There are figures of folklore who come to transcend their original context. Robin Hood is one such: the idea of the righteous thief, robbing from the rich to give to the poor, has an obvious appeal. Another such figure, much more recent, is Sherlock Holmes. A runaway success in his earliest appearances in the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, the fictional detective didn’t long remain a creature of his author.

Conan Doyle got bored of his most famous creation soon enough and tried to kill him off, but found himself forced to resurrect him.

The public clamoured for more stories about Holmes and his stolid sidekick Dr John Watson, and not even Conan Doyle could resist their demands.

In the years since Conan Doyle’s death, Holmes has continued to appear in dozens of new forms: films, graphic novels and television series. In these appearances, many of which leave the source texts a long way behind, fewer and fewer elements of the Conan Doyle stories remain. It is a process familiar to scholars of myth: as the stories are told and retold, one cannot count on anything staying the same.

In the BBC’s series Sherlock , even the setting has changed. Late-Victorian London with its hansom cabs and menacing fogs has given way to the 21st-century metropolis of skyscrapers and investment bankers. In the American network CBS’s version, Elementary , the setting is New York City. But these updates have not dared to eliminate the central relationship between Holmes and Watson, even if, as in Sherlock , the characters are now on first-name terms, and, as in Elementary , Dr Watson is now a Joan.

The Dr Watson of the books is intelligent, courageous and resourceful but falls a long way short of Holmes’s genius. Some film adaptations conclude from this that he is stupid, but who wouldn’t seem so if he had to exist entirely in Holmes’s shadow? However, as the most recent tellings of the stories have found, Watson can play other narrative functions as well: as the heart to Holmes’s brain, the conscience to Holmes’s reason, the intuition to his ‘deduction’.

Now ‘deduction’ is, as every logician knows, precisely the wrong word for much of what Holmes does. The most accurate technical term is, in fact, ‘abduction’, the form of logical inference that looks for the simplest and most probable theory able to account for the observed facts. But it is only through Watson’s narration, and Holmes’s impatient explanations of his method to him, that we are made aware of the structure of Holmes’s reasoning. To Holmes, the process is as intuitive and natural as breathing. He rarely reasons explicitly, step by logical step, from the creases on a client’s trousers to the breakdown of his marriage. It is almost as if he sees the explanation writ on his client’s body.

“Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost,” the novelist Henry James advised the aspiring writer. It is just as good advice for human beings generally.

Holmes is an example of someone who takes this advice but misses its point. He sees a great deal but much of everyday human life is lost on him. To the extent that he understands other people, he does so as a detached observer who may as well be studying a colony of ants.

Time and again, Watson is forced to remind Holmes of obvious truths about human life and psychology that are well known to everyone except genius detectives. These truths, as Holmes frequently has reason to remark to Watson, are “your department”. Watson provides continuous proof that the emotions have their intelligence, that there are other ways to understand the motivations of human beings than “the science of deduction”.

Holmes himself is not a viable ethical model for any of us to emulate. He is too coldly rational, too removed from any ordinary idea of what a human being should or could be like. But there is something about his capacity for perception that provides an analogue, if not actually an example, of something that is central to ethics: empathy.

The capacity to look at other people and to see, not just to find evidence from which to infer, that they are suffering or vulnerable or hungry or sad: that, more than any system of rules and principles, is where ethics begins. Every now and then, even Holmes turns out to show this capacity.

In the little-known ‘Adventure of the Three Garridebs’, Holmes has occasion to cry out, eyes dimmed, lips shaking: “You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake, say that you are not hurt!” Dr Watson is almost overcome: “For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.”

(This monthly column discusses questions of morality through pop culture)

Nakul Krishnais a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge

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