Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy Part 13

The best example of Conan Doyle's misgivings about taking the science of deduction too seriously can be found in his short story, "The Lost Special." It also ill.u.s.trates the problems in deciding between explanations when the evidence is incomplete (as it must always be in a true mystery). The story is a report of a curious incident involving the disappearance of a chartered express train to London-the "special" that was "lost" between two stations and the appearance of the body of the special's driver. There was no sign of any wreckage and no point at which the train could have been diverted from the tracks, except for seven side lines leading to mines in the area. Four of those side lines had their tracks removed, which left only three possibilities, all of which were eliminated because someone would have noticed the train coming through.

The story excerpts a possible solution offered by an unnamed "amateur reasoned of some celebrity" who is thought by some to be Sherlock Holmes. At the very least, he begins his letter with his famous statement about eliminating the impossible. This amateur reasoner opines that one of the three available lines was manned by a crew that was paid by the culprits to a.s.sist in their endeavor. Nevertheless, the fate of the lost special remained unknown until the mastermind behind it confessed. One of the side lines where the tracks had been removed was prepared by laying down the missing rails so that railroad employees in the employ of the mastermind (which did not include the driver) sent the special along this abandoned side line and sent the train speeding into an abandoned mine pit. Once the rails were taken away again there was no evidence of the crime.

The case of the lost special is just another example of how far off one's inductive reasoning can be because the underlying principles are never known to us. If they were, we would simply use true deduction (like a process of elimination) to arrive at a conclusion that must be true. However, whenever we reason about events in the real world, there is always the possibility of another explanation no matter how outlandish it might seem. Had we never found out the truth, the amateur reasoner's conclusion would have been just as viable as someone who (unknowingly) gave an account of what actually happened.

The Kindly Whispered "Norbury"

In "The Adventure of the Yellow Face," Watson begins with a note that reminds us that our faith in Holmes's powers of reasoning might also be the result of a faulty induction. Watson did not usually write about Holmes's failures to solve a case, though he says there have been some. One notable exception was the case of Effie Munro, in which Watson reported Holmes's failure because he knew the actual facts. Effie was a widow from America who had remarried and had begun asking her husband for a sizeable sum of money. She had also begun to make surrept.i.tious visits to a house down the road.

Holmes draws the tentative conclusion that Effie is not really a widow and that her first husband had come to visit her in England. The truth turns out to be far different. Effie had been married to an African-American man and had a child with him. Thinking that a biracial child would not be accepted by her new husband, she had brought the child in secret to live in the nearby cottage. The money she requested was for the child's upkeep. Holmes is chastened by the failure of his inductions and tells Watson, "If it should ever strike you that I am getting a little overconfident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper 'Norbury' in my ear and I shall be infinitely obliged to you" ("The Yellow Face").

Mycroft's deeper appreciation for the Problem of Induction keeps him from becoming as overconfident as Holmes. Knowing that there is no way to be certain our inductive inferences will be correct, he's always on the lookout for the facts that don't fit. Holmes appreciates the Problem enough to test his theories, but he dismisses the Problem after a certain point, which leads to his overconfidence. And because he becomes overconfident, he does not pay attention to the extra details that would lead him to a better solution.

Mycroft's appreciation for the Problem of Induction would also explain his disinterest in checking to see if his solutions are correct or in trying to prove his inferences to a jury. Since there is nothing that can guarantee an inductive inference, there is also no way to know when we have found proof that the inference is correct. All the evidence in the world might point to someone's guilt, but there is no way to be sure that we haven't missed something. "The Greek Interpreter" ends with just an ambiguity. The two villains flee England with the Greek Interpreter's sister. A newspaper later reports that they two men have been stabbed to death. The police conclude that they stabbed each other after an argument, but Holmes speculates that they were both killed by the sister as revenge for her brother's murder. He thinks, if he could just find the Greek girl, he could know for sure. (Of course in the Granada TV series with Jeremy Brett, the interpreter's sister is a willing accomplice, so she would not have sought revenge for her brother.) Sherlock Holmes takes a Popperian approach to detective work as he seems to think that what he does is not really induction. Holmes develops a theory based upon the facts and then goes about testing it little by little. In "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans," he places an ad in the paper and then goes to see who shows up. Because he tests his theories before he exposes the culprit, it can make it seem as if he had the right answer all along. In some stories, he clearly changes his mind as he eliminates different suspects. Holmes's tests of his theories demonstrate impressive reasoning as he often recognizes implications and nuances that others have ignored.

But this reasoning almost always relies on knowledge of facts about human nature and the natural world to give it a starting point. At its heart, Sherlock's method is still about provisional observations. Even his ad relied on the a.s.sumption that no one else but the guilty party would show up. There would be no misunderstandings, curiosity seekers or anything else like that. Such a test would also not be very effective in ruling out someone who didn't show up. There could still be co-conspirators. Mycroft's superior intellect is not reflected in his ability to find the "right" explanation, it's in his ability to come up with other explanations that need to be considered and to see when the test of a theory might be compromised by its reliance upon induction. I'm not even sure that Mycroft has some extra special power of percipience that lets him see more alternatives. I think that truly understanding the Problem of Induction causes him to look longer and harder for other possible explanations.

Our Best Bet Despite his appreciation for the Problem of Induction, Mycroft does not take it to extremes. It seems that Mycroft has embraced another possible response to the Problem of Induction originally proposed by the philosopher Hans Reichenbach. Reichenbach's defense of induction can be summed up as follows: as long as there is one method that enables us to predict the future, then induction will be at least as reliable as that method, if not more so. If the universe was completely chaotic, then induction would work just as well as any other method (which is not at all). If someone could predict the future through a crystal ball, then the rest of us would use induction to realize that we should start listening to the fortune teller's prediction.

Reichenbach's argument is known as a pragmatic justification because it simply argues that induction is our best bet, it doesn't try to prove that it is independently reliable. Mycroft seems to appreciate that the British government is best served when he uses induction to determine a solution to a problem. At the same time, he knows that he'll never be able to confirm that every bet was well-placed-so he doesn't bother.

Unlike Sherlock Holmes's Popperian att.i.tude, Mycroft does not try and justify induction by pretending it is something other than what it really is: astute observation leading to an educated guess about the underlying pattern. Mycroft's wisdom is that he knows that the "Problem of Induction" is not simply about incomplete evidence. Sherlock appreciates the problem of false statements or misleading evidence and he knows that if new evidence were to come to light he would have to revise his thesis. What he fails to appreciate is that it's not clear how incomplete evidence can justify any conclusion.

Most of us are content to appeal to the most plausible explanation, but Sherlock is smart enough to avoid that pitfall. Following his famous dictum, he eliminates every other possible explanation until only one remains. But Mycroft knows that it's impossible to eliminate all but one explanation. Even if there aren't an infinite number of explanations for a particular set of clues, there seems to be an almost infinite number of ways in which once could be mistaken when concluding that a particular explanation has been "falsified." The only thing that really seems to motivate Mycroft to take a risk and act on conclusions arrived at by inductive reasoning is when the fate of England rests upon them.

If we were all more humble about our powers of "deduction," we could avoid a lot of embarra.s.sing instances where we jumped to the wrong conclusions-especially since most of us lack the superior a.n.a.lytical skills of the Holmes brothers and are much more likely to run afoul of-and be frustrated by-the limits of inductive reasoning.

MUSIC AT STRANGE HOURS OR THAT MIXTURE OF IMAGINATION AND REALITY.

Chapter 24.

Why Sherlock Holmes Is My Favorite Drug User.

Kevin Kilroy.

Lazily he sits, in his wing back armchair, the heavy curtains pulled shut on Baker Street. A fire crackling in the deep chamber behind the hearth. He is in his robe and slippers, hair a mess, eyes bewildered-a far-away expression contemplating all he finds within.

On the mahogany table next to him, a vial of cocaine, precisely measured; morphine in another. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusts the delicate needle, rolls back his left shirtcuff.

Our existence contains more to be investigated than our senses will deliver, and Sherlock Holmes knows it. Intuition, imagination, daydreams, memories, esoteric knowledge gathered into books-he plunges the syringe into his scarred and pocked forearm. The scarlet thread absorbs the solution, rushing throughout his being.

His face and chest flush with the cocaine, he picks up his violin off the floor, neglecting the bow-to touch and pluck chaotically entices him more. Skillfully he navigates this time devoted to spontaneity and imagination.

Then to his reading. A tome of obscure criminal events which occurred in eighteenth-century Norway.

He lights a candle, skillfully administers another dose, and moves closer towards this communion of body and mind. Sherlock Holmes uses drugs with the intention to explore the intricacies of consciousness, to purposefully sculpt his collection of knowledge, and to grow more attune with the event of being.

And all this amounts to the source of his phenomenological powers. When at the scene of a crime observing intricate details and the hidden lives of objects, we trust he has access to an intelligence far more mysterious than most a.s.sume possible.

A Clue Isn't Helpful to the Case until the Detective Notices Its Worth Simply put, phenomenology is the study of essences. The essence of perception; the essence of consciousness. Phenomenology shares similar concerns with philosophy-reality, knowledge, being-yet it differs in that where philosophy has sought to a.n.a.lyze and explain these issues, phenomenology seeks to describe them.

Even before Plato, philosophers have been trying to articulate what const.i.tutes reality. The pendulum of responses has been weighted heavily, causing swings from one side of the spectrum to the other: either the observer imposes order upon the outside world (subjectivity) or the world imposes order upon the observer (objectivity). Phenomenology, developed by Edmund Husserl in the early 1900s, was the first philosophical study to bridge the two-to say "Ah, one's experience of the murder weapon is the murder weapon itself compounded by the subject's understanding of murder weapons!" Both subjective mind and objective world work together to create a being's reality.

Add this all up and we can say that phenomenology is a branch of study which seeks to describe first-person experience through the understanding that reality is an intercourse between subject and object. Each of us experience the world in our own way, and the world imposes itself upon our experience. What this all means is that reality is an event. That subject and object are both criminal and scene of a crime. That all detectives are phenomenologists.

And there's no better demonstration of this than Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four.

A detective's intentions are clear: to solve the case utilizing knowledge of crime and demonstrable logic; to make meaning out of the traces criminals leave behind. But not all detectives are created equal. A clue isn't helpful to the case until the detective experiences its intended worth. Clues can be misread and misinterpreted as much as they can be seen clearly. Phenomenological powers extend from a clear understanding of the interplay between the intentions of the detective (subject) and the intentions of the scene of a crime (object). We must transcend the a.s.sumed static quality of the objective world, and we must activate the exquisite tool of the mind. Sherlock Holmes, you fascinate me in this regard.

The Essence of Consciousness The mystery and power of Sherlock Holmes lie in the expansiveness of his field of consciousness. No one doubts the extraordinary powers of detection and deduction Holmes commands, but there is more at work here than simply an excellent eye for detail. Sherlock Holmes represents a reality where knowledge lies in the field of consciousness-the event of an object's perception. What is there to be seen is not all that is there. We must not forget the workings of the detective's intelligence which beholds the room: an exalted sense of intuition fortified with countless hours of extensive research, experiments, and studying.

And inversely, there is more to be experienced than what is seen. Something is hiding, lurking in the object.

My intention is not to romanticize drug use, but to romanticize time spent in, what jazz musicians refer to as, the woodshed. Reading, listening, studying, practicing one's art, consistently and daily pursuing its exaltation-this is what matters when Holmes reaches the scene of a crime. The fact that Holmes uses drugs speaks more to his intense curiosity and his art of perception-he could not bear to interact with the unremarkable. He is addicted to the complex thrill of the mind intersecting with the outside world across his field of consciousness.

It is as if his study-Dr. Watson is such a sheepish roommate to let Holmes take over the apartment-is symbolic of his field of consciousness. Maps on the wall, small flames beneath beakers, pillows bundled up and loaded with bullets, candle wax deformities everywhere, books lined up neatly on the shelf and others as if tossed, yet open to excruciatingly specific pa.s.sages, a home-made hand-collected skeleton, tobacco and pipe, fire roaring-add whatever else you like. Here we have the narrative manifestation of one half of our phenomenological equation-this is what Holmes brings to the table. Figuratively and literally.

In The Sign of the Four, Holmes lets Watson in on the three qualities of a great detective: Knowledge, Observation, and Deduction ("The Science of Deduction"). These are essential to transcendent detective work, and they mirror what phenomenology means when speaking about the intercourse-do forgive the philosopher Edmund Husserl's chancy word choice (or our translation of it)-of subject and object as it occurs across the field of consciousness. Knowledge is attributable to the subject-the intelligence which the detective has garnered and can apply to the crime. Observation is attributable to the object-the clues and evidence which the outside world contains, the way in which the scene of a crime is implicated in the crime. A superior detective is able to locate these clues even though they are hidden by the object which holds them-an inferior detective will misread or miss altogether that the beaker shows traces of an explosive substance. And Deduction-this is Holmes's particular recipe for arriving at truth; it is attributable to the intercourse between intelligence and evidence, subject and object. It is his description of the event which takes place across his field of consciousness.

Why Dr. Watson Has No Special Powers Around this issue of drug use, not only do we gain a deeper experience of Holmes's intellect and being, but also we quickly see an underlying difference between Holmes and our stories' narrator, Dr. Watson. It is the differences between the two that amplifies the essence of Holmes's consciousness.

At the beginning of The Sign of the Four, Watson walks in on Sherlock Holmes shooting up.

"Which is it today? Morphine or cocaine?"

[Holmes] raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. "It is cocaine, a seven per cent. solution."

"Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere pa.s.sing pleasure, risk the loss of these great powers with which you have been endowed?"

Admonishing Holmes for his drug use, Watson's prudence and practicality are revealed. Qualities which never go hand-inhand with special powers. He does not realize that it is Holmes's practices in his study that endow him with the acute insights into the observable world.

Watson at heart, I believe, is a romantic, but prior to having Holmes in his life, all the romance had been drained from his being by the Afghan war-suffering injuries, witnessing his infantry hacked to pieces, and the general malaise that extends from this. He is a doctor, a man of science and medicine-an empiricist to the core who relies on the order of the outside world to define his reality. He does not grow lost in the abstractions of his mind. He is a see-it-to-believe-it type of fellow. He continually challenges Holmes in this manner, though he is fascinated with the workings of the great detective's mind.

Holmes's answer to Watson does not disappoint: "My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate a.n.a.lysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere, I can dispense then with the stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation."

Watson knows neither transcendence nor exaltation-he offers nothing of his personal being to the objective world, as Holmes offers all.

But Watson is aware that he's missing something from his life, and he wishes to learn what this is. He is a character conflicted by the limitations of his empiricism, and driven towards the transcendence of phenomenology. In the first novel, A Study in Scarlet, Watson speaks of his life prior to meeting Sherlock Holmes. Back from the war and still healing, Watson sets up residence in London, but states that something is missing. "There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had considerably more freely than I ought." A meaningless existence, pursuing the luxuries of the outside world. He realizes he needed to cultivate an interior world similar to Holmes's study, and he states, "I must make a complete alteration in my style of living."

A friend introduces Holmes and Watson, seeing that they were both looking for a new apartment. This is where Watson's study begins. Having encountered such an unusual man who keeps odd hours, eccentric habits, and strange company, Watson's curiosity throws him into the middle of Sherlock Holmes's world. Accompanying Holmes on a case, Watson witnesses his extraordinary ability to thoroughly experience the scene of a crime-all of its details, all of its narratives, as if the room and its clues reverberate communicatively with Holmes's mind. Watson reflects on this, saying, "I had had such extraordinary evidence of the quickness of his perceptive facilities that I had no doubt that he could see a great deal which was hidden from me." And this is the mystery: how does one man see what is hidden from another when they are both staring at the same thing?

To answer this we must continue our examination of the observer and the object observed. Surely, Holmes's thorough homework allows him to understand what he sees at a deeper level than one such as Watson, who has never studied criminal history. And, according to phenomenology, the objects themselves-the scene of the crime, the murder weapons, footprints-have a life of their own. They appear differently according to the consciousness which beholds them. Holmes compares the mind to a room which we fill with furniture.

"You see, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with furniture as you chose. . . . Now, the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brainattic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large a.s.sortment, and all in the most perfect order."

To describe this furniture, as phenomenologists, then this is what we must do.

Interior Design There is a unity of Holmes's being. A balance which demonstrates his field of consciousness as the seat of his reality. As Dr. Watson points out, Holmes's body has been disfigured by the intentions of the objective world. He is deformed by his phenomenological powers, something few if any re-tellers of his tales have accounted for in the many visual depictions of Holmes. As Watson relates to us in A Study in Scarlet, his hands are mottled over with pieces of plaster and discolored with strong acids. His skin is invariably blotted with ink and stained with chemicals. His entire being is the meeting ground for the interplay of curiosity and the outside world.

When describing his courses of study, Watson notes the peculiarity of his specialties, and the gaping holes in his common knowledge. Holmes states that "he would acquire no knowledge which did not bear upon his object. Therefore all the knowledge he possessed was such as would be useful to him." Purposefully, Holmes has rid his intelligence of the superfluous-sure that no subjective nonsense would get in his way. He could do this only through understanding the nature of his objective: to make acute observations and accurate deductions. Only could he do this through a balance and unity between what one studies and the object of one's studies. On the other hand, Dr. Watson knows much about many things-sporadic knowledge; a liberal familiarity with many subjects.

Phenomenological powers begin with interior design of our knowledge. Whether or not we see our mind as an attic waiting to be filled with furniture, as Sherlock Holmes does, we must understand that there is a fluidity between what we study and what we observe. Knowledge in and of itself is not power. If intentional and unified with the objective situation, then power is there because consciousness is in immediate unity with the total situation determining it.

Reflecting on how he knew that the yet-to-be-captured criminal at the heart of A Study in Scarlet smoked Trichinopoly cigars, Sherlock Holmes tells Watson: "I have made a special study of cigar ashes-in fact, I have written a monograph upon the subject. I flatter myself that I can distinguish at a glance the ash of any known brand either of cigar or tobacco. It is just such details that the skilled detective differs from the Gregson and Lestrade type."

Sherlock Holmes Eats Roast Beef, Scotland Yard Has None "a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it."

-Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet At the beginning of his career Sherlock Holmes did most of his work from his armchair. Citizens of London or Scotland Yard officers would themselves visit Holmes in his study and ask him to solve a crime through his intellectual powers. As Holmes describes it to Watson, "They lay all the evidence before me and I am generally able by the help of my knowledge of the history of crimes, to set them straight." Through his powers of intuition, imagination, and deduction, Holmes is able to conjure a facsimile of the case in his consciousness, and see it with a lucidity that those who have seen it first-hand cannot approximate. But what occurs in his consciousness when he gets up from his chair? It is as if every object in every room speaks to him, whispering its secrets.

To impose order upon the world and to believe that it revolves around your desires can be a frustrating experience in the detective business. And Scotland Yard detectives Gregson and Lestrade know this frustration very well. I compare it to square-peg round-hole-what you want it to be won't fit what the outside world says it is. Case after case they try so hard to solve, but never can they deal with what the evidence is, nor can they discover the clues necessary to get them on the right track. They do not see all that there is to be seen because they are biased by their theorizing and misconceptions. And because they have little to no knowledge of past cases or forensic particularities-meaning, they have intentions which are out of balance with their objective.

On the other hand, the scene of a crime is certainly activated through Sherlock Holmes's intelligence-he has studied enough of precise subjects and their interplay across his consciousness in order to differentiate and make sense of the sensory data he collects. And he's not afraid to boast about this, "No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done." Study, certainly, but what can be said of Sherlock Holmes's self-proclaimed "natural talent"?

Take A Study in Scarlet. Detectives Gregson and Lestrade quickly exhaust all the forensic and investigation techniques they know, and who do they call on?

"Dear Sherlock Holmes, . . . There had been no robbery, nor is there any evidence as to how the man met his death. There are marks of blood in the room, but there is no wound upon his person. We are at a loss as to how he came into the empty house; indeed, the whole affair is a puzzler.

"Yours faithfully, Tobias Gregson"

After a little nudging from Watson, Holmes decides to offer his a.s.sistance, and they hail a carriage. On their way, Watson is perplexed that Holmes is not anxious, concerned, or even speculating about the murder. Watson prods him about this, "You don't seem to give much thought to the matter in hand." And Holmes answers, "No data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment." Here is the balance which a phenomenological view accounts for: all theory and no corresponding evidence would be a subjective blunder; all evidence and no corresponding theorizing about how it comes together would be an objective misreading-but Sherlock Holmes, seeks deftly for the phenomenal evidence of his case to trigger the theories and the intelligence to make sense of the evidence-as he experiences it. Not beforehand; not after the fact. While he is doing it. Let's see an example: "His nimble fingers were flying here, there, and everywhere, feeling, pressing, unb.u.t.toning, examining, while his eyes wore the same far-away expression which I have already spoke of." And I, as well, in the first section. Holmes's attention is cast in two directions simultaneously: the phenomenal world and the world of his being, his interior chambers. Attention to the objective world and his mind at the same time, producing the event of consciousness. He is absorbed by the moment before him as much as the moment is absorbed by him. After recounting for Watson how he was able to know so much about him in one quick glance, Holmes confesses that this is no trick, "From long habit the train of thought ran so swiftly through my mind that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps." These deductive conclusions are the interplay of knowledge and evidence occurring across his consciousness.

And reciprocally, Holmes understands how each of us play out across the physical world. We leave our mark. As Watson shows that he is learning the phenomenological foundations of Holmes craft in The Sign of the Four, "I have heard you say that it is difficult for a man to have any object in daily use without leaving the impress of his individuality upon it in such a way that a trained observer might read it." Gregson and Lestrade are not trained observers-they do not uncover the clues necessary to solve a case, and what they do see, they misinterpret.

Let's return to Gregson's letter requesting Holmes's a.s.sistance in order to reveal typical Scotland blunders.

"There had been no robbery, nor is there any evidence as to how the man met his death. There are marks of blood in the room, but there is no wound upon his person. We are at a loss as to how he came into the empty house."

They have theorized prior to collecting data-surely, they believe, for a murder to occur, a robbery must be the motive. Because it is thieves who kill, right? Surely if there is blood at the scene of a murder, then it is the victim's? And when Lestrade uncovers the letters R A C H Escribbled upon the wall in blood, he and Gregson are of course correct to a.s.sume this to be the beginning of a woman's name-for a ring had been found on the floor near the body, and if not for money than a woman is motive enough for murder. Right?

Wrong on all accounts. All it takes for Sherlock Holmes to discover how this man met his death is a quick sniff of the lips-poison is foul and lingers upon the object. Ruling out all other possibilities, Holmes deduces that the blood must be from the murderer. Holmes a.s.sumes nothing. Through his compulsion to study the crimes of every country, Holmes knows that "Rache" is German. And it means revenge. As far as entry into the house goes, Holmes had that figured out before he entered the scene of the crime-observing the tracks outside instantly revealed all.

The phenomenal world of the scene of a crime holds all reverberations of the actions which took place; one must only trust the objective world and listen without bias to the intentions of the object, of the room, of the corpse-able to hold ambiguity in the mind without appealing to the false security of presumption. One must practice this talent-time spent in the woodshed, exploring one's consciousness.

The Essence of Perception: Holmes's Intention and Objects Intended So, we have seen the intentions and intuition cultivated by Holmes in his study. Now we must come to an understanding that the observable world is subject to our intentions, yet contains intentions of its own. And that objects possess various meanings.

In Edmund Husserl's book, The Crisis of European Sciences, he states "Things 'seen' are always more than what we 'really and actually' see of them" (p. 51). Take this chair for instance. There is nothing out-of-the-ordinary about it-a medical chair in a medical laboratory. For a detective searching for who stole the corpse, this chair offers little to no epistemological value. That is unless you've studied coasters made in the late 1800s-how they lock up once frozen. Yes, you say, the coasters are locked up, what of it? Well, what of it is that this chair just went from being nothing in relation to our investigation into being something. We observed this chair; we saw it-took note of it. Before we knew what to look for-that the coasters could tell the story of the chair's past-we didn't see all of it. There was more to the object than met the eye. We see this chair now as more than a place to sit-we see it as an object which has recently been in the deepfreeze; the same place the corpses are kept. According to our knowledge of coasters, that is; and according to the intentions of the chair. Edmund Husserl's famous slogan comes to mind: Knowledge is the grasp of an object that is simultaneously gripping us. Until the phenomenon of coasters is understood by the subject, the chair remains an object seamlessly st.i.tched into the room.

A crime scene is a place where impact reverberates. A criminal's presence remains. Intention and execution are imprinted upon the physical world. But the detective must understand the properties of the physical world, how objects take in the presence of the criminal, how they shift in meaning according to what has occurred in the room. Cigar ashes, mud tracks, blood stains are no longer innocent bystanders.

Besides Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger is the other major philosopher to shape phenomenology. And it is helpful to turn to him to understand how an object has intentions of its own. Heidegger differentiates between the objects and meanings present at the scene of a crime, or anywhere, as being either "merely present" (Vorhandenheit) or "usefully present" (Zuhandenheit). In other words, a tablecloth across the dining table at the scene of a crime is something a detective would probably not spend too much time investigating-it is merely present; whereas, a winegla.s.s stained with red lipstick would be taken into consideration-it is useful for solving the case.

The rooms Sherlock Holmes enters become abuzz with activity-the life of these objects in all their perceived, conceived, and actual manifestations is observable to him.4 Mysterious and powerful-a thick fog rolling across Baker Street slips into the room through the open window. Curtains billowing and stained with blood. An armchair and its view. A bureau drawer open, past crimes spilling out. Leaned against the closet door, a neck broken and limbs contorted. Hand-carved mannequins marked with entry and exit wounds. A trunk of curiosities from distant lands. A mirror's shattered pieces across the hardwoods. Gla.s.s tubes filled with a bubbling liquid above a burner. A revolver, six empty chambers, six bullets on deck. The feminine screech from the doorway. Across the floor, a Persian rug, ornate labyrinthine patterns st.i.tched by hand. On the mantel, a candlestick heightened by all its cousins, its properties, its dense blow. One vial full, another rolling empty across the rug. On the desk, a letter to an heir interrupted mid-sentence. A wardrobe filled with books. A syringe stuck into an arm. This is neither study nor scene of the crime-this is Sherlock Holmes's Field of Consciousness.

Chapter 25.

Boredom on Baker Street.

Daniel P. Malloy.

Sherlock Holmes's greatest danger? His true nemesis?

It's not Professor Moriarty nor his a.s.sociate Colonel Moran. It's not the interference of the company he keeps: the plodding Watson or the unimaginative Lestrade. It's not even Holmes himself-his tendency to self-destructive pursuits.

These are all perilous. But they pale in comparison to Holmes's only true nemesis: boredom.

Boredom plays a central role in making Holmes who he is. It's why he takes occasional refuge in cocaine and morphine when he has no interesting work to do. It's why he accepts certain cases and avoids others. His decision is not based on the urgency of the case or the potential monetary reward, but on the difficulty it presents. What attracts Holmes is the chance to fend off boredom for a little while.

At first glance it may not seem that boredom is an especially philosophical topic. Philosophical discussion of boredom is indeed quite limited-aside from an extended discussion by Martin Heidegger (18891976) and two books published in the last decade (Elizabeth Goodstein's Experience without Qualities and Lars Svensden's The Philosophy of Boredom), there are only a few short references in the works of Pascal, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and a few others. But boredom offers the philosopher an attraction not dissimilar from Holmes's attraction to his cases: it provides us the chance to exercise our faculties, and, perhaps, to stave it off for a bit.

When thinking about boredom, we're confronted with three related questions: What is it?

Where does it come from?

And what do we do about it?

Unwelcome Social Summonses It may seem odd to think of boredom as modern, but the evidence suggests that it is. None of Holmes's pre-modern predecessors struggled with boredom. It didn't motivate them. In fact, to all appearances, they never seem to have encountered it. Homer never mentions that Ulysses became bored. Likewise, it's hard to imagine Beowulf or King Arthur just pa.s.sing the time. And yet that's often what we see Holmes doing. Boredom, in spite of its seeming universality, is a distinctly modern phenomenon. The word itself only appeared in the English language in the eighteenth century. It did, however, spread quickly. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it took on epidemic proportions. The turn of the century, where we find our hero, brought no abatement. Boredom continued to bore.

Boredom happens to us, we don't choose it. If Holmes had a choice, he would always have some new puzzle to work on, some case to solve or experiment to run. As he says, "My mind rebels at stagnation" (The Sign of the Four). This comment gives us some clue as to what boredom might be.

"What boredom might be? What are you talking about? We know what boredom is!" True. We've all experienced boredom at one time or another. But still, we may not have a good idea of what boredom is.

Suppose you met someone who had, somehow, never been bored. Could you explain it to them? We might say, with Holmes, that boredom means having nothing to do. But that isn't boredom; it's idleness. There may be a connection between the two, particularly for someone with an energetic disposition like Holmes. But it's possible to be idle and not be bored. Idleness can be quite pleasant, which boredom never is. And, it's possible to be bored and not idle. Many of us are both bored and busy. Someone doing ch.o.r.es around the house, for instance, is certainly busy, but could very easily be bored. For that matter, Holmes could, if he so chose, have more work than he could handle anytime he wished. Remember, he turns away cases that don't spark his interest.

Perhaps that's the key, then: interest. We get bored when nothing interests us. Thus we're bored when there's nothing to do, but also when there's plenty to do, but nothing that intrigues us. And herein lies boredom's connection to modern life. In pre-modern times, we considered ourselves as being here for the world-we were a part of it, and each of us had his or her own place in it. A serf working the land for his lord didn't have to wonder what was next. Either the next task presented itself naturally, or someone would tell him. In modern times, things are different. In part, perhaps, because of the degree of freedom we have achieved-from each other, from the state, from the church-we now have a different relation to the world around us. It's here for us. And we get bored when the things in it don't interest us. It's their responsibility to serve us, not the other way around.