Fic: Philosophy - nil
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rachelindeed
Title: Philosophy - nil
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: John Watson, OFC, gen
Wordcount: 500
Summary: After the case of the Naval Treaty, Watson looks for a book of philosophy to fit Holmes's introspective mood.
Author's Note: I actually wrote this ages ago, but never posted it because I didn't know if any readers would think that the philosophy was worth the punchline. But today is Naval Treaty day at sherlock60, so why not? :)
Philosophy - nil
Holmes often twitted me about my early estimate of “his limits.” We’d not known each other a month before he’d found my list – possibly whilst digging through the wastebin – and teased me within an inch of my life. As I came to know him better, I laughed as well at my own first impressions. He was capable of mechanical practicality, to be sure, but his mind was an eccentric starburst of literary, artistic, and philosophical passions.
Over the years, I made a game of finding books for him that held some connection to our cases. The widowed bookseller across the street became my confidante and advisor as I searched for the perfect texts to commemorate an adventure or evoke a memory.
Being struck, in the affair of the Naval Treaty, by Holmes’s detour into philosophical meditation, I asked the good woman for help in choosing a treatise fit for his tastes. Being an avid and esoteric reader, and also mother to an aspiring Philosophy Chair, she provided a wealth of information.
“We have Plato and Aristotle, of course. As your friend reads French, he might enjoy untranslated texts by Descartes or Pascal. We do not have those in, but I can put them on order. If you are looking for something a bit further off the beaten track…” her eyes sparked, and she plucked a slim brown volume from the back corner, “I would suggest Anselm of Canterbury.”
“And what has Anselm to recommend him?” I asked. I have never pretended to any taste for metaphysics.
She drew a deep breath, reminiscent of no one more than Holmes himself when the moment came to reveal his deductions. “His argument is called ‘ontological,’ because it aspires to draw logical inferences about what category of being a god might occupy. In other words, he tries to think about what it would mean to be perfect. He suggests that a perfect being could not be contingent. Almost everything that we know of is contingent, of course, including ourselves. We exist, but if circumstances had been different, we might not have. In that way, we are dependent on whatever has gone before us.”
I nodded, not yet out of my depth.
“Anselm suggests that any supreme or divine nature could not be dependent. Rather, its existence would need to rely on nothing but itself. He concludes that a perfect being must either be necessary or impossible. Those are the kinds of existence that don’t depend on anything outside themselves.
Impossible things don’t exist because they can’t under any circumstances. Necessary things do exist because they must in every circumstance. But the argument stops there and does not attempt to decide into which of those two categories a perfect being belongs.”
I blinked slowly. “So, if I have understood you correctly, this argument claims that God is either impossible, or…he is whatever remains, however improbable, and must be the truth?”
“In a nutshell.”
I reached for the book. “My dear lady, I will take it.”
rachelindeedTitle: Philosophy - nil
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: John Watson, OFC, gen
Wordcount: 500
Summary: After the case of the Naval Treaty, Watson looks for a book of philosophy to fit Holmes's introspective mood.
Author's Note: I actually wrote this ages ago, but never posted it because I didn't know if any readers would think that the philosophy was worth the punchline. But today is Naval Treaty day at sherlock60, so why not? :)
Philosophy - nil
Holmes often twitted me about my early estimate of “his limits.” We’d not known each other a month before he’d found my list – possibly whilst digging through the wastebin – and teased me within an inch of my life. As I came to know him better, I laughed as well at my own first impressions. He was capable of mechanical practicality, to be sure, but his mind was an eccentric starburst of literary, artistic, and philosophical passions.
Over the years, I made a game of finding books for him that held some connection to our cases. The widowed bookseller across the street became my confidante and advisor as I searched for the perfect texts to commemorate an adventure or evoke a memory.
Being struck, in the affair of the Naval Treaty, by Holmes’s detour into philosophical meditation, I asked the good woman for help in choosing a treatise fit for his tastes. Being an avid and esoteric reader, and also mother to an aspiring Philosophy Chair, she provided a wealth of information.
“We have Plato and Aristotle, of course. As your friend reads French, he might enjoy untranslated texts by Descartes or Pascal. We do not have those in, but I can put them on order. If you are looking for something a bit further off the beaten track…” her eyes sparked, and she plucked a slim brown volume from the back corner, “I would suggest Anselm of Canterbury.”
“And what has Anselm to recommend him?” I asked. I have never pretended to any taste for metaphysics.
She drew a deep breath, reminiscent of no one more than Holmes himself when the moment came to reveal his deductions. “His argument is called ‘ontological,’ because it aspires to draw logical inferences about what category of being a god might occupy. In other words, he tries to think about what it would mean to be perfect. He suggests that a perfect being could not be contingent. Almost everything that we know of is contingent, of course, including ourselves. We exist, but if circumstances had been different, we might not have. In that way, we are dependent on whatever has gone before us.”
I nodded, not yet out of my depth.
“Anselm suggests that any supreme or divine nature could not be dependent. Rather, its existence would need to rely on nothing but itself. He concludes that a perfect being must either be necessary or impossible. Those are the kinds of existence that don’t depend on anything outside themselves.
Impossible things don’t exist because they can’t under any circumstances. Necessary things do exist because they must in every circumstance. But the argument stops there and does not attempt to decide into which of those two categories a perfect being belongs.”
I blinked slowly. “So, if I have understood you correctly, this argument claims that God is either impossible, or…he is whatever remains, however improbable, and must be the truth?”
“In a nutshell.”
I reached for the book. “My dear lady, I will take it.”
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Date: 2016-08-30 01:34 am (UTC)It's an old bit of headcanon for me that Watson buys books to commemorate their cases. The bit in the canon that inspired the idea was that passage where Holmes quotes the correspondence between Flaubert and George Sand. Sand is so reminiscent of Irene Adler that I liked the thought that Watson bought the volume for him as a memento of the Bohemian affair.