by Josef Steiff
In A Study in Scarlet we meet another character named Hope, this time it’s Jefferson Hope. In this story, Hope is a vengeful killer, who murders two men before himself dying. He suffers from an aortic aneurysm, but stays alive long enough to kill his two sworn enemies. To kill each man, he carries with him two sets of two pills, one poison and the other harmless. He offers each victim a chance to choose a pill, so that it is God who decides who shall die—thereby evincing Leibniz’s claim that God and hope are connected. The first man follows Hope’s demand, and chooses the poison. The other, however, refuses to play along, and Hope stabs him in the heart.
Here is what we learn about Hope in this story. Hope’s true love, prevented from marrying him by these men, dies of a broken heart without Hope. God, at least a vengeful God reminiscent of the Old Testament God, sides with Hope. Hope can pierce your heart, and die happy. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that Holmes tracked down Hope and brought him to justice, thereby setting Holmes up contrary to Hope. In the end, Hope left four people dead (including himself), and did not leave an example of hope for others to follow.
Facing the Truth
“The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger” ends with Holmes believing himself to have prevented Mrs. Ronder’s suicide. Holmes’s explanation for her life’s use should not have struck Mrs. Ronder as helpful. Until she unveils herself in front of Watson and Holmes, we’re told of only two people who had seen her face, namely Mrs. Merrilow and a milkman, both of whom saw it accidentally. Unless Holmes is suggesting that Mrs. Ronder move to High Street and sit like a mannequin in a shop window, the only chance for her story to reach the world would be via Dr. Watson, a possibility to which we will return.
Whether Mrs. Ronder is an atheist or a deist is not a question about which we’re likely to be able to make any progress. Whichever may be the case, Mrs. Ronder resembles a postmodern, someone living in an age characterized by Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead,” by which he means minimally that God no longer plays a crucial role in our lives. It does not follow, however, that she accepts the theological claim, and thus must abandon all hope. Rather, hope is crucial to Mrs. Ronder.
The nagging question is, Why would Mrs. Ronder contemplate suicide now? It seems reasonable to think that her desire to commit suicide would have been most pressing shortly after the catastrophe. After all, that night began with the promise of ridding herself forever of her abusive husband and starting a new life, one rich in emotion, with her lover. The night ended with her being alone in the world and scarred in a way that ensured she would remain alone the rest of her days. She has been Mrs. Merrilow’s lodger for seven years, so at least that much time has passed since the fateful night when her lover failed to protect her, and it became necessary to veil her once beautiful face. Presumably the desire to commit suicide would gradually wane, and so it is curious that she would consider killing herself now.
The most direct reasoning is as follows. The idea of confessing what happened that night appeals to Mrs. Ronder. She would like to do it before she dies, she tells Mrs. Merrilow. The reason she has not talked to anyone about the events so far is that her lover, who would’ve been implicated by her confession, remained alive. His recent death frees Mrs. Ronder to tell her life story. Having told Holmes and Watson what really happened, she was then free to kill herself, something that Holmes sensed.
This story line is complicated by Mrs. Ronder’s selectivity in choosing her confessor. Mrs. Merrilow initially proposes that Mrs. Ronder talk either with a member of the clergy or with the police. Mrs. Ronder’s objection to the police is interesting in that she does not object to them per se, nor does she mention that she would not want to be incarcerated. While she tells Holmes that she has not long to live, which presumably mitigates the threat of incarceration, the problem lies with the public. She does not want a scandal and publicity, as these would interfere with her wish to die peacefully. While ostensibly a good reason at the time—at this point in the story the reader assumes she has a terminal disease—we later learn that her death is imminent only because she plans to make it so.
While her dismissal of the suggestion to talk with the police is understandable, her reasoning about the clergy is not particularly cogent. She rejects Mrs. Merrilow’s suggestion that she speak with a clergyman because “the clergy can’t change what is past.” While of course true, it isn’t uniquely true of the clergy. No one can change the past, not even Sherlock Holmes. Her stated reason for selecting Holmes is that he is a “man of judgment,” something that also seems true of the alternatives Mrs. Merrilow proposed, namely a clergyman or the police. While she might mean understanding, independent judgment, Holmes’s response of “I do not promise you that when you have spoken I may not myself think it my duty to refer the case to the police” diminishes the difference between himself and the police.
Time Enough to Drink the Poison
Though we may not be able to say which with any certainty, Mrs. Ronder is an atheist or at least a deist. Not only is she far more concerned with earthly justice than divine justice but she also intends to kill herself, thereby violating a central precept of western religions. She has a strikingly postmodern conception of the clergy as impotent while the crowd wields the true power. So we’re left facing the question, what reason would a suicidal atheist have to confess? Perhaps to assuage her conscience but then she might as well have told a clergyman since they traditionally keep confessions private. Or why not the more convenient answer of Mrs. Merrilow? Even if she were to report Mrs. Ronder to the police—something unlikely given her need for Mrs. Ronder’s rent checks—there would be enough time to drink the poison first. Having no children or any family, it is difficult to think that any subsequent scandal would bother her.
Leonardo’s death does not free her to do what she has wanted to do for nearly a decade. Rather, his death is precisely why she is now suicidal. What kept Mrs. Ronder going for the past seven or more years is the hope that perhaps she and Leonardo might be together again. In relating her story to Holmes, she confides that “at last our intimacy turned to love—deep, deep, passionate love, such love as I had dreamed of but never hoped to feel.” This is the single use of “hope” in the entire story, which is fitting since its topic is suicide. Thinking about the chance of a post-mauling relationship, she contrasts Leonardo’s love (as she imagines it) for her with hers for him: “He might as soon have loved one of the freaks whom we carried round the country as the thing which the lion had left. But a woman’s love is not so easily set aside.” She goes on to tell Holmes that Leonardo died the previous month. It is only a few quick comments after that that Holmes suspects that she is contemplating suicide.
Mrs. Ronder was kept alive by the hope that she might one day be with her lover Leonardo again. She had nothing else to hope for and so when he died, so did her reason to continue living. Her situation lends credence to both philosophical positions we have explored. The Stoics and the Cartesians would note that she had patience without hope she would not be devastated by Leonardo’s death. And Leibniz would point out that without the proper conception of God her hope had no real foundation, it was as frail as human mortality.
It seems unlikely that she either relinquished hope or changed her mind about God. Rather, she found a new hope, one founded on Dr. Watson. Should he recount her case, she would indeed be able to set an example of patience in an impatient world. The clue to this is her desire for a confessor who can change the past.
While no clergyman or policeman or even Sherlock Holmes himself can change the past, a writer can. Indeed, Watson tells us at the very beginning of “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger” that “I have made a slight change of name and place, but otherwise the facts are as stated,” thus signaling the true nature of Mrs. Ronder’s turnabout.
Chapter 22
Where the Most Logical Mind May Be at Fault
Miriam Franchella
“I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgeme
nt.” Strange statement, Mr. Holmes, strange statement. Is it a question of misogyny? Or a playboy’s excuse for avoiding stable relationships? Evidently not, in Holmes’s case.
But someone who talks like this is not isolated or outdated. The belief that emotion is at war with logic is still prevalent, and this raises a whole series of philosophical questions, beginning with: ‘Do emotions interfere with the capacity for logical reasoning? And if so, how much?’
Dreaming of Difference
Andrea Nye has challenged the opposition of logic and emotion. Nye describes two approaches to the world, the “masculine” and the “feminine” approach. The masculine approach considers only the formal aspects and seeks to avoid emotions. The feminine approach considers the emotional aspects. According to Nye, logic has always been a property of men, and used by them to exert power. The masculine approach steers clear of emotions so as to avoid questioning the organization of society, while the feminine approach dreams of different social structures.
Holmes seems to be a genius because of his deductive capability, and he likes to give this impression, although he also often says that he has normal faculties, common to everyone. If we credit such capability only to a few men or women, we risk what Andrea Nye warns against: logic can be used as a super-power in order to oppress other people (for instance by opposing rational westernpeople to brutish savages). Holmes himself does not do that, but this can be the ultimate conclusion of a chain of reasoning beginning with labeling him a “genius,” hence superior to other people.
Some shadows begin to appear when Doyle speaks of Tonga the cannibal in The Sign of the Four. Tonga is described as like an animal, governed by pure aggressive instincts:
Holmes had already drawn his revolver, and I whipped out mine at the sight of this savage, distorted creature. . . . that face was enough to give a man a sleepless night. Never have I seen features so deeply marked with all bestiality and cruelty. His small eyes glowed and burned with a sombre light, and his thick lips were writhed back from his teeth, which grinned and chattered at us with half animal fury. . . .
Tonga thought he had done something very clever in killing him, for when I came up by the rope I found him strutting about as proud as a peacock. Very much surprised was he when I made at him with the rope’s end and cursed him for a little blood-thirsty imp. . .
This view of some humans as little more than animals was prevalent at the time, and linked with their lack of rationality or logic. At the time of the Holmes stories, exhibitions celebrating the triumph of science and rationality were popular, as were “human zoos” in which exotic peoples were depicted in their natural primitive living conditions. We have traces of this in Tonga’s story. His master recalls: “We earned a living at this time by my exhibiting poor Tonga at fairs and other such places as the black cannibal.”
If logic (in any of its forms) is not considered something common to all, something human (in the sense that is comprehensible by any human being in its basic forms), then this can be dangerous. But is logic really something universal?
A first hint for our reflections comes from Carlo Cellucci who maintains that our logic is the product of evolution—it’s necessary for our survival—and that a kind of logic is present also in the most simple primitive unicellular beings.
“All organisms” includes the most elementary ones, even unicellular organisms such as prokaryotes, the single cell organisms which were the first form of life on the earth in the Precambrian era. Such organisms perceive different states of the environment. The information about them is memorized in the genome and inherited, and is used by the organism to regulate its behaviour in accordance with the state of the environment. That the primary role of natural logic is to find hypotheses about the environment for the end of survival means that there is a strict connection between logic and the search of means for survival, and that, since generally all organisms seek survival, natural logic does not belong to humans only but to all organisms.
A further clue comes from Ignacio Matte Blanco, who explains that binary logic is a necessary part of life: it is necessary for distinguishing ourselves from the rest of the world, and the other beings one from another. There is a kind of “basic logic” that must operate in any human being, even if we may be unaware that it is going on. Starting from this basic logic, some types of logical argument automatically appear. Furthermore, they are useful in our social life (for choosing something or for detecting liars) wherever communication by means of words occurs.
There is a difference between being a logician as a profession and using logic in everyday reasoning. Still, it’s necessary to use some logic in daily life. Aside from spirits and gods, every transaction by primitive humans satisfies the logical principles of bivalence and non-contradiction. Although logic is practiced by all people, consciousness of logical laws or rules develops culturally where some people are no longer preoccupied with finding food, where the language is very sophisticated, and where important decisions are stated after many discussions and arguments. So it is not helpful to expect a person from a “primitive” tribal background to think in terms of explicit logical rules.
Even when we reason on a problem expressed in our language, we have to comprehend it in depth first, by considering the conversational context. For instance, if Granny says to her grandson “If you practice your violin, then you can go and play with your sword,” she says “If A then B,” but she intends “B if and only if A.” When logic is applied in everyday contexts, many of the logical steps are understood rather than explicitly announced. So we shouldn’t evaluate the logic of primitive people by how well they understand formal statements. Such people are fully human and naturally employ logic, though usually without any awareness of the rules of logical argument.
The same holds for many first-world people—most of the readers of this book—who are sometimes not conscious of logic even when they use it. A conscious use of logical rules becomes more and more necessary as our society becomes more and more word-based and power is exercised through a mechanism of persuasion. So it was for “democratic” Athens, so it is for our democratic countries. A person who is not used to living in such a society may not feel the necessity of developing reflections about logical arguments, because in her society most communications are short and simple.
But this doesn’t mean that we “civilized people” are superior to primitive people or that we’re entitled to do what we want. “Primitive” humans who actually exist and share the world with us cannot be put on a different stage of the evolutionary chain that the one on which we put ourselves, merely because we have more knowledge and a better capability of developing inferences. This would be an explanation like one based on the physical force: who is stronger is superior. An intellectual cudgel is in its essence not different from a material cudgel if it is used as a weapon of domination.
And we shouldn’t forget that other cultures can offer something to us. The powder that is used in “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” for letting relatives firstly enter into a state of lunacy and later die came from Africa, from primitive people. In this case, it was a poison, but it was however a new substance, that, in fact, Holmes—always interested in medicines that can let him have new mental experiences—tries and proposes Watson to try. “I told him how powerless European science would be to detect it” stated Dr. Sterndale: our interchanges with “primitives” are not one-way and cannot be confined to descriptions of our superiority.
Backwards Thinking
A further question concerns the kind of logic that Holmes uses. He himself describes it as “analysis,” a procedure that starts from data—empirical data, left by victims and murders or found out by the detective—and goes on backwards: “People who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards or analytically” (A Study in Scarlet). Its procedure is presented und
er the label “deduction” but some have remarked that it is in fact abduction. Carlo Cellucci can help us to tackle this question.
Cellucci offers a contraposition between the axiomatic (or “synthetic”) method that starts from axioms and goes on by deduction and the analytic method. This is the method by which, to solve a problem, one starts from the problem, finds a hypothesis that is a sufficient condition for its solution by means of a non-deductive inference (inductive, analogical, metaphorical, metonymic, or diagrammatic), and finally checks whether the hypothesis is compatible with the existing knowledge.
If there is more than one hypothesis that can be a solution to the problem, we pick up the one which seems the “most solid.” Cellucci stresses that it is a discovery method, bottom-up, where error is always possible: maybe not all possible hypotheses have been considered or the evaluation about the solidity of the hypotheses has been wrong.
