Plato vs. Aristotle: Greek Philosophy in the Detective Fiction of
Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle
The detective characters invented by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle share numerous commonalities, and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was clearly inspired by C. Auguste Dupin. Both of these eccentric, intellectual characters are consulted by incompetent police when unsolvable cases arise, and both have ordinary sidekicks who marvel at their superhuman abilities of deduction. Even the plots of some of Doyle’s stories mimic or pay homage to Poe. The events in “A Scandal in Bohemia” closely mirror those of “The Purloined Letter.” However, when examining both stories, key details illustrate the differing philosophical viewpoints of Holmes and Dupin. Though both characters are ingenious thinkers, able to solve cases by looking beyond the obvious, their epistemologies differ and can be compared to those of Plato and Aristotle.
Nearly all the major components of “The Purloined Letter” find their counterpart in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Though the latter lacks the police and their methodical, “Procrustean” search, both stories are centered around finding a MacGuffin that could be used to blackmail royalty. The titular object in “The Purloined Letter” has the same function as the compromising photograph of the King of Bohemia that Irene Adler hides. Holmes and Dupin create comparable ruses to get what they want. Holmes dons multiple disguises and pays people to stage a fight in order to gain entrance to Adler’s home. He also has Watson toss a smoke-rocket through the window to carry out his plan of finding the photograph. In a similar fashion, Dupin pays a man to fire a musket, causing a distraction, and he uses green glasses to disguise his gaze as he searches Minister D’s room. The character of Irene Adler can even be compared to Minister D, as at the story’s conclusion, she proves herself to be a worthy adversary to Holmes. Finally, both detectives employ the use of psychology to discover the items crucial to their cases.
The Prefect in Poe’s story makes an incorrect assumption about Minister D, which prevents him from finding the letter. He does not anticipate any cleverness from the Minister because he is a poet, and therefore, “only one removal from a fool” (Poe 259). Dupin, however, knows the Minister is not only a poet, but a mathematician as well. He criticizes the Prefect’s faulty logic: because he believes the axiom that all fools are poets, he incorrectly infers that “all poets are fools” (Poe 259). Dupin is able to find the letter because he knows how Minister D’s mind works. With two characteristics, Dupin gauges his intelligence, and therefore the strategy he will use to conceal the letter. Poe’s detective discusses the game of evens and odds and agrees with the narrator’s statement that success in the game depends entirely on, “an identification of the reasoner’s intellect with that of his opponent” (Poe 257). In the case of the purloined letter, Dupin does not rely on physical clues, but instead uses characteristics of personality to discover the letter. When he walks into Minister D’s study, he has essentially solved the case already and finds the situation, “exactly in accordance with the conclusion to which I had previously arrived” (Poe 263). In going to retrieve the letter, he is merely confirming what he already knows and can identify it because its battered appearance does not fit Minister D’s personality.
Holmes’ methods of solving the case in “A Scandal in Bohemia” appear similar to those of Dupin, but there are crucial differences. Holmes does use psychology to solve the mystery, predicting that, “When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most,” but this prediction is only part of the equation (Doyle). He still has to create a scenario that leads Adler to reveal the photograph’s location. Unlike Dupin, when he enters the house, Holmes has no idea where the object has been stashed. Action in the form of a false fire is necessary to solve the case. His theory about the way Adler will think and behave proves accurate in this particular instance, though he does ultimately underestimate her.
Dupin does not need physical clues to predict what an individual will do. He attempts to separate himself from the material, stating, “I dispute the availability, and thus the value, of that reason which is cultivated in any especial form other than abstractly logical” (Poe 260). Holmes concedes that while Dupin, “had some analytical genius,” he also tells Watson, “Never theorize before you have data” (Doyle). Data for Holmes can involve physical clues. Dupin, in contrast, seems superior to his environment. His theory of knowledge is Platonic, as he believes truth can be found only in the abstract. The final twist in “A Scandal in Bohemia” occurs precisely because Holmes uses Dupin’s kind of reasoning. Adler absconds with the photograph because Holmes makes a generalization that proves to be false. Though he makes this error in the story, Holmes seems to know better. In A Study in Scarlet, he says, “You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant” (Doyle). Unlike Dupin, Holmes’ does not believe truth can always be found in abstract thinking. Like Aristotle, Holmes trusts empiricism and direct observation.
The philosophies of Dupin and Holmes can also be seen in the way they are characterized. Dupin is extraordinarily cerebral. He prefers to spend his time thinking in a dark room, and at the beginning of “The Purloined Letter,” the narrator mentions that he and Dupin had been sitting in total silence for an hour with “curling eddies of smoke” floating through the chamber (Poe 249). By associating Dupin with darkness, silence, and smoke, Poe reinforces the notion that Dupin himself is abstract and somehow separate from the physical world. He embodies Plato’s philosophies, unprovoked by emotion or the senses. Though he seems to be satisfied by playful revenge at the story’s end, he ultimately hands over the letter for money. Even Poe’s rhetorical strategy matches this persona; the story consists of a narrator relating to the reader a story that has been told to him by Dupin within the confines of his chamber. In the present tense of the story, the only movements Dupin makes are standing up to light a lamp (he changes his mind and sits down again) and handing the letter to the Prefect. In Platonic fashion, Poe has made the story itself feel abstract and removed from an environment or physical space.
Holmes, on the other hand, is active. He’s involved in a mock fight, complete with fake blood, and when he first appears in the story, Watson sees him through the window of his flat, “pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with his head sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped behind him” (Doyle). He oscillates between drug-induced lethargy and energetic manias. Sherlock Holmes may claim to shun emotion in favor of reason, but he is not devoid of feeling. He verges on sentimental in this particular story, requesting a photograph of Adler as payment for helping the king instead of choosing money—the rational reward.
Both detectives, like Plato and Aristotle, prefer cold logic over the physical, but like Aristotle, Holmes views the senses as integral to understanding reality. Edgar Allan Poe was the creator of the brilliant, antisocial detective character and inspired the work of Arthur Conan Doyle. Like Plato’s intellectual descendant Aristotle, Sherlock Holmes starts at the same foundation as Dupin, but the difference in their epistemologies marks a distinct evolution in the detective genre.
Works Cited
Doyle, Arthur Conan. (1995). A Study in Scarlet. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved February 6, 2018, from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/244.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. (2015). Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved February 6, 2018, from www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48320.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Tales. Oxford University Press, 1998.