-Sherlock Holmes on the occasion of Watson"s engagement in The Sign of the Four.
"You do realize how potentially disastrous this whole thing is?" he said. "I am old and set in my ways. I will give you little affection and a great deal of irritation, though heaven knows you"re aware of how difficult I can be."
-Sherlock Holmes proposing to Mary Russell in A Monstrous Regiment of Women.
As a young man, Sherlock Holmes was a confirmed bachelor. But most readers of Conan Doyle probably don"t realize that later in Holmes"s life, after he had retired to his Suss.e.x cottage, he met and married a precocious young woman named Mary Russell. Or at least this is how Sherlock Holmes"s later years have recently been imagined (Conan Doyle aficionados might here insist: re-imagined) in a series of books by the author Laurie R. King.1 Though she"s young and untutored in the art of detection when she first meets Holmes, Russell"s intellect is a match for his own. We might naturally think of her as a female version of Holmes-or, perhaps, as a female version of Holmes who is not only of the twentieth century but also a serious scholar of theology. Both Russell and Holmes realize that they are kindred spirits from almost the moment they meet. As Russell herself describes it, Holmes "towered over me in experience, but never did his abilities of observation and a.n.a.lysis awe me as they did Watson. My own eyes and mind functioned in precisely the same way. It was familiar territory" (The Beekeeper"s Apprentice, p. xxi).
Laurie King herself offers similar reflections in her essay "Mary Russell"s World." Thinking of the mind like an engine, free of gender and nurture considerations, King suggests that Russell and Holmes are "two people whose basic mental mechanism is identical. What they do with it, however, is where the interest lies."
The partnership between Holmes and Russell-first a purely professional pairing, and then a domestic one as well-changes them both in many ways. Holmes, a man who"s fiercely independent and used to being completely unenc.u.mbered, must approach his work differently once Russell comes into his life. And in many ways, both the love between them and their marriage change not only the way that Holmes looks at his work but also the way that he looks at himself.
And, of course, the way that we look at him as well. Sherlock Holmes, a married man? The man who, according to Watson at least, would be as disturbed to find himself having a strong emotion as he would be to find dirt in one of his sensitive measuring instruments? One would be forgiven, at this point, for wondering whether a married Holmes would still be Holmes at all.
The Woman (or The Girl?).
It"s not at all surprising that a man of Holmes"s temperament-a man who so craves mental stimulation that he turns to cocaine and morphine during the lull between cases to escape the dull routine of day-to-day existence-would be unsatisfied with the slow pace of life in retirement.
When Watson confronts the great detective about his drug use, Holmes explains that his 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 artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation" (The Sign of the Four, p. 92).
What"s perhaps more surprising is that he would also mind the solitude. We see glimmers of his loneliness as early as 1907: "My house is lonely. I, my old housekeeper, and my bees have the estate all to ourselves" ("The Adventure of the Lion"s Mane"). These sentiments had presumably only deepened by the spring of 1915 when he first b.u.mps into the fifteen-year old Russell while he"s out observing bees on the Suss.e.x Downs. Actually, their initial meeting is more accurately described as Russell b.u.mping into Holmes. Walking along with her nose in a book, she nearly steps right on him.
Even for those untrained in the science of deduction, the mention of Russell"s age might naturally give rise to immediate concern. Wasn"t Sherlock Holmes already practically middleaged when he took up residence with Watson in Baker Street in the early 1880s? That"s certainly how the Strand ill.u.s.trations portray him. So isn"t he well into his seventies by the time he meets Russell? When he and Russell marry in 1921-after she reaches the age of majority-isn"t he easily old enough to be her grandfather?
Upon meeting Russell, Holmes is able to deduce all manner of things about the teenage girl before him: that she was raised in southwestern London though her father hails from Northern California; that her parents were killed in an accident sometime the previous fall, an accident that has left her scarred both mentally and physically; that she now lives with a tight-fisted and unsympathetic relative; and that she reads and writes Hebrew. Displaying a sharpness of mind that instantly endears her to the great detective, Russell is able to match him at his own game of observation and deduction. Though many facts about Holmes had previously been disclosed in Watson"s published case files, she"s able to tell that he no longer smokes cigarettes though he still frequently uses a pipe, that he"s kept up with the violin, that he"s unconcerned about bee stings, and that he hasn"t entirely given up his former life. When she then guesses him to be in his early fifties, he tells her that he"s fifty-four (and, unsurprisingly, admonishes her for guessing).
Leslie S. Klinger, who has published numerous scholarly articles and books on Sherlockiana, has compiled a comprehensive chronology ("Major Events") of key occurrences in Holmes"s life that puts his birth in 1854. This would make him sixty-one at the time he meets Russell. Laurie King discusses her own scientific deduction of Holmes"s age in "A Holmes Chronology."
Holmes also provides Russell with an easy explanation for the discrepancy between his actual age and the earlier Strand ill.u.s.trations, an inconsistency Russell herself comments upon. Since a youthful detective would not have inspired confidence in readers, Conan Doyle and the editorial staff at the Strand sought to make him appear more dignified by exaggerating his age. So we should not be concerned that Holmes was already a doddering old man when beginning his a.s.sociation with Russell, though the thirty-nine-year age difference between the two might still give us considerable pause. It gives Holmes himself pause. After Russell finishes her incisive characterization of him, he cryptically murmurs: "Twenty years ago . . . Even ten. But here? Now?" (The Beekeeper"s Apprentice, p. 26).
Indeed, not only does love often find us when we least expect it, but it also finds the people of whom we"d least expect it-even someone who has long seemed incapable of love. In Watson"s a.s.sessment, emotion and pa.s.sion were distractions incompatible with the cold precision of Holmes"s mind, and thus "as a lover, he would have placed himself in a false position" ("A Scandal in Bohemia"). Of course, Watson makes this claim long before Russell comes into Holmes"s life. The doctor might have been right that there is but one woman for Holmes, but he was surely wrong about who the woman really is.
Two into One.
One of the earliest sources for philosophical reflection on love is Plato"s Symposium, a dialogue that depicts a Greek drinking party in which the partic.i.p.ants take turns singing the praises of the G.o.d of love. Although Socrates is usually the hero of Plato"s work, here the Greek playwright Aristophanes has the scene-stealing speech. According to his tale, we humans were once quite different from what we are now; as originally created, we were spherical beings with four arms, four legs, and a single head. But when our human ancestors offended the G.o.ds-and don"t humans always end up offending the Greek G.o.ds in some way or other?-Zeus decided to teach us a lesson by splitting each of us in two.
Humanity might have been better off had we just been punished with the usual thunderbolts. Having been bisected into the two-legged creatures we are today, we are left feeling desperately incomplete and always yearning for our missing half. As Aristophanes concludes his paean to Love: "The happiness of the whole human race . . . is to be found in the consummation of our love, and in the healing of our dissevered nature by finding each his proper mate." In love, we attempt to restore ourselves to our former natures, "to make two into one, and to bridge the gulf between one human being and another" (Symposium, p. 544).
As much as we might want to reintegrate ourselves, however, doing so is not always easy. Even after two years of marriage, Holmes and Russell are each still adjusting to their partnership-a partnership that far transcends the marriage bed into every area of their lives together. As he tells her, in terms strikingly reminiscent of Aristophanes" tale, "I still find it difficult to accustom myself to being half a creature with two brains and four eyes. A superior creature to a single detective, no doubt, but it takes some getting used to" (A Letter of Mary, p. 85).
Holmes"s quiet declaration startles Russell. Having known him for over a third of her life, she has long recognized how much she has been shaped by him. But what she is now only coming to realize is that she, too, has been shaping him.
Crazy Love.
Philosophers interested in theories of personal ident.i.ty-the question of what makes an individual the same person over time-are known for inventing unusual and often outlandish cases in an attempt to test our intuitions. Would you still be the same person if your body were completely disa.s.sembled and the molecules beamed across s.p.a.ce, later to be rea.s.sembled in their original configuration on Mars? What if we took a detailed imprint of your complete molecular configuration, destroyed your physical matter here on earth, and then imposed that molecular configuration on completely new physical matter on Mars? Would the Mars human be you? Or what if we imposed the molecular pattern on the completely new physical matter on Mars without destroying your body here on Earth? Would the being newly created on Mars be you? But then who"s on Earth? Are you somehow in both places? Holmes might never have needed cocaine to keep himself stimulated in the downtime between cases had he only turned his mind to reflection of these sorts of cases!
A different outlandish case, and one more relevant to our purposes here, is raised by philosopher Derek Parfit in his influential discussion of personal ident.i.ty. Imagine a world in which fusion was a natural process: "Two people come together. While they are unconscious, their two bodies grow together into one. One person then wakes up" (Reasons and Persons, p. 298). Different people value autonomy differently, and some people accord a greater sense of importance to their sense of individuality than others do, but it"s hard to believe that any of us would fail to be anything but completely horrified by a world in which this kind of fusion was commonplace. Parfitian fusion looks remarkably like death.
But this presents us with something of a puzzle, because romantic love itself is often understood as a kind of fusion. Granted, lovers-even in the very act of love-do not literally become a single physical ent.i.ty. We do not literally achieve the kind of reintegration that Aristophanes claims we"re searching for. But the merger that occurs between lovers, both physically and psychologically, is not just metaphorical. When we fall in love, we are no longer fully separate and independent beings.
In love, as the song lyric says, two hearts do beat as one. Our desires, values, and interests change in accordance with those of our lovers. We no longer make decisions individually. We make joint plans and coordinate our activities. We find ourselves thinking differently about things. We are as highly sensitized to the moods of each other as we are to our own moods, if not even more so. As Russell herself finds, "Marriage attunes a person to nuances in behaviour, the small vital signs that signal a person"s well-being" (A Letter of Mary, p. 27). Simply by noticing that Holmes has not read the newspaper for three days, for example, Russell can tell that something is troubling her husband.
Many philosophers have taken the fusion of ident.i.ties to be central to the very notion of romantic love. For example, on Robert Nozick"s view, love involves wanting to become a we rather than merely an I, and this involves the creation of a new, joint ident.i.ty. Neil Delaney argues that lovers want to merge with one another in profound psychological and physical ways. One identifies with a lover; one takes the needs and interests of one"s lover to be one"s own. Roger Scruton too talks of the union of interests achieved by lovers; when we are in love, the distinction between my interests and your interests is wholly eroded. And Robert Solomon argues that in romantic love the self expands to include another. As he puts it, "shared ident.i.ty is the intention of love."2 The psychiatrist Willard Gaylin is perhaps even more explicit than these philosophers about love being a kind of fusion. On his view, all love involves the blurring of boundaries between individuals, the merging of the self with another individual to create "a fused ident.i.ty." Moreover, the notion of fusion here sounds eerily like Parfitian fusion: The concept of fusion as I will use it literally means the loss of one"s ident.i.ty in that of another; a confusion of ego boundaries; the sense of unsureness as to where I end and you, the person I love, begin; the identification of your pain with my pain and your success with my success; the inconceivability of a self that does not include you . . . (Rediscovering Love, p. 103) But here something seems to have gone awry. Although there"s something deeply plausible about the understanding of love as a kind of fusion, once the account gets spelled out in detail, it starts to seem more puzzling. How can a loss of ident.i.ty be a good thing? As even Gaylin himself notes, an uncertainty about the boundaries of one"s ident.i.ty is a feature of psychosis. Watson may have been right that Holmes once viewed emotions such as love as incompatible with the achievement of a properly balanced mind, but surely even Holmes wouldn"t want to suggest that falling in love means literally going insane.
From I to We.
Just a couple of weeks after turning twenty-one, while involved in a difficult investigation, Russell is kidnapped by a band of criminals, held captive for ten days, and repeatedly injected with opium against her will. In a n.o.ble effort to keep her mind clear, she forces herself to engage in a variety of forms of "mental gymnastics." She conjugates verb forms in the many languages she knows, works on difficult mathematical problems, and tries to solve logic puzzles. Eventually, however, her mind turns to a more personal puzzle: Her relationship with Holmes.
She has been working by his side for six years, first as his apprentice and then as his equal. Trapped in her bas.e.m.e.nt prison, she finally comes to acknowledge the depth of her affection for him: "I loved him, I had loved him since I met him, and I doubted not that I should love him with my dying breath." What shape, exactly, does that love take? It"s not a love of frenzied infatuation. But that"s not to say that it"s not impa.s.sioned. Rather, as Russell comes to realize, "For me, for always, the paramount organ of pa.s.sion was the mind. Unnatural, unbalanced, perhaps, but it was true: Without intellect, there could be no love" (Monstrous, p. 266).
Theirs may be a pa.s.sion born of the intellect, but that"s not to say it was a purely intellectual pa.s.sion. Once married, they do engage in the activities rendered legal by their marital status (Moor, p. 7). But what"s critically important about their relationship for Russell is that she not "lose herself " in love-thereby hitting upon precisely what seems problematic about the fusion view of love. If, in becoming a we, I have to give up my very autonomy as an individual-if, in becoming a we I can no longer be an I-then falling in love would be a loss of self. So if, like Russell and Holmes, we value our individuality, our autonomy, our very ident.i.ty, then love would be simply unthinkable.
But perhaps there"s away of understanding the fusion involved in love that allows us to avoid these unpalatable consequences. Nozick tries to ward them off when he suggests that being part of a we "involves having a new ident.i.ty, an additional one. This does not mean that you no longer have any individual ident.i.ty or that your sole ident.i.ty is part of the we. However, the individual ident.i.ty you did have will become altered." But Nozick doesn"t do much to help us understand what this means. To spell it out in more detail, we might look to an intriguing suggestion by Delaney that the merger involved in love be understood as akin to what happens when a group of sovereign states opt to come together into a republican nation.
In a discussion of the potential threat to autonomy posed by romantic love, Marilyn Friedman develops this suggestion of Delaney"s. When states come together in a federation, they combine without ceding all of their previous powers. The states themselves continue to exist as states, even as a new joint ent.i.ty-their federation-comes into being. On Friedman"s view, we should say something similar about romantic joinings. In the merger that is love, there is indeed the emergence of a new ent.i.ty, a new we, but our own ident.i.ties are not themselves wholly submerged by it. The merger is thus both partial and flexible: Each lover remains, in some sense and for some purposes, a separate self with her own capacities for the exercise of agency. On this view, a romantic merger does not obliterate the separate existence of two lovers. Instead it produces a new ent.i.ty out of them, but only to some extent, only at some times, and only for some purposes-while leaving them as two separate selves. Each lover remains, like each state in a federation, a separate self with capacities to make choices and to act on her own. (Autonomy, Gender, Politics, p. 119) For Friedman, then, love is best understood as involving a sort of threesome-though not of the kinky variety. In becoming we, neither you nor I cease to exist. The two individual lovers continue to exist along with "the flexible romantic "federation," or merger, that they become," and these three ent.i.ties co-exist in "a dynamic, shifting interplay of subjectivity, agency, and objectivity."
Our ident.i.ties are shaped and shifted by all sorts of activities in which we engage, love among them. And there"s nothing wrong with that. In living our lives, we"re constantly engaged in the shaping and reshaping of our own ident.i.ties, whether through education, exercise, or a.n.a.lysis. The psychotherapy that Russell undergoes after the car accident that kills her parents, and the hypnosis employed by her psychoa.n.a.lyst over the course of the therapy, enables her to get past her own guilt at having caused the accident. Clearly her ident.i.ty was shaped both by the accident and by the resulting therapy. But although she became in some sense a new person as a result of those experiences, we don"t see them as a threat to her very selfhood. As long as what"s involved in a romantic fusion is the shaping of an ident.i.ty, rather than its obliteration, we have nothing to fear from love.
Granted, as Friedman notes, this can"t be the end of the story. Not all mergers of ident.i.ties are mutual mergers, and thus not all of them are fair. An unfair merger robs us of our autonomy and drains us of our individuality. In contrast, a fair merger is both nurturing and affirming, and it promotes our autonomy and individuality rather than denigrating it. To love well, then, we have to make sure to hold on to ourselves.
Perhaps this is why Russell doggedly persists in her pursuit of theology. It does occasionally cross her mind to wonder whether she"d chosen a course of study that Holmes regarded as an "irrational pseudodiscipline" in part to maintain her ident.i.ty "against the tide of Holmes"s forceful personality" (A Letter of Mary, p. 29). Perhaps it"s also why she prefers to be addressed as "Miss Russell" rather than as "Mrs. Holmes," and why she finds it so irritating when the Dartmoor locals, who affectionately refer to Holmes as "Snoop Zherlock" give her the nickname "Zherlock Mary"-a nickname that doesn"t reflect her ident.i.ty in her own right, but rather fuses her with her husband (The Moor, p. 132). And perhaps, in a way, it also explains why Holmes gives the advice he does to one of those same locals who has just been abandoned by his fiance: "You look around for a woman with brains and spirit. You"ll never be bored" (p. 70). Upon hearing this advice, Russell isn"t sure who was the more nonplussed: the young lad or herself.
Surviving Fusion.
Even if Watson had been a woman, Holmes could never have loved him the way that he loves Mary Russell. As Watson himself admits, he was hardly a partner to Holmes in any real sense of the word. He may have in some sense served as a "whetstone" for Holmes"s mind, but that"s more a matter of his mere presence than any positive contribution that he made. In fact, conversations between Holmes and Watson are really best described as instances of Holmes"s thinking aloud: His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me-many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead-but none the less, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject. If I irritated him by a certain methodical slowness in my mentality, that irritation served only to make his own flame-like intuitions and impressions flash up the more vividly and swiftly. Such was my humble role in our alliance. ("The Adventure of the Creeping Man") No, for Holmes to fall in love, he needed to find someone who could be a true partner to him-someone who could fuse with his strong personality, and still remain herself. Her ability to do so is important not only for her own sake, but for Holmes"s sake as well. Marriage to Mary Russell does indeed change Sherlock Holmes, but just as he does not sacrifice his ident.i.ty to their pairing, neither does she sacrifice hers. And it"s for precisely this reason that their partnership, however surprising and unconventional it may be, is a successful one. It"s even-dare I say?-elementary.
This chapter is dedicated to the Holmes to my Russell, Frank Menetrez.
Chapter 13.
A Study in Friendship.
Ruth Tallman.
From their first meeting in A Study in Scarlet, in which they each run through their laundry list of flaws to determine if they"ll make compatible roommates, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are a match made in . . . well, they"re a match, anyway. Watson grumbles about Holmes"s slovenly habits, and Holmes usually maintains his "too cool for emotions" veneer, but anyone who has followed the pair through adventure after adventure intuitively recognizes friendship in both men"s actions.
Despite the fact that Holmes and Watson obviously seem to be friends, the long-standing gold standard for a philosophical account of friendship comes from Aristotle, and on his account, it turns out that Holmes and Watson are not friends at all. This leaves us with two mysteries: first, what clues can we deduce from Aristotle"s account of friendship that will help us learn why he thinks Holmes and Watson cannot be friends? Second, who is the better friend, Holmes or Watson?
Good Friends?
Aristotle was the first philosopher to offer a systematic account of friendship, and he deserves credit for getting a whole lot right. He recognized that we often use the word "friend" loosely, and that many people that we casually call friends are at best fair-weather friends. These are people that spend time together because it suits their self-interest, but they part ways when one or both of them cease to benefit from the relationship.
True friends, Aristotle explains, bear some resemblance to this other, lesser type of friend, but true friendship is markedly different. True friends can be distinguished from the other types of friendships, according to Aristotle, because true friends want what is good for their friend, even when that good comes at the expense of their own good (Rhetoric, lines 1380b351381a).
So far, Aristotle"s description of true friendship seems perfectly in accord with the relationship between Watson and Holmes. Both men have risked their own lives for the other, the pre-eminent example of putting another"s good before your own. What"s more, they clearly have genuine affection for each other. While Watson wears his heart on his sleeve-and chronicles his affection for the detective faithfully in his writings-Holmes also demonstrates his love of Watson, generally in more subtle ways, such as the care he takes to explain the steps in his reasoning process that allow him to solve mysteries.
The usually impatient Holmes is always willing to take the time to help his friend understand what is intuitively obvious to himself. Probably the clearest instance of the demonstrated recognized reciprocity of the friendship is shown in "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs," when Watson suffers a gunshot wound, and Holmes fears he has been killed. In his moment of panic, Holmes"s normal reserve is dropped, revealing deep raw emotion for his friend. That unguarded revelation was, to Watson, "worth many wounds . . . to know the depth and loyalty of love" his friend feels for him.
So, Watson and Holmes have deep affection for each other, and their love is such that they each want the best for the other, even at their own expense. Yet, Aristotle"s account would have us conclude that the two cannot be true friends. How is this possible?
The problem, according to Aristotle"s account, is that he holds that true friends must be "equal in goodness." He says, "Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves" (Nichomachean Ethics, Book VIII). Here is where we run into a problem for Watson and Holmes. Aristotle"s moral philosophy holds that "the Good" is a single, unified object, something that individuals can be more or less alike with regard to.
Aristotle thinks that true friends must be equally good, for if one friend is morally better than the other, the superior friend"s goodness will be diminished by spending time with the worse friend. This makes a lot of sense if you buy into Aristotle"s understanding of the way humans develop morally. Remember when your parents didn"t want you to hang out with the "wrong crowd"? That"s because Aristotle"s view, that we model our behavior on those around us, has been highly influential in Western thought and culture. If you have a "bad friend," chances are, that friend is going to pull you down, and a friend who would corrupt you is no true friend at all.
Good for Me, Good for You.
But wait a minute, you might be saying. Aren"t Holmes and Watson both good? Maybe, but they are certainly not both good in the same way. Aristotle"s account of morality holds that good people must conform to a particular model of virtue, and for him, the good of a friend is that the friend helps you to perfect yourself in a virtuous way. He explains that friends should serve as mirrors, allowing each other to see their moral flaws in a more objective way, so that they can work to correct them, constantly seeking to better themselves morally. But who"s the mirror to whom in the Holmes and Watson friendship? Should Watson try to be more like Holmes, or should Holmes strive to model himself on Watson? You might think that there"s no right answer-that neither should have the goal of becoming more like the other. The problem with trying to understand the way the relationship of Holmes and Watson fits into this account stems largely from the fact that the two men hold entirely different moral codes.
Aristotle was a moral naturalist. Moral naturalism holds that there are objectively right and wrong ways for human beings to behave, and that the standards of human behavior can be known through a scientific study of the kind of biological beings we are. Sometimes an individual might not realize what"s best for himself, but what is best for him is an objective fact, whether he knows it or not.
A moral naturalist would say that Watson is right to continually condemn Holmes"s cocaine habit, even though cocaine was not seen as a particularly objectionable substance at the time. Regardless of what individuals or society think, there are objective standards of behavior to which we ought to conform, and we behave immorally when we choose to behave differently. Good actions are those that promote human flourishing, and bad actions are those that thwart it. Cocaine use is wrong, on a naturalistic account, because it inhibits the body"s ability to flourish.
Some examples, like that of cocaine, make Aristotle"s account seem correct, but is there really always one clear answer regarding what is good for a human? We all need food, shelter, rest, and so forth, but what about all those values we disagree about? Is a life of physical exertion more valuable than a life of intellectual study? Does telling the truth always lead to human flourishing, or do we sometimes flourish better through the use of a selective white lie? Should humans try to promote their own goodness, or should we strive to maximize the social good? Many people, called moral pluralists, think there is no single right answer to questions regarding what is best for a human being.
If you hold that there are objective truths about morality, and that these truths are the same for everyone, regardless of their personal values and beliefs, Aristotle"s rule about friends needing to be equal with regard to goodness makes some sense. However, moral pluralists do not think that there"s one objective standard of the Good that is the same for everyone, and so it"s not necessary or even desirable to choose only friends who "match" you morally. Moral pluralists believe that there can be more than one moral code that a human could follow and live a good life, and just because I choose to follow one path, this does not mean that you must follow the same path.
What"s more, there are many possible "good lives," and they are not the sorts of things that can be measured against each other, as there is not just one Good that applies to everyone, but rather there is "good for me" and "good for you." "Good for Holmes" might include the ingestion of a hearty amount of lung blackening and mind-altering substances, while "good for Watson" would include fastidious dedication to the purity of his internal organs. A good human life involves attention to the many factors that feed into the overall best life for each of us. The pleasure Holmes derives from tobacco and cocaine is considerable, but Watson derives no such pleasure from these things. Watson experiences a good from his devotion to clean living that Holmes would experience merely as unpleasant deprivation. According to moral pluralism, there is no "good for humans," but rather "good for this human" and "good for that human."
Moral pluralists are likely to find Aristotle"s claim that friends must be equally good a little puzzling. After all, how can a plurality of goods be measured? Who"s better, the hearton-shirtsleeves physician sidekick, or the tough-as-nails loner detective? Are you a better person if you work within the law, allowing many guilty people to go free, or outside of it, using methods that allow you to bring more criminals to justice? Is it better to adhere to an unbreakable code of conduct, or to hold that good ends justify questionable means?
Because moral pluralists say there is no single answer to these questions, and that most of the answers will depend on the particular values and preferences of the individual moral agents involved in the business of living their lives, we often can"t tell whether those who live according to differing moral codes are "better" or "worse"-in fact, there might not even be an answer. Holmes might sleep very well at night knowing he spent his day deceiving and manipulating innocent people, because at the end of it all a criminal is behind bars, and those he harmed are at peace. Watson"s more reverent att.i.tude toward the law means some of the methods acceptable to Holmes are unacceptable to Watson.
Sometimes, differences in moral codes determine whether two individuals will become or be interested in or able to maintain a friendship. For example, James Moriarty"s values are so much at odds with Holmes"s that it seems unlikely that the two could ever be friends. Mutual affection cannot shine through a complete revulsion for the other person"s life goals and projects. Even so, it is not typically the case that friends" moral codes exactly line up. Many of us probably count among our friends someone whom we think goes wrong on at least one moral point. Given this, we are left with an interesting question. How ought we to respond when our friends profess and enact values that are different from our own?
An Act of Persuasian.
One option is to be a proselytizing friend-to try to persuade your friend to adopt your own values. This approach is tempting, as most people who have given careful thought to their moral code think is the best path to follow, otherwise, they wouldn"t accept it themselves. Thus, having come to this wisdom, a person might feel the need to share it with those he cares about.
This is the approach that Watson accepts. Not only does he reject the ingestion of cocaine into his own body, he does his best to talk Holmes out of using it as well. Watson complains when he thinks Holmes is behaving inappropriately, judging him with the familiar refrain, "Surely you have gone too far!" The proselytizing friend sees himself as looking out for the best interests of his friend. He"s interested in helping him develop and act in accordance with what he sees as the "right" moral code. Although he recognizes differences between his friend"s values and his own, the proselytizing friend deems his own values to be superior to his friend"s, at least with regard to some matters (the ones he proselytizes about). This model of friendship seems to be about helping those you care about to make moral progress, but this progress must be on the proselytizer"s own terms.
Recognizing the Difference.
In contrast to proselytizing friends, some friends recognize differences between their own values and the values of their friends, but do not seek to modify the friend"s values to match their own. While the proselytizing friend sees himself as helping his friend recognize the error of his current way of thinking, this type of friend, which I will call "integrity-promoting," is interested in helping his friend live up to his own moral code. This sort of friend demonstrates a great deal of humility, as he does not a.s.sume that he has all of morality figured out. This friend, though living according to an alternative moral code, does not suppose that his code is necessarily superior to that of his friends.
What"s important to the integrity-promoting friend is that he and his friend are internally consistent and that they live lives of integrity. Internal consistency means not endorsing contradictory moral beliefs (beliefs that cannot possibly both be true), such as believing that h.o.m.os.e.xual behavior is an abomination because it says so in Leviticus and every word of the Bible is G.o.d"s law to be followed explicitly, but also believing there is nothing wrong with eating a bacon cheeseburger (which double-violates the dietary laws laid out in Leviticus). Those striving to be internally consistent, while they might not think there is one right answer to how one ought to live, think they should modify their belief set when it turns out to be self-contradictory, as contradictory beliefs means at least one of them is necessarily wrong. Internal consistency, then, is to be valued because it helps us eliminate false beliefs and get closer to truth.
Integrity means living in accordance with your own belief system. People who lack integrity are those who act against their moral code-they believe one thing but do another. It seems that this is just what the proselytizing friend is asking us to do, and this is just what the integrity-promoting friend encourages us not to do. Now, the proselytizing friend will probably protest that he doesn"t want you to act against your own belief system, but rather that he wants you to modify your belief system so that it"s more like his. Maybe so, but it is likely that he would take as a second choice that you merely modify your actions, if you can"t manage to modify your beliefs. Let"s think about Watson again for a minute-surely his first choice would be for Holmes to adopt his belief that he ought not ingest cocaine. However, since it seems Holmes simply will not be brought around to this belief (given Watson has been hounding him for years), certainly Watson prefers that Holmes merely act against his own belief system and in accordance with Watson"s, and lay off the drug. This lends further support to the thesis that Watson is a proselytizing friend.
Holmes, on the other hand, is concerned to help Watson stick to his own moral code, even when his beliefs don"t match Holmes"s. In "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton," Holmes strives to convince Watson to stay home while Holmes breaks into Milverton"s house to steal the letters he is using to blackmail a woman. Holmes almost certainly wants Watson to accompany him and provide back up on this dangerous excursion-this would be in Holmes"s own best interest. Yet, he urges Watson not to accompany him, because Watson has already voiced his belief that the act of breaking and entering is wrong and ought not be done. Rather than pressure Watson to conform to Holmes"s moral code, Holmes actually pressures Watson to stick to his own code! This is what an integrity-promoting friend does.
Despite Holmes"s urging, however, Watson repeatedly violates his own moral code in the name of friendship. He thinks breaking into the house is wrong, but scampers along after Holmes anyway. He thinks Holmes"s cocaine habit is wrong, but enables him by providing care when the drug gets the better of him. These actions suggest that Watson, despite his friend"s efforts, lacks integrity. He puts friendship ahead of morality, and asks Holmes to do the same. This is characteristic of a proselytizing friend, and ant.i.thetical to the integrity-promoting friend, who feels that, rather than friendship getting in the way of one"s efforts to behave morally, part of the responsibility of friendship is to help each other maximize their own conception of moral goodness. While Watson clearly thinks these two values come into conflict, and require a choice, Holmes doesn"t see it this way. In respecting Watson"s opposing moral code, Holmes recognizes that this means he and Watson will not always engage in the same behaviors, and he feels that part of being a good friend involves not asking your friend to act against his own conscious.
The Best Kind of Friend.
Although Watson is a loyal and loving friend, Holmes provides us with a better model of friendship. He demonstrates a respect for Watson that Watson doesn"t return. A person who helps his friend become the kind of person he wants to be is better than one who tries to make his friend over into the kind of person he thinks he should be. The proselytizing friend a.s.sumes an att.i.tude of moral superiority that is actually quite demeaning, even though it is done with a spirit of goodwill. The Watson model of friendship a.s.sumes a friend who follows an alternative moral code cannot possibly know what is best for himself, and thus seeks, out of love, to "fix" his behavior. Holmesian friendship respects the friend"s ability to choose the best life for himself, and works to help him stay on that path when challenges come his way. Holmes"s interactions with Watson throughout Doyle"s stories provides us with a powerful model of respectful and integrity-promoting friendship.
Chapter 14.
Out of House and Holmes.
Julia Round.
When Lord Robert Baden-Powell launched the British Boy Scout movement with his book Scouting for Boys (1908), he advised scoutmasters to demonstrate "Sherlock-Holmesism" and to use examples from Conan Doyle"s stories as puzzles for their boys to solve.
Holmes"s rationality, logic and comradeship with Dr. Watson are masculine traits that helped set the pattern for masculinity at the start of the twentieth century. But how would Holmes fare in today"s society?
The American television series House pays homage to Holmes in various ways, not least through its antisocial, drug-taking lead character-but has also made significant changes. What does this tell us about the changes that have taken place over the past century?
Model of Perfection.
Victorian masculinity was strongly a.s.sociated with rationality, logical thought, and a lack of emotion. Although Holmes is not a scientist, he"s introduced to the reader in a scientific laboratory and chapters called "The Science of Deduction" appear in both A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four. Holmes also uses the logic and language of medicine-for example when finding a key clue he says: "It confirms my diagnosis" (The Sign of the Four). He claims that his theories "are really extremely practical-so practical that I depend on them for my bread and cheese" (A Study in Scarlet). Defining his intellectual activity as everyday work also emphasises his masculinity.
Logic and rationality form the basis of Sherlock"s thought processes, and are emphasised throughout the stories. In The Sign of the Four, Holmes claims he values "true, cold reason . . . above all things." Watson describes his friend"s mind in "A Scandal in Bohemia" as "cold, precise but admirably balanced" and Holmes as "The most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has ever seen"-in fact their mutual friend Stamford says he is even "a little too scientific for my tastes-it approaches cold-bloodedness" (A Study in Scarlet).
Sherlock Holmes is a man of science and reason; the perfect model of Victorian masculinity. Or is he? Did such a model ever really exist?
The Essential Man.
The nineteenth century was marked by a "crisis of masculinity" in society. The industrial revolution had affected men"s lives more than any other change in history by moving work outside the home. This reduced contact between boys and men, challenging patriarchy, which should have provided more diverse options for male behavior. But in fact this meant that men of all cla.s.ses stubbornly clung to basic notions of what a "real man" should be, with what Peter Stearns (in Be a Man!) describes as a "self-conscious a.s.sertiveness." So Baden-Powell could endorse the Holmes tales because they confirm qualities a.s.sociated with the masculine: "observation, rationalism, factuality, logic, comradeship, daring and pluck."
a.s.serting set male characteristics in this way is a clear example of essentialist masculinity. Essentialism is the idea that everything can be precisely defined and described, and that each thing has a set of characteristics or properties that all things of that kind must possess. So, there are set characteristics of being "male" that all men will possess, regardless of their particular situation or personality type; equally there is an inherent "Englishness" that can be defined.
But this idea is difficult to reconcile with Victorian masculinity, which (despite the simplistic definition offered above) was a troubled concept, for instance regarding cla.s.s, s.e.xuality, and nationality. The accepted general view is of the bloodless and repressed Victorian man, cultured and upper-cla.s.s; and the working-cla.s.s proletariat, illiterate and often dishonest, who lived in abject poverty. But both types are only a half-story. The upper cla.s.ses were not all repressed sophisticates; the lower cla.s.ses were not all thieves and drunks.
Victorian men"s lives were constructed in dual roles that relied upon processes of exclusion and ant.i.thesis in order to balance social and moral respectability against cla.s.s and gender expectations. The upper-cla.s.s Victorian man was expected to be refined, cultured, and above his baser urges-and yet also to complement Victorian femininity by being worldly-wise and s.e.xually experienced; and possess manly skills such as boxing, fencing, and so forth. It therefore seems doubtful that essentialist definitions of cla.s.s or gender can be valid, although at this time these were accepted and a.s.serted.
Sherlock Holmes is an image of the self united in exactly this type of division, and The Sign of the Four provides numerous examples of this dual nature. He is first and foremost a man of thought, and sometimes mocked for this; for example referred to as "Mr Theorist" by disgruntled detectives. Conan Doyle presents Holmes as a refined man, whose "long, white hand" is able to play the violin with "remarkable skill," and who also enjoys listening to music while deep in thought. On the surface, he is a cultured and intellectual gentleman.
But (like a good Victorian hostess), he can also sustain varied dinner conversation with "gaiety"-"on miracle plays, on medieval pottery, on Stradivarius violins, on the Buddhism of Ceylon, and on the warships of the future." He has sophisticated culinary knowledge; as he quips "I insist on you dining with us . . . I have oysters and a brace of grouse, with something a little choice in white wines. Watson, you have never yet recognised my merits as a housekeeper."
Holmes is also what one might call the feminised half within his and Watson"s friendship-for example in his emotional moods and changeability. These qualities and the use of the domestic sphere (their rooms at Baker Street) for his professional activities begin to suggest a critique of essential "maleness."
A Man"s Man.
However Conan Doyle also makes sure he defines Holmes as a man"s man, tempering his intellect and enthusiasm for music and art with experience of fencing, boxing and martial arts. He "is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman" (A Study in Scarlet), and many writers have pointed out that our hero"s name is a combination of sportsmen Mordecai Sherwin and Frank Shacklock. Both of these were famous Victorian cricketers. Shacklock and his fellow fast-bowler William Mycroft made a sensational impression at Lord"s cricket ground in 1885, two years before the cricket devotee Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his first Holmes story.
Holmes shows great daring and bravery: climbing at night time atop a "breakneck" roof with little fear, "like an enormous glow-worm crawling very slowly along the ridge," and attempting the dangerous descent with a simple "Here goes, anyhow." He carries a revolver and is at ease with the necessity of using it: "if the other turns nasty I shall shoot him dead" (The Sign of the Four). It seems key to Holmes"s character that he walks the line between the cerebral and the physical, and this allows Conan Doyle to subtly challenge the Victorian ideal of essential masculinity.