David Hume and a Deflationary Philosophy of History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Tuesday 07 May 2024 is the 313th anniversary of the birth of David Hume (07 May 1711 New Style, 26 April 1711 Old Style, to 25 August 1776), who was born in Edinburgh on this date in 1711. Hume was born on the 7th of May, and Edward Gibbon was born on the 8th of May, although the two were a generation apart, so you can consider today’s episode on Hume as Part I of Enlightenment Historiography, and tomorrow’s episode on Gibbon as Part II of Enlightenment Historiography. I will be touching on many similar issues with regard to both Hume and Gibbon.
Today we think of Hume as a philosopher, in fact as perhaps the most influential Anglophone philosopher of all time. It would be fair to say that Hume is the godfather of the tradition Anglo-American analytical philosophy, or, even more narrowly, the godfather of logical empiricism. In Hume one finds the origins of the is/ought distinction and the analytic/synthetic distinction as we currently understand them, and which have played such a prominent role in analytical philosophy.
Hume also set the tone of empiricism in Anglophone philosophy. The fundamental ideas of empiricism were pioneered by Hume, they achieved their most explicit and uncompromising formulations in the work of the logical empiricists, and now we retain these ideas, but in a highly qualified and conditional form, having learned the limitations of the doctrinaire exposition of these ideas. It is often said that modern philosophy began with Descartes, and Descartes’ work is sometimes characterized as an “epistemological turn” in philosophy. It wouldn’t be too much to say that modern Anglophone philosophy began with Hume, and that Hume represented an “empiricist turn” in philosophy.
All of this is to say that Hume dominates the philosophical tradition in English speaking countries, but in his own time, Hume was a failure as a philosopher. He said that his first great philosophical work, A Treatise of Human Nature, originally published in 1739, “fell dead-born from the press.” Hume recovered from the disappointment and made a name for himself as an historian. He continued to publish philosophical works, many of which were re-written portions of A Treatise of Human Nature, and others of which broke new ground, but continued to develop his empiricist and skeptical point of view.
Hume left his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion to be published posthumously, probably because he anticipated that it would be controversial, but he published his work on miracles while he was still alive. Section 10 of Hume’s 1748 An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is titled “Of Miracles,” includes this following:
“Upon the whole, then, it appears, that no testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability, much less to a proof; and that, even supposing it amounted to a proof, it would be opposed by another proof; derived from the very nature of the fact, which it would endeavour to establish. It is experience only, which gives authority to human testimony; and it is the same experience, which assures us of the laws of nature. When, therefore, these two kinds of experience are contrary, we have nothing to do but subtract the one from the other, and embrace an opinion, either on one side or the other, with that assurance which arises from the remainder. But according to the principle here explained, this subtraction, with regard to all popular religions, amounts to an entire annihilation; and therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion.”
This isn’t all of Hume’s critique of miracles, but it is enough to give a flavor of his reasoning on miracles. If there are no miracles, then the kind of providential history we find in Saint Augustine and Bossuet must be false, and we must proceed by understanding history in terms of human motivations and exertion, and we understand human beings by understanding human nature. Hume’s critique of miracles (along with some other ideas of Hume) was picked up by Edward Gibbon, who, for example, tells the story of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge without mentioning any supernaturalistic element.
Tradition has preserved the story that, prior to the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine saw a vision of the cross, and, next to it in Latin, “In Hoc Signo Vinces” — by this sign thou shalt conquer — and then he had a dream in which Christ explained to him the significance of the vision. Constantine had a military standard made that included what has come to be called the Chi-Rho symbol, which are the first two letters of the name of Christ in Greek, and his troops subsequently marched into battle carrying the Chi-Rho symbol and the cross. Echoes of Hume on miracles can be found in the following passage from Gibbon:
“The miracles of the primitive church, after obtaining the sanction of ages, have been lately attacked in a very free and ingenious inquiry, which, though it has met with the most favorable reception from the public, appears to have excited a general scandal among the divines of our own as well as of the other Protestant churches of Europe. Our different sentiments on this subject will be much less influenced by any particular arguments, than by our habits of study and reflection; and, above all, by the degree of evidence which we have accustomed ourselves to require for the proof of a miraculous event. The duty of an historian does not call upon him to interpose his private judgment in this nice and important controversy; but he ought not to dissemble the difficulty of adopting such a theory as may reconcile the interest of religion with that of reason, of making a proper application of that theory, and of defining with precision the limits of that happy period, exempt from error and from deceit, to which we might be disposed to extend the gift of supernatural powers. From the first of the fathers to the last of the popes, a succession of bishops, of saints, of martyrs, and of miracles, is continued without interruption; and the progress of superstition was so gradual, and almost imperceptible, that we know not in what particular link we should break the chain of tradition. Every age bears testimony to the wonderful events by which it was distinguished, and its testimony appears no less weighty and respectable than that of the preceding generation, till we are insensibly led on to accuse our own inconsistency, if in the eighth or in the twelfth century we deny to the venerable Bede, or to the holy Bernard, the same degree of confidence which, in the second century, we had so liberally granted to Justin or to Irenæus. If the truth of any of those miracles is appreciated by their apparent use and propriety, every age had unbelievers to convince, heretics to confute, and idolatrous nations to convert; and sufficient motives might always be produced to justify the interposition of Heaven.” (Chapter XV: Progress Of The Christian Religion. — Part IV.)
Hume’s philosophy, then, not only influenced his own work as an historian, but also influenced the work of his contemporaries, as we can see in this passage from Gibbon. Like Kant and Machiavelli, both of whom I have recently discussed, Hume didn’t write any books on philosophy of history.
Claudia M. Schmidt in her book David Hume: Reason in History, noted that, “Hume does not provide us with a specific work concerning the philosophy or methodology of history.” (p. 379) However, Schmidt does show us how Hume’s history is bound up with this philosophy, and vice versa:
“In the Treatise and the First Enquiry, Hume introduces historical inquiry as a type of causal reasoning in which we judge the probability that an event has occurred in the past by reasoning from evidence that we encounter in the present. This evidence may be conveyed, in whole or in part, through oral reports, extending back to a supposed witness of the event. However, in these cases the historical facts are often ‘disguised by every successive narration,’ as a result of feeble memories, exaggeration, or even carelessness, until the report contains little or no resemblance to the original event.” (p. 379)
Schmidt also recognizes the constitutive role that Hume’s conception of human nature plays in his history:
“…Hume is seeking to account for the actions of historical individuals as effects of their passions and beliefs, characters, and circumstances. In so doing he is applying the principle, regarded by Sabine as a discovery of the nineteenth century, that history is ‘peopled by actual human beings, with human desires and purposes,’ and that the historian’s task includes re-creating the men and women of the past, entering into their feelings and desires, and explaining their actions to posterity.” (p. 400)
Hume’s own self-understanding of the role history in human knowledge is given exposition in a brief essay, “Of the Study of History”
“…history is not only a valuable part of knowledge, but opens the door to many other parts, and affords materials to most of the sciences. And indeed, if we consider the shortness of human life, and our limited knowledge, even of what passes in our own time, we must be sensible that we should be for ever children in understanding, were it not for this invention, which extends our experience to all past ages, and to the most distant nations; making them contribute as much to our improvement in wisdom, as if they had actually lain under our observation. A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
Someone who has “lived from the beginning of the world” and who has continually added to their stock of knowledge through the ages might be regarded as a kind of thought experiment. We can ask how such an individual might perceive history and human action historically, and, Hume implies, this is the perspective that history provides us. But there are many kinds of history, and, as I have described in several previous episodes, many ways to engage intellectually with the past. One might reasonably wonder whether the nature of our continual additions to our stock of knowledge shapes our understanding of the world that we grasp, through the medium of history, from its beginning.
So far, Hume’s empiricist history only seems to rule out miracles, and therefore most providential philosophies of history. What positive features would an empirical philosophy of history involve? In the passage I just quoted from Hume some features are implied, and the quote from Claudia M. Schmidt implies an engagement with human nature, which we certainly find in Hume, as well as an interest in a quasi-scientific account of historical causality, with the fully human historical agent caught within a network of casual processes. Later in the Enlightenment this approach came to be called philosophical history, with Gibbon being perhaps the most famous practitioner.
We can find this kind of causal explanation of historical events in ancient history, especially in Thucydides, but this way of history was largely lost in the early Middle Ages, and the chronicle replaced history as a form of historical record keeping. With the advent of modernity, the tradition of history as explaining historical causality had to be rediscovered, and Hume and Gibbon were part of this rediscovery. This process continues to unfold, as the logical distinctiveness of narrative propositions only came be explicitly understood in the twentieth century.
Today we take narrative, explanatory history for granted — that is to say, we take philosophical history for granted. We don’t see it as an innovation, but it was a long, slow process to converge on history as we know it today — a process that co-evolved with the growth of historical consciousness that occurred in parallel with the growth of sophistication in historical research and writing. The process continues today, as historical methodology and historical consciousness continue to grow in parallel and each stimulates the other.
What can we expect from the tradition of philosophical history as it continues to develop? I said earlier that Hume was the godfather of logical empiricism. Can there be a logical empiricist philosophy of history that builds on the work of Hume? The only contribution to Otto Neurath’s International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, which was a logical empiricist organ, concerned with history was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Certainly in the work of Kuhn we find philosophical history of a subtle and sophisticated order, but it seems to point in a direction other than that of logical empiricism. It is something of an historical fluke that Kuhn’s work appeared Neurath’s series of logical empiricist monographs.
Hume himself seems to point in a different direction, as I quoted him above as writing about, “continual additions to his stock of knowledge,” which implies a cumulative conception of knowledge that Kuhn is usually presented as having shown to be untenable. Haskell Fain in his Between Philosophy and History (pp. 9–10) calls this Hume’s ‘addition theory of knowledge,’ being, “the view that changing theories and ideas result in an addition to, but not an alteration of, mankind’s conception of what knowledge itself is. Knowledge, like Human Nature, is judged everywhere the same, though methods for arriving at it change.” On the one hand, this does seem to fit with the kind of universalism characteristic of the Enlightenment, and which informs Hume’s conception of human nature. On the other hand, Hume’s passing remark about an additive conception of knowledge does not necessarily exclude the possibility that added knowledge alters earlier knowledge. In the twentieth century, this view has become commonplace in the form of narrativism since Danto, and, as we saw earlier, this narrativism wasn’t made explicit until the 20th century, long after Hume’s time.
Hume gives us little to go on in elaborate a more comprehensive philosophy of history. We are, in essence, grasping at straws with Hume, and Hume’s historical writings do not seem to embody any obvious philosophical principles other than the exclusion of the miraculous. This has continued to be the case with the logical empiricists, whose work built on Hume. It seems that the logical empiricists were as indebted to Descartes as to Hume, as they share the Cartesian disinterest in history. Neurath himself, in one of the monographs included in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, gave something of a sketch of what a logical empiricist history might look like:
“…all sciences as dovetailed to such a degree that we may regard them as parts of one science which deals with stars, Milky Ways, earth, plants, animals, human beings, forests, natural regions, tribes, and nations — in short, a comprehensive cosmic history.” (Vol. II, №1, Foundations of the Social Sciences , p. 9)
This is the barest hint of what might be done with the intellectual resources of this tradition. It sounds a lot like contemporary big history, which I discussed in my episode on my paper “A Complexity Ladder for Big History.” Big history fulfills the Humean conception of the function of history giving the individual a perspective as though he had lived from the beginning of the world.
On the other hand, a providential philosophy of history like that of St. Augustine might also be said to give the individual a perspective as though he had lived from the beginning of the world, though the providential world of St. Augustine is distinct from the scientific world of logical positivism. Here the kind of knowledge that is cumulatively added through historical experience appears in stark relief in these two contexts. Hume’s exclusion of providential philosophies of histories that invoke miracles excludes the kind of cumulative knowledge construction that we find in Augustine and those who followed him. Perhaps that is the lesson here: an empiricist philosophy of history is and ought to be primarily defined in terms of what it excludes and less in terms of what it includes.
Empiricism, then, is a principle of selection of history, and giving an account of the problem of selection has been one of the abiding problems for history. An empirical philosophy of history holds the promise of providing a definitive answer to the selection problem. This would be a deflationary philosophy of history that would entirely do without the signs and wonders that inhabit the pages of more credulous historians.
We might believe ourselves to have long outgrown signs and wonders, and think ourselves superior to the historians who once invoked them, but the human mind is not so easily demythologized. We have put aside supernatural miracles and we have replaced them with our own signs and wonders, which we can’t see for what they are precisely because we wholly inhabit the conceptual framework that justifies them. Here, Hume’s skepticism can be the help that we need to extricate ourselves from our presuppositions and thus to carry forward the project of a deflationary philosophy of history.
