Gibbon’s Metaphysics

   

As did many of his contemporaries, Gibbon rejected metaphysics. In his more generous moments, he described metaphysical thinking as little more than superstitions folly.[1] But sometimes he went much further, faulting metaphysics as the source of a Christian dogmatism that suppressed the moral qualities which had once enabled Rome to flourish.[2] Gibbon’s skepticism was historically appropriate. By the late 18th century, British philosophers had absorbed sufficient influence from the natural sciences that their epistemology advocated strict adherence to empirical observation. For these thinkers, even non-religious metaphysical ideas were too abstract, too vague, and thus beyond the reach of verification to be of much use.[3] Rather than aspire to transcendent truth, philosophy should focus on what is knowable through experience and should be functionally pragmatic. The traditions of Western metaphysical thinking fell woefully short of these goals, and were thus dismissed by empiricist thinkers as little more than ungrounded theories with little explanatory value.[4]

These are among the reasons why Gibbon’s historiography eschewed providential inferences and oral traditions. The study of history, for him, was to be rigorous and practical, relying on primary sources such as preserved documents and inscriptions. Rather than appeal to supernatural causes for historical insight, the historian must confine his analyses to what secular sources reveal about the political, social and economic conditions of the events he is studying.

In spite of Gibbon’s negative attitude towards metaphysics, I intend to show that his reasoning relied on assumptions that do in fact display metaphysical qualities. I will argue that without such notions, he would have been unable to inquire into the deep structures of history or generalize to the broad ranging explanations that comprised his principal goals. Gibbon considered himself to be a “philosophical historian,”   which means that he was aspiring to disclose universal and inevitable mechanisms in the historical process, rather than merely record its incidental occurrences. But as I will indicate, this raises a serious question about the compatibility of these larger themes with the empirical methods he claimed to employ.

Metaphysical qualities often appear in Gibbon’s descriptions of what he believed are the defining characteristics of human nature. Such would include the virtues necessary for the growth of empires, as well as the inevitable debauchery that causes them to decay. If he did not regard these traits and the cycles they generate as inevitable and universally shared, then Decline and Fall would have had to remain a cramped study of narrow particularity, providing little more than chronicles of the Roman emperors, legislative enactments of the Senate, and shifting behavioral tendencies of the Roman aristocracy. Moreover, the explanatory principles that Gibbon sought were moral in nature, rather than consisting of merely factual descriptions. He assumed that these normative structures are the conditioning principles of the historical process itself, rather than merely inductive generalizations based on social or psychological data. Logically speaking, empirical information is simply not strong enough to do the heavy lifting that Gibbon had in mind. When he extrapolated from his analysis of Roman history to develop a comprehensive ethical theory explaining why empires rise and fall, Gibbon had to rely on ideas that are much more than mere generalizations, ones that are universal in scope and carry the force of necessity.

These points can be illustrated further by scattered remarks about human nature that appear throughout Decline and Fall. Early in his analysis, in Chapter 1 for example, he enumerated some of the virtues that he observed among the Romans, but which he also believed to be necessary for all civilizations to flourish. Such would include patriotism, which he claimed “is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of free government of which we are members.” (p. 39). Gibbon’s use of the present tense in this statement is revealing, suggesting that he intended to do much more than merely describe an historically local sentiment. This is the expression of a moral principle, one which denotes a necessary relationship between citizens and their nation, without which societies cannot evolve and thrive. But in addition to describing the virtues that he thought necessary for strong and successful civilizations, Gibbon also discussed specific vices, such as the “natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness,”[6]  which is a principle that he offered to explain why Rome had lost its moral substance. It is clear that by using such terms as “natural” and “inevitable,” Gibbon did not intend to identify an incidental occurrence peculiar to the history of Rome. The semantic markers of this statement indicate a far more general maxim applicable to all empires, ancient as well as modern.

Regardless of their factual content, there are several formal qualities these comments display which suggest metaphysical thinking. First, statements about inevitability carry a degree of logical force that exceeds anything empirical evidence can support. Sense experience can identify sequences and correlations between events, but cannot validate claims about their inexorability or necessity. Second, remember that Gibbon’s intent was to go much farther than just a description of Rome. It was his hope that the findings of Decline and Fall could be universalized to provide lasting lessons for his own and future generations. This comprises a range of explanation the scope of which far exceeds what empirical sources alone can avail. And third, as we have already seen, to derive the philosophical insights that Gibbon had in mind, he had to assume that history is a morally conditioned process, rather than merely a patterned sequence of physical and social occurrences. Gibbon’s friend and mentor, David Hume, argued persuasively that values cannot be logically derived from facts alone.[7]  Whatever information sense experience may yield, valid moral inferences demand that normative premises be conjoined with empirical data. Otherwise, our observational claims are confined to factual descriptions only, and lack the judgments necessary to add ethical insight to our theories. Thus, to move from observable facts to the epic moral conclusions that he sought, Gibbon’s study had to transcend his empirical findings and search for necessary ethical principles. Without such notions, which are clearly metaphysical in character, Gibbon would not have been able to magnify the range of his theories from the particular to the universal, from the contingent to the inevitable, and from the descriptive to the normative.

There are many similar comments about human nature in Decline and Fall for which Gibbon offered no empirical arguments, but which were indispensable for grounding his explanations. These include a belief he shared with David Hume that human behavior is driven primarily by passion rather than reason,[8]  and that the ambitious pursuit of power is a ubiquitous influence on choice, conduct and human relationships. Most important, perhaps, was the thesis running throughout Decline and Fall that as empires age, they eventually lose the discipline and the call to sacrifice they are willing to bear while they are growing and expanding. These reflections imply that historical events are subject to deep ethical cycles, in addition to emerging from material and political conditions. As with the remarks we examined earlier, such claims express normative evaluations of the human condition, and not just empirical descriptions.[9]  Gibbon intended these ideas to have universal, or near universal application, and to express a degree of necessity that logically exceeds anything observational data can support. There is nothing in the most scrupulous empirical analysis that can avail enough evidence to articulate any moral principles of history.

A limited study such as this can do little more than explicate just a few of the metaphysical assumptions at work in Decline and Fall.[10]    A more thorough analysis would be required to see whether these notions merely provide heuristic assistance, or if they have meaning and value that can be assessed independently of the functions they serve to facilitate the philosophical historian’s thinking. If they are strictly heuristic, then these concepts may amount to little more than expedient, ad hoc stipulations. But if they do have independent meaning, then they may prove to be concepts essential not only for the investigations of Decline and Fall, but which condition the very possibility of narrative history itself.

I can merely suggest at this point that there is one such metaphysical idea that narrative history cannot dispense with, and that is free will. Analytical history, which narrows its aperture to such physical evidence as coin inscriptions and tax receipts, has little use for this concept. The more empirical an historical study becomes, the more mechanical are its explanations. The analytical approach often reduces human action and relationships to behavioral statistics derived from demographic, environmental and economic data. Free will vanishes under these lenses, as human decisions are seen retrospectively as predictable outcomes produced by material sequences of events.

The narrative historian, on the other hand, has a much broader purview, inquiring into how choice impacts the contingency of circumstance. When free will is assumed, decisions appear to follow from ethical possibilities that can occur spontaneously, and with consequences that are unforeseeable to those present in the moment. The idea of free will is not empirically provable or reducible to any kind of physical evidence. For this reason, it is rightly considered to be a non-scientific concept. But without free will, it would be impossible for the historian to engage in an assessment of moral character, either of individuals or their societies, which was a defining goal of Gibbon’s study.  It would be equally difficult to understand the laws, values and institutions of a civilization as responses to the urgings and consequences of personal agency and responsibility.

If this is correct, then the metaphysical idea of free will may place narrative history somewhere between social science and literature. The physical and material data of such disciplines as archaeology and economics provide bedrock evidence grounding history in verifiable fact. But the metaphysical idea of free will liberates the historian’s imagination to investigate the humanity of the populations under study, such as Gibbon was attempting in Decline and Fall. History is thereby deepened and enriched, providing an intuitive and subjective portal into the lives of those who came before and who, like us, struggled to make sense of their lives and find meaning in the world in which they found themselves.

[1] Decline and Fall, Chapter 28.

[2]  ibid, Chapters 20-21.

[3] David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 12, pt. 3 (1748)

[4] See Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785); Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

[5] Cf., Hume The History of England, (1754-62); Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, (1748)

[6] Decline and Fall, Chapter 28.

[7] A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part I, Section I.

[8] ibid, Book II, Part III, Section III.

[9] As a matter of comparison, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau attempted to explain the human condition with state-of -nature hypotheses. These notions are also non-verifiable, presented as they are in a language resembling fable. Such examples provide additional evidence which shows that accounts of human nature aspiring to universality require modes of expression that are unconstrained by the limits of empirical information. Rousseau’s theory in particular conveniently evaded verification by asserting that the original stage of human development, the period of innocent contentment that he cited as the basis of human nature, had already been left behind by the 18th century (Inégalité, p. 114).

[10]  I fully appreciate the manner in which Gibbon tempers and filters these ideas so that his analysis remains sensitive to the nuances of careful empirical study, e.g., his notion of circumstantial causality. Such is clearly not the case with Hegel’s philosophy of history, in contrast, which coerces history into a priori categories.