Sherlock Holmes is highly specialized in the art of criminal detection—hyperspecialized, in fact. He possesses highly trained powers of observation and reasoning, which he pairs with a deep knowledge of matters that bear directly on his profession, including chemistry, anatomy, the history of crime, footprints, bloodstains, mud splatters, and tobacco ashes. Yet Holmes—at least when we are first introduced to him—is almost totally ignorant of many areas of knowledge that virtually all educated Victorians took for granted. For instance, he knows “next to nothing”1 about contemporary literature, philosophy, and politics, and he is so ignorant of modern astronomy that he doesn't even know that the earth revolves around the sun. When Watson asks why he only pursues knowledge relevant to his profession, Holmes responds by comparing the mind to an attic that must be kept clear of useless and obstructing lumber and that contains nothing “but the tools which may help him in doing his work.”2
Sherlock's attic analogy is one that many of today's career-minded college students would cheer. Why waste so much time in college learning useless lumber like history, literature, and philosophy when they could be studying far more relevant things in their career-oriented major courses? Why bother to learn anything, in fact, that doesn't help one get a good job and make a good living?
Are these students—and Holmes—justified in placing so much emphasis on vocational education and career success? Is Holmes's attic metaphor an apt way of thinking about how we should furnish and organize the mind? Does the single-minded pursuit of career success or some particular form of human excellence (for example, athletic success) violate an ethical duty to be a well-rounded person, or an informed citizen, or some other duty of personal development or self-improvement? Here we'll explore these questions with the help of some leading philosophers, educators, and social theorists.
The clearest statement of Holmes's view of education and self-improvement is contained in Watson's famous introductory character sketch of Holmes in A Study in Scarlet. When Watson expresses astonishment at how little Holmes knows about literature, politics, and so forth, Holmes replies:
I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that the little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.3
Holmes here compares the human mind to a woodworker's attic. He notes three relevant similarities: limited storage capacity, the utility of stored items, and duties of proper stocking and organization. We address each of these in turn.
The mind, says Holmes, is like a “little room,” not a spacious warehouse. It can only store a limited amount of information. Fools who try to cram too much knowledge into their brains will inevitably end up either forgetting some useful bit of information or misplacing it in a jumble of useless facts.
A workman's attic should be well organized and include only tools and lumber that “may help him in doing his work.”4 Likewise, Holmes claims, a person's mind should be orderly and should include only knowledge that is of practical value.
The workman is not merely able to distinguish between useful and useless tools; as a practitioner of a skilled craft, he has an ethical or professional duty to choose his tools well and maintain an uncluttered and well-stocked workroom. Holmes himself fulfills this obligation by ignoring useless information and focusing almost exclusively on matters that relate directly to his profession of crime detection.5
To some extent, Holmes's attic theory of the brain is supported by contemporary neuroscience and educational psychology, particularly his claim that the brain's tools must be kept “in the most perfect order.” In cognitive psychology, interference theory seeks to show how some memories can block retrieval of other memories.6 Research has shown, for instance, that interference can occur when a person tries to master two different areas of knowledge at the same time, such as two languages; the two subjects become jumbled together and are easily confused. Studies have also shown, however, that interference is rarely a problem when we use well-developed mental skills. So Holmes needn't be worried that learning a little basic astronomy will interfere with his ability to do bloodstain analysis, because he already knows that subject so thoroughly.
Moreover, cognitive science has shown that memories that are unrelated to other ideas are more likely to be lost than ideas that exist in a network of related thoughts and memories. According to prevailing theories of mental development, memories tend to fade or be forgotten quickly without a supporting context of intellectual or emotional associations.7 The reason we tend to forget things is not because the memories are elbowed out by additional knowledge, but because the memories weren't securely anchored in a nexus of related thoughts and feelings.
Sherlock's solution to the problem of disorganization is to avoid clutter by attempting to acquire only useful information.8 This stems from his view that the mind, like an early-generation computer, has a limited storage capacity. In fact, research has shown that the capacity of the brain to remember certain things becomes better developed—or, in brain attic terms, bigger—as our expertise in those areas develops. As we become more proficient in categorizing our memories, we retain more of them. This is one reason people remember so little from their early childhoods; at that age they lack sufficient life experience to know where to file those memories. So Holmes's worry about the capacity of his brain attic to store information is mostly groundless. The more we learn, the more our capacity to learn grows. In fact, current work in schema theory suggests that mental clutter may serve to enhance memory function by aiding the process of categorization. This theory likens the organization of memories to the arrangement of books in a cramped used bookstore. A musty pile of useless self-help books might bookend a fine collection of British detective fiction and keep them from becoming scattered and disorganized. The self-help books may have little value in themselves, but if they help patrons find the good books, they fulfill a useful purpose.9
There is an additional problem with Holmes's facile distinction between useless and useful information: people may be poor judges of which information is actually useful. Holmes himself invokes irrelevant knowledge on numerous occasions. After all, the ability to communicate with people in all walks of life is crucial to Holmes's profession, and often seemingly useless facts smooth this process of communication. In one instance, responding to Watson's ruminations about the beauty and power of nature, Holmes remarks, “Are you well up in your Jean Paul [Richter]?” When Watson replies that he has read a fair number of Richter's works, Holmes goes on to relate one of Richter's observations on the topic at hand.10 It is unlikely that the works of Richter, a relatively obscure eighteenth-century German novelist, would qualify as “useful facts” for Holmes in theory.11 Yet in practice, this knowledge serves as a handy conduit for Holmes's message.
The idea that people are not always good judges of what information will turn out to be useful is supported by the sociological literature on social and cultural capital.12 Social capital is the value of our relationships with other people, through whom we gain access to goods and services. Cultural capital is the value of knowledge of cultural practices—meaning everything from how to calculate a golf score to how to evaluate abstract mid-twentieth-century painting—through which we communicate with people in various social strata and so cultivate social capital. Both types of capital are resources that are interchangeable with other forms of capital to produce various advantages. For instance, in The Sign of Four, Holmes is able to gain entry to a building by trading on his knowledge of boxing (cultural capital) to exploit a weak relationship to the man guarding the entrance to a building who also happens to be a boxer (social capital), which ultimately allows him to pursue a lead (and possibly acquire some economic capital from a grateful client).13 The value of social and cultural capital, and particularly cultural capital, lies in its superficially noneconomic nature combined with its relative exclusivity: not everyone knows the right people or would know what to say to the right people if suddenly put in their path, and this knowledge is neither easy to come by nor of explicit material value. Even those with substantial social or cultural capital holdings may not be aware of the extent to which they exchange it for material advantage. Moreover, cultural capital in particular is more potentially valuable as it becomes rarer and more obscure, and by the same token, the contexts in which one can meaningfully use rare and obscure cultural knowledge are much more limited. Consequently, those who work across a variety of social milieus—such as Holmes, who on a given day might need to wheedle information from both an archduke and a chimney sweep—are best served by cultivating multiple types of cultural literacy as a way to bridge the divisions of lifestyle and social class. Holmes, for example, can read the subtle cultural cues to uncover the identity of a disguised nobleman, as in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and he can also convincingly adopt the rakish demeanor of an inveterate gambler to establish common ground with a reluctant poultry merchant in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.”14 This is not merely a testament to Holmes's acting ability, but also of his mastery of the cultural mannerisms of a broad swath of late Victorian British society. In short, what Holmes derides as useless knowledge often proves critical to his success in solving crimes.
Holmes's distinction between useful and useless knowledge is even more problematic in our own day. In today's economy, workers who cultivate a narrow set of “practical” job skills may quickly find their knowledge obsolete because of technological innovations, restructured transnational labor forces, or the movement of entire industries offshore. Employer surveys consistently indicate a preference for workers who are broadly knowledgeable over those who are more narrowly trained. Among the most desired job skills today are critical thinking, good communication skills, ethical decision making, the ability to work well in teams, and global literacy.15 Being able to distinguish useful and useless knowledge in today's economic climate may require a predictive power that not even the great Sherlock Holmes could claim.
We turn now to an even bigger problem with Holmes's attic analogy. The analogy assumes that no useless knowledge should be acquired—that the mind should be furnished only with tools relevant to one's career success. We shall argue, on the contrary, that there is a moral duty to acquire useless nonvocational knowledge, an obligation that follows from a more general duty of self-improvement. Talk of a duty of self-improvement smacks, perhaps, of Victorian moral earnestness, and this might explain why there has been so little systematic discussion of the idea in recent moral theory.16 In fact, however, such a duty fits comfortably within many ethical frameworks.
Consider the three leading moral theories today: consequentialism, duty theory (aka deontological ethics), and virtue ethics. Consequentialists—ethicists who claim that acts are right or wrong depending on the consequences they have—could point to the public benefits that would result if people took seriously a duty to become more intelligent and responsible citizens, parents, students, teachers, workers, and public servants. Duty theorists—ethicists such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and W. D. Ross (1877–1971), who believe that some acts, like promise breaking and torture, are wrong even if they do maximize good consequences—could appeal to the intrinsic value of developing one's moral and intellectual potential (Ross) or note that a rational being could not possibly will that a maxim such as “let your talents rust and go undeveloped” should become a universal law of human conduct (Kant). Virtue ethicists—theorists such as Aristotle, Aquinas, and Alasdair MacIntyre, who claim that ethics is centrally concerned with developing good character and fulfilling human potential—could note that inculcating a strong sense of personal responsibility for developing one's talents and capacities is crucial for human fulfillment.
In short, there appears to be a strong overlapping philosophical consensus for recognizing a general duty of self-improvement. There will, of course, be disagreements over specifics. Which should be given priority: intellectual, moral, physical, emotional, spiritual, or vocational improvement? Is there some single ideal pattern of human development that all humans should strive for, or does this vary from individual to individual and from culture to culture? Is it permissible for an individual to concentrate more or less exclusively on one area of improvement (say, physical improvement in an Olympic hopeful or wealth building in a young dot-commer), or is there some minimum level of intellectual, moral, or spiritual development that all persons should be expected to achieve? These are issues on which philosophers of different stripes would obviously disagree.17
However, there are certain fundamentals on which nearly all philosophers would concur. Any meaningful duty of self-improvement must include absolute or qualified bans on suicide, self-injury, and acts that rob one of one's autonomy, self-mastery, or capacity for rational reflection or responsible choice. Most philosophers would go further and say that persons who have the time, talent, and opportunity to become well-rounded, broadly educated individuals have an ethical responsibility to do so. We believe that there is such a duty for several reasons.
First, as we have seen, it is a mistake to sharply distinguish useless knowledge of things like literature and philosophy from practical knowledge relevant to career success. There's nothing more useful than being able to think. And that's what we get from a broad-based education. As philosopher Andrew P. Mills notes, thinking involves more than
just knowing facts and figures and formulas. Being able to think means being able to write well and speak clearly. It means being able to organize your time, being able to offer creative solutions to intractable problems, and being able to deal with new and challenging situations. Above all, being able to think means being able to ask the right questions, make smart decisions, and teach yourself what you don't know.18
This, in fact, is why Conan Doyle's portrayal of Holmes is so unrealistic. Somebody who really knew next to nothing about literature, history, politics, and so forth would not possess either the background knowledge or the habits of disciplined thinking to make the accurate, lightning-quick logical inferences that are Holmes's stock in trade. Logical inference is only as reliable as the information contained in the premises. As Holmes himself admits, an ideal reasoner would have quickly solved the mystery in “The Crooked Man” by recognizing that the name David was an allusion to the biblical story of David and Bathsheba.19 In fact, Holmes often solves mysteries by drawing on factual information that, in terms of his own attic metaphor, he should not possess.
Second, a broad knowledge base is important for civic literacy and the responsibilities of democratic citizenship. Being a good democratic citizen requires a basic understanding of democratic institutions, processes, and values. However, effective citizenship requires more than this. An effective citizen is a knowledgeable and informed citizen. Effective citizens must stay abreast of local, national, and international developments and intelligently appraise political office seekers' qualifications and views on the issues. This implies not only a willingness to acquire the intellectual skills and dispositions necessary for sound political judgment, but also a willingness to stay informed on political issues and events. Holmes, we're told, reads nothing in the newspapers except the criminal news and the “agony columns,”20 and he knows next to nothing about politics. This means he is what philosophers call a free rider in Great Britain's democratic system of government. He benefits from the fact that others participate actively and knowledgeably in that system, making good governance possible, without doing his fair share to keep the process working. Not that Holmes is a useless citizen—far from it. He fights crime, and in one of his last adventures, he even helps Britain win the Great War by foiling a German spy network.21 However, our point is that Holmes would have been a better crime fighter and a more useful citizen if he hadn't been totally uninterested in politics.22
Two reasons for recognizing at least a presumptive duty to become a well-rounded, culturally literate person are that by doing so, one can acquire skills and dispositions that will prove useful in one's career and in one's role as a responsible citizen. However, the deepest reason for recognizing such a duty is rooted in human nature itself. As Socrates said, care of the soul—leading an examined life and valuing virtue and wisdom over fickle and ultimately unfulfilling concerns such as fame, power, or wealth—should be our highest priority. As Aristotle noted, human beings have many capacities that other animals do not. In particular, he observed, humans have unique capacities for rational reflection, ethical decision making, and autonomous choice. Because of these unique capabilities, the richest forms of human fulfillment must consist in making the most of our potential—striving for excellence in all that we do, but particularly in those capacities of heart, mind, and spirit that make us distinctively human. This is precisely what a broad-based liberal education can help us to achieve. A liberal education broadens the mind, disciplines our rational powers, enlarges and sensitizes the imagination, and helps to free us from the biases and predigested dogmas of our upbringing, our culture, and our age. Through the liberal arts, we encounter the greatest minds of human history and can participate in the Great Conversation that stretches from the agoras of ancient Greece to the halls of top modern universities. As Allan Bloom remarks, people “may live more truly and fully in reading Plato and Shakespeare than at any other time, because then they are participating in essential being and forgetting their accidental lives.”23 By focusing single-mindedly on career success, as Holmes does, one fails to tap into the incredibly rich resources the Great Conversation provides for enjoyment, critical awareness, and the examined life.
Of course, Holmes's case isn't nearly so simple. For one who disdains useless facts, Holmes often proves to be an amazingly cultivated and well-rounded guy. As the stories unfold, we're surprised to find him quoting Goethe in German, discoursing learnedly on Buddhism in Ceylon, quoting the medieval Persian poet Hafiz, rhapsodizing over concert music, discussing the novelist George Meredith, writing a scholarly treatise on sixteenth-century choral music, and reading his pocket Plutarch. Eventually, we're told, Holmes becomes an “omnivorous reader,”24 dividing his time in retirement “between philosophy and agriculture,”25 and writing a learned monograph on beekeeping.26 In short, Holmes doesn't practice what he preaches. He isn't at all the career-obsessed philistine one would expect from his own attic theory of the mind.
In the end, we don't want to be too hard on old Sherlock. As the German philosopher Hegel said, “Nothing great has been accomplished in the world without passion,”27 and we can all admire the tremendous passion and dedication Holmes brings to his self-invented profession. Let's face it: Holmes became a great man and a great detective precisely because of his intense and single-minded devotion to his craft. Our point is simply that he took it too far.
1. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1930), 21. All subsequent references to the Sherlock Holmes stories are to this edition. In later stories, as we shall see, this picture of Holmes as a single-minded, career-obsessed philistine is considerably softened.
2. Ibid. Compare “Five Orange Pips,” 225, for a similar account.
3. Study in Scarlet, 21.
4. Although there is some sloppiness in his analogy here, he does make a distinction between knowledge and skills, and he privileges the latter over the former. Knowledge is clearly “lumber,” which may clutter the brain attic rather considerably. Skills, however, exist outside the attic; they are vested in the “skilful workman” himself, who owns the attic but does not occupy it. The position of “tools” is less clearly specified, in that they are the necessary instruments for exercising the workman's skills, but they may also clutter the brain attic if the workman isn't careful.
5. “Red-Headed League,” 177. See also Sign of Four, 91, when Holmes deploys his knowledge of “the influence of trade on the form of the hand” by remarking that “the fish that you have tattooed immediately above your right wrist could only have been done in China. I have made a small study of tattoo marks and have even contributed to the literature on the subject.” Likewise, in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (214), Holmes employs his own cigar ash study, which was first noted in Sign of Four, 91.
6. This is why, among other reasons, the practice of cramming is inadvisable. See John W. Santrock, Educational Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 288.
7. Ibid., 60, 288–89.
8. We can control what types of tools we put in our attics. We can't really control all the ideas that flow into the mind. As much as we'd like to forget that tragic car crash or annoying ear candy, we just can't. This is one of many major disanalogies between the brain and an attic.
9. Santrock, Educational Psychology, 284.
10. Sign of Four, 121.
11. Holmes also apparently counts steps on the off chance that this information might turn out to be useful. See “Scandal in Bohemia,” 162.
12. Both terms are commonly used in sociological discussions of social class and other inequalities; the various properties of social and cultural capital were initially articulated in the works of Pierre Bourdieu, particularly in Outline of a Theory of Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), both translated by Richard Nice.
13. Sign of Four, 106.
14. “Scandal in Bohemia,” 165, and “Blue Carbuncle,” 253.
15. See, for example, “Employers Seek More College-Educated Workers with Higher Levels of Learning and Broader Sets of Skills, New Survey Reveals,” http://aacu.org/press_room/press_releases/2010/employersurvey.cfm.
16. See generally Gregory Bassham, “Lifelong Learning and the Duty of Self-Improvement,” Think 6, no. 16 (December 2008): 101–5. The concept of a duty of self-improvement is found most prominently in deontological, self-realization, and natural law ethical traditions. For representative discussions, see David Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 21; Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1963), 116–26; V. J. McGill, The Idea of Happiness (New York: Praeger, 1967), chap. 7; and Samuel Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature, trans. David Saunders (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), 69–80.
17. This and the preceding paragraph are adapted from Bassham, “Lifelong Learning,” 101–2.
18. Andrew P. Mills, “Why Are You Here? College as a Health Club for the Mind,” http://faculty.otterbein.edu/AMills/ConvocationSpeech.html. Arguments that colleges should just focus on relevant job skills are nonsensical when one considers the realities of the job market. Fewer than half of all college students graduate at all. Of those who do, considerably fewer than half are working in their major field within five years of graduation. In fact, in the first four months of 2009, less than half of all college graduates aged twenty-five or younger were even working in fields that require a college degree. Tony Pugh, “Recession's Toll: Most Recent College Grads Working Low-Skill Jobs,” June 25, 2009, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/329/v-print/story/70788.html. Even more startlingly, none of the ten jobs most in demand in 2010 even existed six years ago. Nancy Gibbs, “Time Will Tell,” Time, September 21, 2009, 92.
19. “Crooked Man,” 422.
20. “Noble Bachelor,” 288.
21. “His Last Bow,” 970–80.
22. This paragraph is adapted from Bassham, “Lifelong Learning,” 103.
23. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 380.
24. “Lion's Mane,” 1094.
25. Preface to “His Last Bow,” 869.
26. “His Last Bow,” 978.
27. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 26.