Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy

by Josef Steiff

  And, dear Reader, we rarely speak of (ahem, come closer as I whisper) how often, in defiance of his grand reputation, our dear Holmes doesn’t solve the case. Holmes dissuades Violet de Merville from marrying Baron Gruner, yes—but there is no mystery per se. The scarred Mrs. Ronder reveals the murderous plot behind the “veiled lodger.” But, again—no mystery to solve. And Holmes himself confesses his many blunders to Watson—“a more common occurrence than anyone would think”—such as when he mistakenly assumes that Silver Blaze has returned or when he diagnoses a case as “blackmail” only to find it a cover-up of an innocent child. And, despite Holmes’s best efforts, (shhhhhhh!) criminals elude him—John Openshaw is murdered and the masterminds of “The Five Orange Pips” escape by boat (though they drown). Those who smash the engineer’s thumb also get away. Sherlock, in self-deprecation at one of his blunders, tells Watson to remind him of his failures when he feels “overconfident” (“The Yellow Face”).

  So it’s not the particulars of a case—the motive, the outcome, or the moral issue at stake—that drives Holmes.

  What matters most is that there’s a game, that it’s afoot, and that he’s afoot in it.

  Come, Watson!

  The Adventure of the King’s Crown

  Jeremy Brett—as Holmes—holds Henry Baker’s large, beat-up hat and challenges Watson to deduce why its owner has a large “intellectual capacity.” Watson can’t. So Holmes playfully flips the large hat onto his head. Its brim sinks low on Holmes’s brow.

  Why does Holmes do this?

  The mask takes center stage in the carnivalesque. Disguise encourages not only play, but the joy of “change and reincarnation, relativity, and the merry negation of uniformity and similarity” (Rabelais, p. 39). Masks fuel new identities—folk can travel in and out of social spheres beyond their “real” station—even to an outright “reversal of hierarchic levels.” In one classic carnival celebration called the “feast of fools,” a fool is elected king. The real king (old authority and truth) is brought down—metaphorically killed—so that the king of fools (a new authority, a new truth) can emerge. When the fool’s reign is over at carnival’s end, his kingly disguise is removed and he retakes his place as a clown. But the fool doesn’t “die” in vain—he has led the hierarchy and the folk through metamorphosis. Dying brings change and rebirth.

  Our dear Holmes is a master of masks. He travels, disguised, up and down the social ladder to find the truth of his latest riddle. We wonder which act he enjoys more—the rector, the bum, the bookseller, the stable groom, the tramp, the plumber, the old sailor, the opium addict. Maybe it’s when he tricks poor Agatha into becoming his fiancée (The Master Blackmailer). Perhaps it’s the many times he fools poor Watson, even feigning sickness unto death (oh!). And Holmes sees through masks as if they aren’t there—he identifies John Clay, recognizes Joe Barnes under the dress, discerns Flora Millar as playing a lunatic, catches the Resident Patient lying, and gets behind the deceptions of most other criminals. It takes a mask to know a mask: shape-shifting defines Holmes’s methods (small wonder that the only one to fool him retains his highest affections—Irene Adler). Sherlock dons the hat—walks in the shoes—of others, becoming them. Watson explains: Sherlock “puts himself in the man’s place, having first gauged his intelligence. Then he tries to imagine how he himself would have proceeded in similar circumstances” (“The Musgrave Ritual”). Our dear Holmes can become—literally or figuratively—anyone he chooses.

  But Sherlock’s greatest disguise is hiding in plain sight, when his chameleon-like abilities vaunt him upon a fool’s throne. The body politic bows to Holmes when the monarch entrusts him with matters of state. Holmes acts as a royal agent when the monarch cannot (the “Illustrious Client” is none other than Edward VII). Holmes secretly resolves many cases that threaten Empire—he restores the lost Naval Treaty, recovers the Bruce-Partington plans, regains the Mazarin Stone, and retrieves the letter from the “ruffled foreign potentate” that would mean certain war (“The Second Stain”). So Holmes, in effect, becomes the surrogate embodiment of a royal authority. But Holmes also usurps royal authority without permission when he takes justice into his own hands. He pardons murderers: he burns John Turner’s confession, letting him go free, and sends Dr. Leon Sterndale—“a law to himself ”—back to Africa without reporting the doctor’s devilish crime (“The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” “The Devil’s Foot”). And Holmes and Watson watch, from behind a curtain, the blackmailer Charles Milverton’s murder—without stopping or reporting it. Here Holmes brandishes a kind of fool’s justice beyond any royal decree. The fool as king independently creates and enforces a new law: his own.

  But our dear Holmes shows his truest mettle when he defies all official protocol and crowns himself. Holmes unflinchingly dictates his terms to any client, to Prime Ministers, government Secretaries, nobility, and even kings. He levels patronizing nobility—Holmes tells Lord St. Simon he is “descending” by taking the Lord’s case (his last client was a king). And Holmes refuses to bow to or shake hands with the King of Bohemia, exalting Lady Adler’s character over his: “she seems indeed to be on a very different level to your Majesty.” But Sherlock’s most revealing and mystical self-crowning involves the divine right of kings, interrupted by Charles I’s beheading in 1649. When Holmes helps school chum Reginald find the missing butler Brunton, he also recovers the sacred crown of Charles II. For more than two hundred years, none of the noble Musgraves has understood the family Ritual—and yet Holmes deciphers it in short order. Only Holmes recognizes the “battered and shapeless diadem” as fragments of the ancient crown. And only Holmes, of all the nobility in England, can metaphorically put the crown back together—as if, like Excalibur, it were rightfully his. As if Holmes, having recovered the divine right, is the real king of England.

  And yet, game over, Holmes just as quickly steps off his throne. He faithfully returns Charles’s diadem to the monarch. Holmes doesn’t need a crown—sovereign authority seems to emanate from within him, from an independent source (dare we say a cosmic divine right?) that he can invoke at his choosing. His next adventure, perhaps.

  So Holmes gives full credit to Scotland Yard and defers to royal authority, even when he’s the mastermind. And outside of cases, Holmes upholds the Crown and lives as a respectful, lawabiding subject of the monarch. He keeps none of the vestiges of the throne for himself.

  Only the thrill of the match—and the occasional satisfaction of checkmate.

  Oh, and the spirit of rebirth after every new adventure.

  All the Queen’s Horses

  So we return, dear Reader, to our final problem. Why is Sherlock the greatest detective of all time? Perhaps we might pose a different question.

  Does Holmes serve the Queen or the folk?

  Even amidst bodies piling up in Sherlock Holmes’s Adventures, play for him means play for us. As readers, we don’t feel the sting of death, the seriousness of crime, or rejoice in “official” justice in any meaningful, moral way. We know that the bodies (spoiler!) aren’t really injured or dead anyway. What matters most is the puzzle, the chess match, the solution to the riddle. Will Holmes prevail? When it’s all wrapped up, we don’t remember victims or punishments, but how Holmes did it. It’s all just a game. A game that continues to redefine modern entertainment.

  Consider, dear Reader, how Holmes’s “one character, one sitting” model still resonates in television media. Most sit-coms, dramas, detective shows, and crime dramas follow characters through half-hour or hour “sittings” of contained episodes. Who knew that the strength of Holmes’s character would redefine carnivalesque time and space for the industrialized world? In effect, Holmes inaugurates “prime time.”

  And Sherlock Holmes will not die. When Holmes says “all the Queen’s horses and all the Queen’s men can’t avail,” he suggests he holds a power beyond the crown. The Queen’s mortal body dies. But Holmes returns from Reichenbach Falls—inspired in part by Londoners wearing bla
ck arm bands in protest—and resurrects his adventures. With every daily revolution of the Earth, every yearly orbit around the sun, Holmes continues to appear across the hurtling globe—crowning and uncrowning himself as he puts Humpty Dumpty together again—in old and new media: comics, video games, novels, animation, television programs, and film. He’s the man who protects the public, sports secret identities, wears a distinct costume, has a supporting cast, and cheats death because of special powers unique to him—powers not born just of reason, but of “imagination” and cosmic connection (“Silver Blaze”). It’s no wonder that Superman appears in 1938—only a few short years after the last of Doyle’s short stories is published. Holmes is his prototype: the first superhero.

  So, does our dear Holmes “uncrown” the prevailing concepts of the world? Topple a monarch? Out with the old, in with the new? Perhaps, dear Reader, our mystery is best left for you to solve.

  Your move.

  In the meantime, in a cacophony of cosmic laughter, Holmes has left the building.

  Holmes lives. Long live the King.

  HE IS A MAN OF HABITS AND I AM ONE OF THEM

  The Very Smartest of Our Detective Officers

  For Whose Future Holmes Had High Hopes

  ANATOLIA BESSEMER has been spotted in Chicago despite being equally at home in London. Knowing where she is at any given moment is difficult because Anatolia often travels under assumed names, disguises, and false passports, much like her hero Sherlock Holmes. Though for her, it’s less about catching criminals and more about never quite being pinned down in terms of her analysis of religious, cognitive, Marxist or philosophical evidence. She likes to keep all options open.

  JEF BURNHAM denies this reality. Only that which appears on television seems real to him. Indeed, he considers Egon Spengler, Crow T. Robot, and The Doctor among his closest friends and, to the horror of his wife and family, has gone through many a television set desperately trying to claw his way in. In spite of this debilitating perceptual handicap, Jef somehow managed to earn a degree in Film & Video from Columbia College Chicago and secure a position as Editor of FilmMonthly.com.

  CARI CALLIS practices bare attention in her garden as she plucks drunken bees from grapevines, rescues the tomatoes from bindweed and investigates the death of eighty-six goldfish from an unexpected January thaw. She makes no claims that Holmes was a practicing Buddhist, but she’s convinced that his creator intentionally cultivated that truth seeker with one foot poised upon the divine path. Houdini’s pranayamic breathing lessons stayed with her and became a lifetime ritual on the yoga mat. But despite her invocations to the spirit of Holmes’s genius, she still grapples with how to see things as they really are. In the classroom at Columbia College Chicago where she’s an Associate Professor, she provokes her students to do the same. Oh, and if anyone has a copy of “The Origin of Tree Worship” she’d really like to borrow it.

  JONATHAN CLEMENTS is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade and co-author of the Dorama Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese TV Drama Since 1953. As a contributing editor to the forthcoming new edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, he has been assembling details of Sherlock Holmes’s many appearances in anime, manga and Japanese literature. He is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Applied Design and Engineering, Swansea Metropolitan University, writing his thesis on the industrial history of Japanese animation.

  TAMÁS DEMETER has long been struggling with making people’s behavior coherent. That’s why he ended up with writing a thesis on the philosophy of psychology in Cambridge. There he argued that we are pretty much lore-abiding people who create reassuring narratives for making coherent otherwise unintelligible behavior. That’s why he admires Holmes’s immense capacity for creating coherence among divergent facts in various possible ways and deploying the resulting narratives while solving all those mysterious cases These days he is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Philosophical Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and he has been acting as guest editor for special issues on similar problems for Monist and European Journal of Analytic Philosophy.

  Frequently accused of sharing Holmes’s hyper-rationality, BRIAN DOMINO is an associate professor of philosophy at Miami University where, alas, he solves no crimes. He agrees with Holmes that “education never ends. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.” Unlike Mrs. Ronder, he is not contemplating finishing that lesson early, but is hoping for an extension of the due date. He would like the extra time to finish working on an essay on the meaning of life, and perhaps his monograph on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo.

  TOM DOWD spends way too much time as people other than himself. One of the co-creators of the table-top roleplaying game Shadowrun he has decades of credits in the role-playing and computer game industries, including the best-selling Xbox title MechAssault. Currently, he teaches game development and interactive and transmedia narrative at Columbia College Chicago where he oversees curriculum development as well as the large-team senior capstone class in game production. He also has a garage full of costumes and props from years of live-action role-playing and hard-disks full of computer adventure and narrative games that fill a similar purpose. Tom also currently oversees the text-based high-fantasy role-playing game Castle Marrach at www.skotos.net that blends mystery, intrigue, romance, and fantasy in an original narrative environment. With the exception of a few court orders, his fascination with costuming and personas—virtual or otherwise—hasn’t gotten him into trouble… yet.

  SEAN C. DUNCAN is Armstrong Professor of Interactive Media, an Assistant Professor within Miami University’s School of Education, Health, and Society and Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies. He studies games, learning, and participatory online cultures. In his free time, he enjoys vacationing in the island of Uffa (avoiding the Grice-Patersons, whenever possible).

  DON FALLIS is Associate Professor of Information Resources and Adjunct Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He has written several philosophy articles on lying and deception, including “What is Lying?” Journal of Philosophy, v. 106, n. 1, (2009) and “The Most Terrific Liar You Ever Saw in Your Life” in The Catcher in the Rye and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, forthcoming). He has also published on the philosophical implications of the work of Philip Marlowe and the work of Sam Spade. Finally, much like Professor Moriarty, he has done work in mathematics as well as philosophy (his Erdös number is 5), and he is responsible for “half that is evil” and “nearly all that is undetected” in southern Arizona.

  MIRIAM FRANCHELLA is Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the State University of Milan. She feels that her washing machine has a deep empathy with her: they work in the same way. Miriam puts a set of different objects (a botanical t-shirt, some psychologised trousers, poetical gloves, logical socks) inside; then, they mix and renew everything. Looking at the clothes line, one can evaluate the result.

  MIHAELA FRUNZA teaches Ethics at Babes-Bolyai University from Cluj, Romania. She holds a PhD in Philosophy and has recently published in applied ethics and bioethics. When not investigating Holmes’s mysteries, she is involved in research in medical ethics and moral philosophy.

  RONALD GREEN has endeavored to possess knowledge useful to his work. That relating to politics can be marked at zero, botany variable, geography profound only as regards the location of cults within fifty miles of town, sensational literature and self-mortification records unique. He teaches accordingly at Coastal Carolina University.

  LAURI JÄRVILEHTO is a metaphysical explorer, an epistemic detective and a Sherlock Holmes fan. His master’s thesis addressed Wittgenstein’s ladder and his PhD focused on epistemology. His current research focus is on the workings of the human mind, and in particular intuitive thought. Lauri is passionate about trying to work out the mysteries of the mind and figuring out ways to share his findings with the world.

  There are few places in the English speakin
g world further (both culturally and geographically) from 221B Baker Street than Montana. However, quite thankfully, when it comes to the science of deduction, wherever you go there is almost always room for at least one local dabbler. This is where you can generally find JUSTUS SOLOMON JOHNSON: poking his nose in other people’s business and trying to convince local law enforcement that they need to hire a consulting detective. Justus can also be found running experiments at the University of Wyoming attempting to deduce precisely how moral appraisal and the distinction between doing and allowing interact.

  As you emerge from the twilight quill, wondering whether it was the drug or the murder which knocked you down, KEVIN KILROY drifts and descends, drifts and descends—evaporating, cloudlike, across the city streets. Elsewhere, while you ponder the searchlights, he sits in his chair at The Office of Urban Spiritual Research, the window open, a train rolling by, people, communion with the bruised weight—all of it criminal. He as well. And then there’s his laughing, your drinking, his betting on horses. The newspaper, walking, ethically a detective as he ornaments these streets.