Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy Part 11

Holmes's egalitarian approach to facts, his reluctance to discriminate among them in the initial phase of fact collecting, poses the problem of weighing different items of evidence. Initially, all facts collected are equal with respect to their potential relevance to the case to be solved. But eventually some of them prove to be more significant than others: some prove to be highly relevant for the final explanation, and others are left out completely.

The weight of a piece of evidence may also change as the investigation goes ahead. So what is Holmes's method for apportioning weight to different pieces of evidence? Some obvious answers are ruled out. Preferring those pieces of evidence that lead to the simplest explanation is not an option for him, as we have seen. Relying on the most obvious facts is ruled out as well, as is organizing evidences so as to support the most plausible candidate among competing hypotheses-that would amount to twisting facts to fit theories.

Holmes's way of weighing evidences is that of finding patterns in the collection of facts. The core of Holmes's heuristics consists in establishing connections between various facts with an attention to their possible implications. Not every fact is turned into evidence in every pattern: different patterns may not agree on which facts count as evidences and which are mere disturbing noises. And so "when a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation" (A Study in Scarlet)-an interpretation which ascribes the fact some different significance or abolishes its status as evidence. And so, it is patterns that turn a fact into evidence by bestowing significance on them in a particular structure that establishes interconnections between facts and reveal their possible implications in various and sometimes conflicting ways.

Any particular pattern automatically distributes significance among facts: the weight of a piece of evidence is a consequence of its place within a pattern. This is why Holmes sometimes decides on "elucidating" hypotheses by further investigation even if there are "many grave objections" to them, as he does in "The Cardboard Box." Without doing so, it is much easier to overlook facts of potential significance, and to take obvious facts at face value. The process of elucidation results in a pool of possible hypotheses, possible patterns of facts, from among which the true one can be selected in the final phase of investigation by eliminating the impossible ones.

An Order of Significance.

These patterns are organized by narrative principles. As Louis Mink has pointed out, a coherent narrative, whether historical or fictional, represents "actions and events . . . as it were in a single glance as bound together in an order of significance." The structure of events in a story enables us to understand it, by giving unity to a succession of events. The unity is not inherent in the facts, without the contribution of narrative imagination, and this unity cannot be inferred simply from a step-by-step a.n.a.lysis of effects and causes. Starting from an a.s.sortment of facts, unity can be created in many ways; the coherence of facts can be established in various patterns, and therefore several possible scenarios can be set up for further investigation.

The type of understanding given to us by Holmes's approach is, to use Mink's typology, configurational and differs from both theoretical and categoreal modes (as Mink calls them) that are characteristic to scientific and philosophical approaches respectively. In the theoretical mode, a number of instances are subsumed under, and understood as the consequences of, a generalization or law; in the categoreal mode, a number of instances are represented as belonging to the same category that gives form to experience itself. At this point it is easy to conclude that neither of these two is characteristic of Holmes's method; his preference for the bizarre and unusual excludes the possibility of theoretical comprehension, and his warnings against prejudices that distort observation excludes the categoreal approach.

It is the configurational mode of comprehension that informs Holmes's perspective; it holds together various pieces of information as elements in a single complex of concrete relationships. So understood, particular facts of a case are comprehended not under some abstract scheme of laws or categories, but they are smoothly woven together as evidences into a coherent narrative pattern.

Framing the Story.

Various facts in these patterns acquire their weight as evidence due to the significance they posses in relation to the conclusion of the narrative. In this context facts can have "retrospective significance" which is accessible only if they are looked at from the teleological perspective of the narrative (Noel Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics, p. 127). This is the typical perspective Holmes adopts, and this explains why Holmes has a preference for seemingly irrelevant minutiae: facts that are not in themselves informative can be charged with significance by recognizing their possible implications in the light of the final outcome. They are thus "important . . . without being interesting" ("A Case of Ident.i.ty"). This outlook also explains why Holmes needs an all-facts-areequal approach in the initial stage of investigation: we can never know when a fact will turn out to be eventually relevant. This can be decided only in relation to the ending, which may be elusive in more mysterious cases.

Organizing facts into a narrative structure suits Holmes's preference for bizarre explanations. A plausible conclusion of a narrative, unlike that of an inductive inference from facts, does not need to follow with high probability; it does not need to be likely given the antecedents. And the same holds for the connection of facts within the narrative pattern.

Probability may be a good guide in some contexts, but it is also a kind of prejudice based on previous experiences. In a narrative framework, probability is not a good guide. Rather, antecedent events are expected to fill in some void, contribute some missing piece, however surprising or improbable. What matters is whether they enhance grasping the whole case together: "The more outre and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined, and the very point which appears to complicate a case is, when duly considered and scientifically handled, the one which is most likely to elucidate it." (The Hound of the Baskervilles) The fact that pieces of evidence are treated in a narrative framework sheds light on why Holmes is not concerned with simplicity and warns against any kind of prejudice (including some notion of probability prompted by previously observed regularities): they do not fit the logic of narrative explanation. But his preferences for subtle and bizarre constructions, as well as the search for unique features that do not fit with natural expectations, are consistent with looking at cases as if they had an inherent narrative structure.

Holmes's narratives are thus typically scenarios of how things might have been. They are constructed from facts collected in the initial stage of the investigation, and even if they are rarely put forward explicitly, they guide the second stage of fact collecting from the background.

Accepting a scenario, only if tentatively, guides the second phase of fact collecting, which may result in rejecting or strengthening the initial scenario depending on what further facts are collected and how they are related to other facts already at hand. We can see now why Watson's remarks are often helpful. His speculations, albeit typically mistaken, are useful in creating and eliminating possible, but untrue scenarios.

The Man with the Twisted Lip.

The scenario before us, then, is that organizing facts into narrative patterns requires a set of values and sensitivities that are at odds with pure deduction. The resulting structure of facts and conclusions is a product of narrative imagination-a quality Holmes finds conspicuously missing in inspectors Lestrade and Gregory ("The Norwood Builder," "Silver Blaze")-and not of abductive reason. Abductive inference plays an important role in exploring the possible implications of facts, but not in creating scenarios of how those facts and implications may hang together. The most important work, we might say with Holmes, is done with "the scientific use of the imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to start our speculation" (The Hound of the Baskervilles).

Eventually, the outlines of Holmes's rules of discovery look like this: collect as many facts as you can, search for unique features, be attentive to seemingly unimportant minutiae, work out their possible implications and antecedents (this is the phase where abduction plays an important role), turn facts into evidences by organizing them into narrative scenarios whose conclusion is the mystery to be solved, collect further facts for finding and eliminating impossible scenarios and then you have the solution.

"The Man with the Twisted Lip" is an excellent ill.u.s.tration of this method. Neville St. Clair, a comfortably-off and respectable businessman, disappears in an opium den, and despite the fact that St. Clair's body is missing, a beggar, Hugh Boone is suspected of being his murderer. Holmes's first scenario, which he sets up after initial fact-collecting, is that Boone pushed St. Clair through an open window into the river underneath. Only St. Clair's coat, with its pockets filled with coins, remained in the room. Holmes sketches a scenario of how things might have happened: Suppose that this man Boone had thrust Neville St. Clair through the window, there is no human eye which could have seen the deed. What would he do then? It would of course instantly strike him that he must get rid of the tell-tale garments. He would seize the coat, then, and be in the act of throwing it out, when it would occur to him that it would swim and not sink. He has little time, for he has heard the scuffle downstairs when the wife tried to force her way up, and perhaps he has already heard from his Lascar confederate that the police are hurrying up the street. There is not an instant to be lost. He rushes to some secret h.o.a.rd, where he has acc.u.mulated the fruits of his beggary, and he stuffs all the coins upon which he can lay his hands into the pockets to make sure of the coat's sinking. He throws it out, and would have done the same with the other garments had not he heard the rush of steps below, and only just had time to close the window when the police appeared.

This story is consistent with the facts, but some questions remain open, like: What was St. Clair doing in an opium den? And a question Holmes does not even bother to ask: Why did Boone kill him? Nevertheless, he sticks to this version even when he's presented with conflicting evidence: a letter most probably written by St. Clair to his wife after the time of his suspected murder. But eventually, the new fact leads Holmes to rethink the case, as "Sherlock Holmes was a man . . . who, when he had an unsolved problem upon his mind, would go for days, and even for a week, without rest, turning it over, rearranging his facts, looking at it from every point of view until he had either fathomed it or convinced himself that his data were insufficient."

As a result of rearranging the facts, Holmes realizes that St. Clair and Boone may be one and the same person. From this angle his earlier story or hypothesis is obviously misplaced. The facts are to be seen in an entirely different light, they count as different pieces of evidence supporting different conclusions. For example, the pockets filled with coins cannot count as evidence towards Boone's alleged intention of getting rid of St. Clair's coat.

So the very same fact is turned into different evidence in a different narrative. The elimination of the initial story is, in this case, due to some inconsistencies and a new scenario emerging from the imaginative recombination of available facts. The brute fact that St. Clair is missing is reinterpreted. Instead of being killed, he is in hiding. This brings along a different distribution of significance among the facts collected so that they contribute to the conclusion differently, and in this case even the conclusion is reinterpreted during the investigation.

After the initial phase of fact collecting, any further collecting and interpreting facts relies on the scenario Holmes accepts as his actual working hypothesis-until, of course, he decides such a working hypothesis needs to be reworked, and then he can look for a new item of evidence, demonstrating that that Boone and St. Clair are the same person.

An Inexact Science.

Despite the key to Holmes's method being his narrative imagination-more art than science-he nevertheless takes pain to emphasize that his method is thoroughly scientific. This is his official ideology, which represents his actual practice in a distorted way.

Watson is inclined to paint Holmes's adventures in a way more colorful than Holmes would accept as appropriate. He comments on Watson's recounting of the events in A Study in Scarlet as follows: "Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid."

But while Holmes would prefer a reconstruction closer to scientific or even geometrical ideals, because that is how detection ought to be done, Watson insists that his presentation of the actual process of investigation was accurate: "But the romance was there . . . I could not tamper with the facts" (The Sign of the Four). Now the question is whether the public image Holmes would prefer for himself or Watson's perception is closer to truth. By now, you should not find it surprising that I side with Watson in this respect.

It seems that sometimes Holmes himself is inclined to admit that his capacities are in important respects imaginative and creative rather than deductive, and they cannot be acquired through systematic training. He even goes so far as to suggest that a hereditary gift is the basis for his unusual ability. When, in clear concert with what Holmes likes to think, Watson says: "it seems obvious that your faculty of observation and your peculiar facility for deduction are due to your own systematic training," Holmes very tellingly answers: "To some extent. . . . My ancestors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their cla.s.s. But, none the less, my turn that way is in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms."

And when Watson asks why he thinks his talent is hereditary, Holmes responds thus: "Because my brother Mycroft possesses it in a larger degree than I do" ("The Greek Interpreter"). This pa.s.sage clearly suggests that Holmes's method is at most only partly founded in a strictly logical approach to mysterious cases.

In a similar vein, Holmes's well-known preference for taking drugs, mostly cocaine, fits fairly well with the central role of creative imagination in his approach to criminal cases. Were it only for rigorous deductions and logical connections, it would be far from obvious why he needs this stimulation: while it can enliven the imagination, it could hardly have a similarly positive effect on reliable logical capacities. Holmes is fairly clear that taking cocaine is relevant in the context of stimulating brainwork while arranging and rearranging facts, and as such, it has an effect similar to Watson's questions and objections to Holmes's scenarios.

But why is it then important for Holmes to maintain the "scientific" ideology of his practice?

On the one hand, appealing to the authority of modern science, as it was understood by Victorians, contributes to the legitimacy of his role as a consulting detective. His persona does not fit easily into the inst.i.tutional framework of criminal investigation. Emphasizing the scientific character of his method lends him more credibility and makes his role more tolerable in a less than hospitable professional environment.

On the other hand, this ideology makes it possible for him to improve the skills and knowledge of fellow detectives. If Holmes were emphasizing his unique talents there would be no way for him to urge professional detectives, albeit in a sarcastic way, to be more careful in their investigations, more attentive to minutiae, and more systematic in reasoning. This educational aspect of Holmes's ideology has a potential for improving the existing practices of criminal investigation.

And criminal investigation is, after all, what he does.

HOLMES IS A LITTLE SCIENTIFIC FOR MY TASTES.

Chapter 20.

Resisting the Siren Song of Rationalism.

Jim John Marks.

Sherlock Holmes was not the first fictional account of a modern detective. He was predated and influenced by Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and Emile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq, to name the best known. He was, however, the first to become a household name and to endure through several generations of fans. I believe that it is no accident that he was created, and experienced this singularly extraordinary publishing success, specifically in late nineteenth-century England.

Holmes, as detective par excellence, was by necessity the paragon Victorian. Holmes's complete faith in the power of the human mind, in the natural sciences, in technological progress, in hierarchical civilized society and in strict morality despite a nominal interest in matters of faith and the waning role of religion act as a nearly flawless mirror for the Victorian Era (subjects of the English Queen Victoria, who reigned from 1837 until 1901) in which he lived and worked. This is the Sherlock Holmes who, with outrageous style, taught me as a young man that critical thinking could benefit society, if properly applied.

We Meet a Man, the Epitome of His Era.

Unexpectedly, for all his faith in deduction and absolute, objective facts, Holmes seems to have understood the limits of the human intellect. Let us not forget, Holmes rarely prevented crimes from being committed, he merely solved the mysteries of how they were accomplished and who was behind them, frequently preventing ultimate success by the criminal while many a dead body remained just as dead. On one such an occasion, at the conclusion of "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" (published in 1892), he exclaimed, "What is the object of this circle of misery and violence and fear?" (He means life itself.) "It must have a purpose, or else our universe has no meaning and that is unthinkable. But what purpose? That is humanity's great problem to which Reason, so far, has no answer."

The very phrasing of the sentiment betrays Holmes's sharing of the fearful suspicion that had begun to creep into the collective conscience ever since Friedrich Nietzsche, the noted Modern (nineteenth-century) German philosopher, had spoken so unflinchingly about the impact that rapid secularization (removal of religion from civil society) would have on humanity's capacity to find meaning in the Cosmos. Victoria was not only the English queen, she was the head of the Church of England. In a society so explicitly intertwining Religion and Civics, how could one help but feel a certain fear when staring into the unknown of a society constructed on secular philosophies?

It is no coincidence that Nietzsche's notorious claim that "Gott ist tot" (G.o.d is dead) was published in its most complete form, in The Gay Science, in 1887-the same year that Holmes first made his appearance on the pages of The Strand. In fact, much of Modern philosophy was entirely focused on trying to reconstruct ethics, morality, justice and the social order once G.o.d, or rather Religion in general, for which G.o.d often stood in as a personification and scapegoat, was removed from the equation. Only a few decades before Nietzsche, Karl Marx had written "Religion is . . . the Opium of the People," and Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species (1859), which, through his theories about biological evolution, continued the trend of Natural Science displacing Religion as the final word of explanation.

European, and particularly Victorian English, society was fundamentally and inherently Christian in its foundations. It is easy to understand why so many of these Modern thinkers concluded that the social order would collapse entirely without the cohesive "glue" of Religion holding it together. Depending on how we choose to read the history of the first half of the twentieth century, we might conclude that it indeed did collapse. From Holmes's point of view in 1892, society might not be collapsing, but Reason (science, technology, reasonable discourse and information) was certainly failing to provide much comfort in the way of demonstrating either purpose or meaning to life. If one of the primary goals of philosophy is the pursuit of the knowledge necessary to construct a moral, ethical and just society, we might have to conclude that the secularization of society was not a very good idea, at least not from the philosophical point of view.

Fear at the Brink of Tomorrow, Even for a Genius.

Holmes's reflection of Victorian society goes beyond the selfa.s.sured confidence we see on the surface to expose all the doubt, uncertainty and frustration which was lurking just below the surface. We can see that Holmes captures both the enthusiasm for progress and the paranoia of hurtling into the unknown which were the very fabric of late nineteenth-century Europe. Holmes's love of avant-garde composer-performers such as violinist Pablo Sarasate, and Watson's distaste for the same, help us see that when meaning and purpose come into question, aesthetic notions like beauty and taste begin to border on meaningless.

Holmes's use of cutting-edge pharmaceuticals such as cocaine, which he claimed cleared his mind and allowed him to think all the more clearly, contrasted with his abhorrence of the use of opium, which he always characterized as reducing people to useless dreamers-a completely individual morality, not rooted in any communally agreed upon norms, not even shared by his closest friend. His distaste for the traditional countryside which he frequently described as substantially more dangerous than London's darkest alleys, his accident-p.r.o.ne advances into the then dubious field of forensics, his fanatical devotion to the printed word, shows Holmes to be at the cutting edge of understanding that up-to-date, accurate, thorough information was essential for the kind of work that we are so often promised that science and technology can do.

Holmes made frequent use of the British railroad network, not only to reach the scenes of crimes, sometimes without a moment to spare, but also because their well structured time tables helped establish or refute alibis for witnesses and criminals. As the nation was tied together not only by railroad tracks but also telegraph wires, and as tariffs and taxes were reduced on the necessary supplies, the newspaper industry grew rapidly both in scale and in importance in British society. These baby steps towards what we would eventually call the Cloud Network had a seismic impact on the extent to which citizens were able to develop informed opinions about the world around them. Watson frequently complained about Holmes's refusal to ever dispose of anything printed and the controlling manner in which he insisted doc.u.ments be filed and stored, and yet many a mystery was solved by the consultation of near-to-hand back editions and the ultimate success of a few crimes was prevented through details of information pulled from the evening edition, just off the presses. My own computer programming background sees this a.n.a.log, proto-database as truly well ahead of its time, even simply as a conceptual technology.

These habits combine to give the stories their sense of fastpaced adventure which must have been truly breathtaking at the time they were first published. As the reality of such startlingly modern criminals as Jack the Ripper (London) and Herman Webster Mudgett (Chicago) exposed the fragility of civilized society, these fictional stories must have acted both as reflectors of reality and also as amplifiers of the sense of unease that permeated society. In 1883 (the earliest time setting for a Holmes tale, publication began in 1887), horse drawn carriages still dominated London streets and the smoke of wood, coal and tallow still dominated the skies overhead. While it's true that mechanized trains were commonplace both for ma.s.s transit and ma.s.s commercial transport, the Benz Patent Motorwagen (the first production internal combustion engine automobile) did not become available to the German public until 1888, and the Daimler Motor Company (England's first automobile production company) did not begin selling to the British until 1896.

Even the "safety" bicycle (the first style sold as usable by the ma.s.s public, including women) was a revolution in personal transportation so powerful that the consequences of the individual freedom it created, most notably for young, unmarried women, were at the very heart of one of the mysteries Holmes solved ("The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist"). And yet, by the time His Last Bow is published in 1917, the First World War had ushered in not only motor vehicle travel, but motor vehicle warfare and tank warfare, not only powered air travel, but aviary warfare, not only petrochemical production, but chemical warfare. That collapse which the philosophers had predicted certainly seemed to have begun.

Humanity was literally thrilling itself to death with its capacity to harness the power of the mind to a.n.a.lyze data, innovate creative solutions to problems, and then to convert those solutions into mechanized slaughter. Surely this was all anathema to Holmes. Holmes loved the human capacity to deduce and reason precisely because it helped to retain law, order and civilized society. For all his Victorian bigotry (Englishmen of this era were notoriously racist, cla.s.sist, and s.e.xist by today's standards and neither Holmes nor Watson were an exception), Holmes is on the whole a humanitarian. He admired the French recognition of, and lenient sentencing for, "the crime of pa.s.sion" and took as much pleasure in helping to free those wrongly accused as he did in bringing to justice the genuinely criminal. Is it any wonder that in the wake of such realizations about how distorted the pursuit of Science can become that Holmes enters quiet retirement to study something as ba.n.a.l and practical as bee husbandry? This is a Sherlock Holmes all too keenly aware that failing to understand the limits that The Cosmos imposes on us can have catastrophic consequences and wary of human arrogance.

And yet, roughly a hundred years after Holmes's career, long after sweeping projects in secularization such as Maoist China, Soviet Russia, and n.a.z.i Germany bathed the first half of the twentieth century in oceans of blood, we still find ourselves in a society not yet entirely willing to admit that Reason (science, technology, reasonable discourse, and information) does not have all the answers. In fact, we see an ongoing, growing movement, which can be traced back all the way to the Age of Reason in the seventeenth century, spearheaded today by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Bill Maher, advocating a Rationalist worldview. I use this term here to mean a blending of scientific Materialism (the view that only matter exists, and that all phenomena have a knowable explanation, as a boundary against the super natural or spiritual) with political positions regarding a secular society. Staunchly opposed to any even vaguely speculative approach to pursuing Truth, Rationalists are ever increasingly adamant that the longer we wait to cast aside superst.i.tions (their a.s.sessment) like Religion in favor of Reason (science, technology, reasonable discourse and information), the longer we risk the obliteration of the human race. We have to wonder if these Rationalist thinkers have ever stopped to notice that humankind's best efforts at wiping itself off the face of the Earth, like Communism and National Socialism, have been direct products of radical secularization, not of misguided religious zeal. And so the question lingers, is Holmes the champion of Rationalism, or the harbinger of its inevitable doom?

A New Man Emerges for a New Era.

In 1994, the late Jeremy Brett gave his final performance as the definitively Victorian Sherlock Holmes in the small screen adaptations which dominated the final decade of his life and career. In fact, the last sentences Brett ever spoke in the role are those which I quoted above from "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box."

Brett gave us a Holmes so obsessed with thinking, with reasoning, with deducing, and with The Chase that when the case was solved, his enthusiasm would get the better of him, often resulting in behavior which caused no end of embarra.s.sment for his companion, Dr. Watson. But these eccentricities are mere symptoms of his great mind, not some kind of psychological profile.

We do not live in the Victorian Era, we live in the postmodern Era. The postmoderns were, and are, those post-World-War period philosophers who, often in direct reaction to the atrocities of those wars, voiced ideas starkly critical of the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century a.s.sertions that the human capacity for Reason could eventually drive social progress to an ideal end. They prefer to take a much more cautious view of humanity's ability to reason its way out of the mess it has made of the world.

No surprise then that in the recent Sherlock Holmes movies, Robert Downey Jr. gives us a postmodern Sherlock Holmes. A neurotic, tortured action hero who is solving crimes through adventure and violence, not deduction and Reason. He is calculating, but not deductive. He has amazingly precise timing, but not particularly precise thinking. He is emotional, often arguing and dismissive of his companion-showing far more strain on the friendship than is strictly speaking true to the original texts. Rather than Doyle's description of a physically fit, slim framed, well trained boxer, he is an anachronistic mixed martial artist and middle weight power house. Rather than being utterly disinterested in women and romance, he is a jilted and pining lover. Rather than a vocal champion of his innovations and methods, he is secretive about his work. Rather than a highly disciplined person for whom idleness bred a despair so complete that his discipline crumbled, he is a shambles of a man at all times who can barely pull himself together for long enough stretches of time to be presentable in public without causing a distasteful scene. To say that this film adaptation was a shock to the purist lovers of Holmes the Saint of Science would be an understatement in the extreme.

But, is this transformation of the Victorian Father of Forensics into a postmodern steam punk romper stomper a sign that contemporary culture is resisting the siren song of Rationalism? While it may make for arguably lower quality story telling, does it make for better philosophy? There are at least two reasonable interpretations of this film, and one of them allows us to see this film as a repudiation of the contemporary Rationalist position.

Who This New Man Is Not.

Two conflicting interpretations of the film have occurred to me. The first interpretation appears to refute my claim that the film rejects Rationalism. In this interpretation of the movie, the villain, Lord Blackwood (played by Mark Strong), stands as the personification of Religion. Secretive, mystical, arcane, and ultimately evil, he uses elaborate ritual magic to spread fear as a tool to control government, and by extension the population at large, to gain power. Holmes stands as the personification of Reason; public, methodical, scientific, and ultimately good, he uses deduction and logic to prevent the success of Blackwood's schemes. The whole film becomes a neat and tidy morality tale about how Religion is patently false, irrational, a tool for duping the gullible and ultimately impotent when facing off against the power of the human mind, put to it's proper, that is to say scientific, use. However, there are serious problems with this interpretation of the film which ignores several key elements which render it an insufficient a.n.a.lysis.

Who This New Man Is.

The second, I believe more accurate, interpretation of the movie takes these additional elements into account and reaches a very different conclusion. Lord Blackwood does not stand as the personification of Religion. He stands as the personification of Science in the hands of ambition-Technocracy. His rituals are a ruse. He does not rely on arcane magic, but chemistry, machinery, and psychology. Holmes does not stand as the personification of Reason. He stands as the personification of Science in the hands of the military-Dictatorship. The conflict between Blackwood and Holmes does not boil down to religious magic versus the logical mind, the conflict between Blackwood and Holmes boils down to who can dish out the most carefully aimed violence to eventually defeat the other through complete incapacitation-death, in fact. Holmes does not out-think Blackwood, he beats him to a pulp and then drops him off a bridge with a noose around his neck. And in the end, both Holmes and Blackwood lose to Professor Moriarty (who personifies Science in the hands of greed-Terrorism) who uses the distraction of their conflict to steal their most powerful tools. What could more perfectly encapsulate our post 9/11 cultural neuroses? But again, our question looms unanswered-Is Holmes the Victorian Scientist or the Postmodern Soldier? Can Reason save us, or will it destroy us in the end?

The New Man or the Old?

The twentieth century gave us a world in which almost all scientific and technological research is either conducted by the government (through the military or direct grant funding)-Dictatorship. What little technology is developed by the genuinely private sector remains in the hands of a select few very wealthy persons with personal ambitions-Technocracy. Sometimes these technologies, such as the nuclear material from the former USSR, get lost and ends up in the hands of criminals-Terrorism. The militarization of the Fruits of Reason have made those fruits decidedly unreasonable. It's all well and good to argue that the capacity of the human mind can ultimately save the world as a purely abstract, intellectual proposition, but the practical reality of the world around us is that the capacity of the human mind has been predominantly applied to ensuring that the poor stay poor, the powerful stay powerful, and that anyone who tries to change the rules gets reduced to a forgettable red smear-or less.

If we're honest about both the philosophy and history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we must accept that while it may be that Religion is ultimately false, the role which Religion played within the fabric of society, shaping culture, politics and morality into some normative cohesion, may ultimately be not only crucial, but singular. The sweeping secularization experiments of the early twentieth century had a great hope that there existed some other normative, foundational principle upon which civil society could be based-Science, Social Progress, the Collective Good, Innate Superiority. A century into these experiments, our society is ever increasingly pluralistic, fragmented, contentious and violently uncivil. While we may have skirted the disasters of perpetual world war and deliberate nuclear holocaust, we remain on the brink of destruction because of climate change, terrorism, poverty and other consequences of nineteenth- and twentieth-century excesses. While it's true that we cannot produce an una.s.sailable philosophical defense for faith or religion, ultimately those kinds of beliefs lie beyond the boundary of the reasonable mind, it's also true that Rationalism is a siren song. If we continue to insist that we can replace Religion with Science, we are eventually going to be dashed to pieces on the rocky sh.o.r.es from which that song is sung.

So where does this leave the boy who grew up enchanted by deductive reasoning applied with outrageous style? Can I love and enjoy Sherlock Holmes and reject the nineteenth-century philosophy and twentieth-century catastrophe with which it is inexorably intertwined? Which, then, is the "real" Sherlock Holmes: the devotee of science and technology, the last man of the Age of Reason, or the paranoid crank, begrudgingly among the first of the Postmoderns?

The answer, like the answer to so many big questions is not either/or, but is both/neither-Sherlock Holmes truly stands alone at the brink of a new age, with a foot on both sides of the divide. Perhaps this is why such a character can be as popular in the twenty-first century as he was in 1887.

Chapter 21.

The Thing the Lion Left.

Brian Domino.

Nearly a decade after Mrs. Ronder's scheme for happiness went horribly wrong and left her disfigured, Holmes and Watson stand in her secluded apartment. After she has told them the truth of what happened that night, and that Leonardo, her one true love, recently died in a swimming accident, Watson and Holmes prepare to leave.

With his trademark perspicacity, Holmes detects that she's contemplating suicide. After a brief exchange, Holmes avers: "The example of patient suffering is in itself the most precious of all lessons to an impatient world." These words apparently stop Mrs. Ronder as two days later, a bottle of Prussic acid arrives by post for Holmes with the note, "I send you my temptation. I will follow your advice." Ostensibly, the hyper-rational Holmes (recall that in "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone" Holmes tells his chronicler "I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.") convinces Mrs. Ronder of the truth of his quasi-Stoical life philosophy.

To interpret the story as the triumph of reason over the emotions misses what is most striking about the shortest story in the Canon. It is Mrs. Ronder but not Holmes who faces the challenge of constructing a rational basis for hope in the shadow of the death of G.o.d. She finds that solace in that most postmodern of constructs, the text-specifically in her case those of Dr. Watson. More pointedly, the crux of this story is hope, a word that occurs only once in it.

The Soul, Uneasy.

Mention "hope" to an English speaker and he or she is likely to think of the cliche, "Hope springs eternal." This is a line from Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Man." The entire pa.s.sage reads: Hope springs eternal in the human breast:

Man never is, but always To be Blest.

The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Pope's poem is a rhymed version of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's optimistic philosophy. Curiously, Holmes himself offers a version of it when he claims "The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest."

Leibniz hesitates less than Holmes, and wants to a.s.sert that the world is not a cruel jest. At the heart of his argument, Leibniz makes two claims about hope, both of which are encapsulated in Pope's poem. The first is a psychological claim that hope is necessary, if not for survival, then for human happiness. The second seems to also be a psychological one, but both Leibniz and Pope would understand it as a theological or metaphysical claim, namely, that hope requires the existence of a G.o.d who interacts in the world to bring about justice.

Leibniz charged his predecessor Descartes with failing to appreciate the first claim, due largely to his nearly wholesale adoption of Stoic and Epicurean ethics. The second claim is also lodged against Descartes, but Leibniz recognizes that since he subscribes to deism, Descartes is being consistent in rejecting hope as a rational possibility.

Possession of the G.o.ds.

When Holmes realizes that Mrs. Ronder intends to kill herself, he warns her: "Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it." The claim that we are mistaken if we believe our lives are among our possessions to do with as we please, including terminating them, is at least as old as Plato. In his Phaedo, Plato has Socrates identify humans as possessions of the G.o.ds. He argues that just as we would be "angry if one of [our] possessions killed itself when [we] had not given any sign that [we] wished it to die," the G.o.ds will be angry with us for ending our lives when they did not want us to do so. Holmes is not the only fan of this dialogue, as Leibniz recommends it as holding views parallel to his own (pp. 241f, 283).

This can be a powerful argument when used on a believer who has failed to think of him- or herself as a divine possession. It is ineffective on Mrs. Ronder. In response to Holmes's claim about the rightful ownership of her life, Mrs. Ronder asks "What use is it to anyone?" The natural reading is that this is a rhetorical question since the life of a veiled hermit lacks value to others. In making this response, Mrs. Ronder ostensibly denies that a human life can have divine value. She does not retort "I don't see how G.o.d could find me useful" but keeps her answer on the human plane. Her earthly answer is consistent with both deism and atheism.

The Most Precious of All Lessons.

Mrs. Ronder's implicit rejection of a G.o.d who remains active in the world after creating it means that Holmes cannot offer her hope; instead, he a.s.serts that "The example of patient suffering is in itself the most precious of all lessons to an impatient world." Holmes's remarks and Mrs. Ronder's actions fit in nicely within a debate in ethics raised by Leibniz. In a letter to Mola.n.u.s, Leibniz concludes that "Descartes has good reason to recommend, instead of felicity, patience without hope" (p. 242). By "patience" Leibniz means the intellectual fort.i.tude to be unperturbed by the outcomes of fortune, over which we lack control. Stoic patience might be more accurately described as resignation, if that term is taken neutrally. Indeed, Leibniz himself uses this term elsewhere to describe the lives of many ancients who believed "there were neither providence nor an afterlife" (New Essays, IV.viii.9).

For Leibniz, the lack of hope stems from Descartes's conception of G.o.d. Hope requires the possibility of divine justice, or of G.o.d taking an interest in our well being. Leibniz's charge against Descartes in one sense turns on a psychological claim: "Patience without hope cannot last and scarcely consoles" (G.W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, p. 241).

Most of us believe that it is human nature to find something to hope for no matter how grim the situation. Most of us see this as among the most positive, laudable aspects of human nature. It will sound surprising, then, that the Stoics taught their followers to reject hope as ultimately harmful. For the Stoics, hope falls prey to the same problem as the other emotions, namely, that they are more indicative of an error on our part than any truth about the world. We hope for things that we believe are good, if only from our own often narrow perspectives. People who have recently ended a relationship frequently hope to be reunited with their former lovers even if, as it usually turns out, this would not be for the best.

If the world is mechanistic as Descartes thought it to be, hope amounts to saying "I would like it if it came to pa.s.s that . . . ." It is much like the situation of the gambler at the roulette wheel. She places a bet and hopes that her bet wins, but her bet is no more likely to occur than any other. Her bet is simply the outcome about which she has positive emotions. Hope can be seen as a particularly damaging emotion since it nurtures the expectation that one's hope will come to pa.s.s. It might be better to allow events to occur, and subsequently look for the good in them (Annette C. Baier, Reflections on How We Live p. 229).

In contrast to the Stoics and Cartesians, Leibniz connects hope with a morally perfect and omnipotent G.o.d. This gives a reasonable foundation to hope because no longer is the universe unfolding mechanistically but rather is controlled by a G.o.d who makes the morally right action occur. Of course I can be wrong about what the morally right action is. I may, for example, hope that my former lover wallows in anguish when she realizes she should not have left me, but that may not be the morally correct outcome. So to the extent that our hopes mesh with divine plan, in other words, to the extent that we are virtuous, we can rationally hope.