes is renowned for observing several minute details and then being able to draw amazingly accurate inferences about what has happened. At their first meeting in A Study in Scarlet, Holmes quickly notices that Watson has a military bearing, that his face is darker than the skin on his wrists, and that he holds his left arm in “a stiff and unnatural manner.” From these clues (together with his knowledge of the recent Anglo-Afghan War), Holmes famously concludes, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” But obviously Holmes didn’t mention all the clues he had employed, because based on that evidence alone, Watson could also have been in South Africa, where the British had been fighting the Zulus at about the same time.

  However, the sorts of “deductions” that Holmes regularly makes in order to solve crimes are even more impressive. In these cases, Holmes manages to uncover something that (unlike Watson’s military service) someone else is actively trying to keep hidden. In other words, he’s dealing with liars and deceivers who attempt to make the world appear to be one way when the reality is actually quite different. And in order to see through their ruses to the truth, Holmes has to understand the various ways in which people try to deceive other people.

  Philosophers from Plato and Saint Augustine to Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche have been primarily interested in moral questions about lying and deception, such as whether it’s always wrong to lie and whether lying is worse than other forms of deception. But philosophers are also concerned with the purely epistemological questions of how people can be deceived and how deception can be detected. In other words, how can we acquire knowledge in a world of liars and deceivers?

  All types of deception involve manipulating people’s beliefs by altering the way the world appears to be. However, as we see from reading the “Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.,” deceit comes in a wealth of different varieties. Thus, philosophers, such as Augustine, Roderick Chisholm and Thomas Feehan, J. Bowyer Bell and Barton Whaley, Jonathan Adler (no relation to Irene), and, most recently, Thomas Carson, have attempted to classify the different possible types of deception.

  As well as writing a technical monograph enumerating the various types of tobacco ash (The Sign of the Four), Holmes was also interested in categorizing the various types of crime and deceit. As he points out, “There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first” (A Study in Scarlet).

  Why They Might Deceive Us

  Saint Augustine (De Mendacio, pp. 86–88) was the first philosopher to explicitly classify different types of deception. In particular, he categorized various kinds of lying based on the purpose for which it is done. For instance, there are lies that harm someone and help no one, lies that harm someone and help someone else, lies that harm no one and help someone, and lies told “solely for the pleasure of lying.” However, this taxonomy is not very helpful when it comes to classifying deception in the Sherlock Holmes stories (a.k.a. the “Canon”).

  There may be a few lies in the Canon that harm no one and help someone. In “The Adventure of the Second Stain,” Holmes is asked by the Secretary for European Affairs to retrieve a sensitive document that has been stolen from his “despatch-box.” Holmes discovers that the document has been removed by the Secretary’
s own wife. But instead of exposing her, he secretly replaces the document in the despatch-box and tells the Secretary, “the more I think of the matter the more convinced I am that the letter has never left this house.”

  Since the document is safe, the lie arguably does no harm and it saves the wife from potentially losing her husband. But almost all of the examples of deception that Watson records fall into the category of helping the deceiver and harming someone else. In fact, even the lie in “The Adventure of the Second Stain” ends up making the Right Honourable Trelawney Hope look a bit foolish for having thought that the document was stolen in the first place.

  But fortunately, there is a more useful way to classify the deceptions in the Canon according to their purpose. Most notably, criminals use deception to conceal who committed the crime. For instance, Colonel Valentine Walter and Hugo Oberstein steal the “Bruce-Partington Plans.” But they kill the junior clerk at Woolwich Arsenal and plant several of the documents on his body to make it look as if he was the thief.

  Criminals sometimes attempt to hide the fact that a crime has been committed at all. In “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” Dr. Grimesby Roylott of Stoke Moran kills his step-daughter so that she cannot get married, and he does so in a way that conceals the fact that she was murdered. (As we’ll see below, there’s a veritable epidemic of parents in Victorian England who are willing to take extreme measures to keep their daughters from getting married.) He sends a venomous snake down a bellrope into her locked bedroom to bite her, which leaves no visible evidence of foul play.

  But in addition to covering up the crime, criminals also use deception to commit the crime in the first place. Most notably, Vincent Spaulding (a.k.a. John Clay) deceives Jabez Wilson about there being a “vacancy on the League of the Red-headed Men.” The ruse keeps Wilson out of his pawnshop for several hours a day so that Clay and his accomplice can dig a tunnel into the vault of the neighboring City and Suburban Bank.

  In “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” Jonas Oldacre plants false evidence to suggest that he has been murdered by the unhappy John Hector McFarlane. He uses a little of his own blood, and McFarlane’s thumbprint from a wax seal on an envelope, to place a bloody thumbprint on the wall.

  Some of Holmes’s own clients try to deceive him simply to avoid embarrassment. In “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” Mr. Neil Gibson tries to deceive Holmes about the nature of his relationship with the governess of his children (at least until Holmes accuses him of lying). Dr. Gregory House, a fictional medical detective who is loosely based on Sherlock Holmes (see Jerold Abrams, “The Logic of Guesswork in Sherlock Holmes and House”), has the same sort of problem. (“I don’t ask why patients lie, I just assume they all do.”) In fact, Holmes explicitly draws the analogy between a client lying to him and a patient lying to a doctor. (“And it is only a patient who has an object in deceiving his surgeon who would conceal the facts of his case.”)

  Holmes himself regularly uses deceit in order to solve the crime. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Watson throws a “plumber’s smoke-rocket” through a window so that Irene Adler will think that there is a fire and will reveal the location of the indiscreet photograph that Holmes has been engaged to retrieve. In “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes puts a wax bust of himself in the window of 221B Baker Street to convince Colonel Sebastian Moran “that I was there when I was really elsewhere.” In “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone,” Holmes does the exact opposite. He pretends to be a wax replica of himself so that Count Negretto Sylvius will think that he is elsewhere when he is really there.

  Holmes even goes so far as to fake his own death at the Reichenbach Falls to protect himself from the Moriarty gang (“The Adventure of the Empty House”). The “tragedy” at the falls occurred before the “Norwood Builder” faked his own death. But Holmes might have gotten the idea from John Douglas in The Valley of Fear. In addition to faking his own death, Douglas (while working as a Pinkerton in America) was a counterfeit counterfeiter (“I never minted a dollar in my life. Those I gave you were as good as any others”).

  Holmes often deceives Watson as well as the criminals he’s chasing. Just like the rest of the world, Watson is completely convinced that Holmes died with Moriarty at that “fearful place.” And, as if Watson had not already suffered enough grief, Holmes later persuades him that he (Holmes) is dying of a rare tropical disease (“The Adventure of the Dying Detective”). But Holmes usually only deceives Watson as a means of deceiving the criminals that he’s chasing. For instance, Watson had to believe that Holmes was dead because “it is quite certain that you would not have written so convincing an account of my unhappy end had you not yourself thought that it was true.”

  It’s not completely clear why Holmes needs to maintain this fiction for three years. After all, a “confederate” of Moriarty was a “witness of his friend’s death and of my escape.” Holmes has a much better excuse for deceiving Watson in “The Adventure of the Dying Detective.” He wants Watson to fetch Mr. Culverton Smith (“the man upon earth who is best versed in this disease”) and, as he later explains to Watson, “if you had shared my secret you would never have been able to impress Smith with the urgent necessity of his presence, which was the vital point of the whole scheme.”

  As the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out just a few years before Holmes supposedly fell into that awful abyss, “men believe in the truth of that which is plainly strongly believed.”

  And finally, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself engages in deception. He’s always trying to deceive his readers about what’s really going on, until Holmes reveals the solution to the mystery. As Doyle explains in his autobiography, “having got that key idea, one’s next task is to conceal it and lay emphasis upon everything which can make for a different explanation.” In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Doyle provides us with several possible suspects. In addition to being the butler (always a suspicious character in murder mysteries), Mr. Barrymore has “a full, black beard” just like the man that followed Sir Henry Baskerville in London and he could have the motive of keeping Baskerville Hall for himself. The escaped convict Selden, the Notting Hill murderer, is loose on the moor and is “a man that would stick at nothing.” There is also the suspicious, unidentified “man on the tor” that Watson sees silhouetted against the moon (who turns out to be Holmes himself). Or the curse of the Baskervilles could actually be true and there is a “hound of hell” roaming the moor.

  How They Might Deceive Us

  It’s useful to know about the different reasons why people deceive. This can make us more aware that a person might have a motivation to deceive us. But it’s even more important to understand how people deceive. According to J. Bowyer Bell and Barton Whaley and to Paul Ekman, there are two main ways to deceive. You can “hide the truth” or you can “show the false.” For instance, Dr. Roylott just hides the truth that he murdered his step-daughter. By contrast, Colonel Walter and Oberstein show the false that Cadogan West stole the plans for the submarine (as well as hiding the truth that they did it).

  Either way, the ultimate goal is the same. As several philosophers have pointed out, in order for something to count as deception, the goal must be to foster in someone a false belief, or at least to lower that person’s confidence in a true belief. For instance, Dr. Roylott wants people to believe that his stepdaughter was not murdered and Colonel Walter and Oberstein want people to believe that West stole the plans.

  Admittedly, it’s possible to hide the truth from someone just in order to “keep him in the dark.” I might steal the latest copy of Variety from your mailbox so that you will not learn that the new Sherlock Holmes film is going to be written by the guy that accused George Costanza of double dipping. However, with only a few exceptions, philosophers don’t count this as deception. Similarly, Holmes is not deceiving anyone when he keeps his chain of reasoning secret. As he explains to Watson in A Study in Scarlet, “I’m not going to tell you much more of the
case, Doctor. You know a conjuror gets no credit when once he has explained his trick, and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all.” When the same issue comes up in “The Red-Headed League,” Holmes quotes the Roman historian Tacitus, “Omne ignotum pro magnifico” (Everything unknown appears magnificent). Likewise, the “cipher messages” used in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” and in The Valley of Fear are not intended to deceive. They are simply designed to keep everyone but the intended recipient ignorant of the contents of the message.

  A Master of Disguise

  As Bell and Whaley have pointed out, there are several different techniques for hiding the truth and showing the false. These techniques can be illustrated by looking at the various ways that disguises function in the Canon.

  Several of the villains that Holmes chases down disguise themselves. Most notably, Mr. Neville St. Clair becomes “The Man with the Twisted Lip” because he could make more money as a professional beggar than as a journalist. In “A Case of Identity,” James Windibank “disguised himself, covered those keen eyes with tinted glasses, masked the face with a moustache and a pair of bushy whiskers, sunk that clear voice into an insinuating whisper, and doubly secure on account of the girl’s short sight, he appears as Mr. Hosmer Angel, and keeps off other lovers by making love himself.”