Reflections on Sherlock Holmes

 I like reading to Adam at night, before he goes to sleep. It is a ritual which satisfies Adam – he follows the story until he is sleepy, which puts together the two great ends of tale-telling, the enjoyment of following an event as it unfolds itself and is unfolded by the observer, and the enjoyment of being slowly induced into closing your eyes on the way to unconsciousness – and it satisfies me, as I get to try out all kinds of voices, from Huck Finn drawling Southern to Sherlock Holmes nasal British.

Sherlock Holmes has delighted me since I was eleven or so – about a year older than Adam. I’ve read them over countless times. There’s a certain paradox here, since the stories are motivate by the need to solve a human problem, and end on the solution to the problem – which would seem to close them up and make the reader averse to a second reading, not to mention a fifth or seventh. This is the mystery of the mystery – why it transcends, in some small way, its neatly tied two fold structure as problem-solution.

Of course, reading these stories always involves being irritated by the same things that irritated you before – it awakens that irritation again. Certain stories are, really, partners to the reader – even the irritations are dear. For me, the irritation is Holmes’ infamous use of the term deduction.

There are whole books on this subject. Eco and Sebeok’s collection, Dupin, Holmes, Pierce: the Sign of Three, is probably the best. I explained, to Adam, that deduction is something like proving from a given, while what Holmes is doing is an induction, or an inference from probability based in experience. Adam listened and nodded, but the nod was the here comes sleep nod rather than the I get it nod.

Of course, reading Sebeok, I want to retreat from my sophomoric objection. Sebeok makes a good case that Holmes’ guessing – although Holmes claims he never guesses – is illuminated by C.S. Pierce’s notion of retroduction, or hypothetico-deduction, or abduction.

There is quite a literature on the inspiration for Holmes’ method – the human model that Doyle converted into the fictitious device. But for a philosopher, as important is the method itself – philosophers do like a method. Methodus – the Greek for pursuit, which brings us back to the function of “following.” Method is natural to narrative, although how we follow, tripping from topic to topic, is still a misty matter. Holmes’ soliloquies about his method are quite pretty:

“The ideal reasoner ... would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.”

I like to think that this is true. It is fundamentally monism, or its contemporary descendent, connectionism. When Holmes winds himself up and delivers these maxims, he seems like one of the Greek sages whose best hit bits are quoted in Diogenes Laertes.

He also seems a bit like Lichtenberg. Take another Holmes quote:

From a drop of water ... a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagra without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study, nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it."

That is a grand view. I relate it to this jotting by Lichtenberg, in his scribble book, when he is considering the vibrational psychology of Hartley (the 18th century predecessor of today’s neuro-philosophers).

“Suppose a pea is blown into the sea at Helvoet [in the Netherlands] and suppose my brain is something like the sea, then you may suppose that there will be an effect on the coast of China. This effect would be strongly modified, however, through every impression made on all the other objects in the sea, through the wind that pushes on it, through the fish and ships that plow through it, through the vaults that break open the shoreline. The form of the surfaces of a land, ist mountains and valleys, etc., is one with a written history of natural signs of all ist changes, every grain of sand is a letter, but the language is mostly unknown to us.”

The adjacency of the largest and the smallest, of the murder that ends a human life and the most trivial thing, a fingerprint, that “proves” who did it, is where crime overlaps with metaphysics. And I suppose that this is one of the reasons that I keep returning to Sherlock Holmes.