Henri Frankfort on the Form of a Civilization

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

Monday 24 February 2025 is the 128^th anniversary of the birth of Henri Frankfort (24 February 1897 – 16 July 1954), who was born in Amsterdam on this date in 1897.

Frankfort was an archaeologist who directed excavations in Egypt and Iraq. He wrote a number of scholarly monographs and is especially known for his work on cylinder seals. I know about Frankfort because of his book The Birth of Civilization in the Near East. Like many of the books that have influenced me, I picked up the book in a used book store knowing nothing about it or the author. It looked interesting and I only paid 99 cents for it. After I bought it, it sat on my shelves for many years before I actually read it. But once I read it, I was immediate drawn in.

Frankfort had much more of a philosophical bent than, for example, his fellow archaeologist and elder contemporary Leonard Woolley, who also wrote widely on his work for a popular audience. The first chapter of The Birth of Civilization in the Near East, titled “The Study of Ancient Civilizations,” is at once fascinating and deeply confused—perhaps it’s fascinating because it’s confused. What do I mean by saying the Frankfort’s book is deeply confused? In it, Frankfort engages with the philosophies of history of Spengler and Toynbee, making of Frankfort’s book a document of its time, that is to say, a book that exhibits clashing influences of the as yet many unknowns of archaeology and the origins of civilization.

Spengler and Toynbee each seem to promise a framework for historical thought, but Frankfort can’t accept either of them. This, of course, would be true of almost every historian and archaeologist today, so that’s not usual. What’s odd about Frankfort is the way in which in engages with and then rejects both Spengler and Toynbee. In my episode on Spengler I quoted the following paragraph, which I characterized as an admixture of accuracy and invective:

“Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West was first published in 1917 and bears the sub-title, Outline of a Morphology of World History. This indicates that the aspect of form (as we have called it) is fully considered in his work. In this resides, as a matter of fact, the element of lasting worth of his sensational, arrogant, and pompous volumes. They were written as a reaction against the prevalent view of history which was prejudiced in two respects: it considered world history exclusively from the western standpoint; and it presumed, with evolutionary optimism, that history exemplified the progress of humanity. For Spengler the word ‘humanity’ is merely an empty phrase. The great civilizations are unconnected. They are self-contained organisms of so individual a nature that people who belong to one cannot understand the achievements and modes of thought of another. He maintains that not even in science does knowledge show accumulations transcending the limits of one civilization.”

Even while name-calling, Frankfort gets many things right about Spengler, so he must have read Spengler with some care. Frankfort repeatedly compares Spengler with Toynbee, often to the detriment of both:

“…the two men who have devoted their life’s work to the problem of the genesis of civilization have done so under a compelling awareness of its decline. Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee both wrote under the shadow of an impending world war; and their work is, to some extent, warped by their preoccupation with decay.”

And Frankfort makes a surprising claim about both of them:

“Spengler… writes, like Toynbee, under the spell of the nineteenth century and attempts to interpret history in the terms of science.”

Today, Spengler and Toynbee are rarely if ever said to be scientific, and they are never condemned for being too scientific. Frankfort not only says that they are trying to be scientific, but also he implies that this is a mistake. My assumption is that Frankfort was thinking of Henry Thomas Buckle, who, like Toynbee, was admired by many and criticized harshly by others for his attempt to treat history scientifically.

Again, few are the historians today who would judge Toynbee’s work to be scientific. But, for Frankfort, Spengler and Toynbee were trying too hard to be scientific and, again for Frankfort, history is not supposed to be scientific. He reiterates this with the claim that,

“Our criticism does not proceed from a positivistic belief in so-called ‘scientific’ historiography which is supposed first to assemble objective facts which are subsequently interpreted.”

This at least gives us a sketch of the straw-man that Frankfort was attacking. For Frankfort, scientific historiography is a naïve acceptance of the givenness of objective facts that can be first assembled without any agenda and later interpreted. If we pursue a method that is a variation on this theme, say, starting with an explanatory framework and then assembling facts in accord with it, we might not be guilty of what Frankfort called scientific historiography, though we would probably be guilty of confirmation bias.

Needless to say, archaeology has change quite a bit since Frankfort’s time. I could even argue that the change in archaeology has brought it closer to Frankfort, since the New Archaeology, also called Processual archaeology, emphasized not the assembly of facts followed by their interpretation, but the construction of a model prior to any excavation. There’s a joke about processualism that it would eventually end up hypothesizing what’s under the ground and publishing the model without bothering to dig the site. But processualism aspired to be scientific if it was anything, and in this sense archaeology grew apart from Frankfort’s criticism of scientific historiography.

I think most archaeologists today would prefer that their discipline be understood as a science and, in this spirit, they would welcome whatever science can be brought to history and civilization, though there is a legitimate question here of how exactly science ought to make itself felt in archaeology. In connection with this, it’s interesting to note that, while Frankfort cites and discusses Spengler and Toynbee, he doesn’t cite or discuss Wilhelm Windelband or Heinrich Rickert. Whether or not he was aware of their work I have no idea, but the position for which Frankfort is arguing seems to be an ideographic conception of history, as first explicitly formulated by Windelband. Frankfort’s implicit ideographical conception comes out in passages like the following:

“Generalizations based on limited historical experience, and theorizing, however ingeniously conducted, must fail to disclose the individual character of any one civilization or of any series of events.”

Frankfort also quotes Ruth Benedict with approval, and, knowing Ruth Benedict was a protégé of Franz Boas, who argued for cultural relativism as against cultural evolutionism, Ruth Benedict’s emphasis upon the contingent in the development of civilizations fits rather nicely together with the implicitly ideographic conception of history that Frankfort seems to have held.

If Frankfort is confused about the nature of science, which is what I have clearly implied, he’s certainly not the only one who is confused. Even today we have no resolution to these problems in the logical structure of science, which is a result of the fact that we have no science of science. We make distinctions like that between the nomothetic and the ideographic precisely because we don’t have a framework within which all the sciences can be understood. In my immediately previous episode on Schopenhauer, I suggested that there may be more than one way to nomothetic rigor, and it might also be the case that there’s more than one way to ideographic rigor, and that Frankfort was himself trying define his own form of ideographic rigor in history.

I can formulate my own historical hypothesis about how Frankfort’s views came about and conjecture that Frankfort read Spengler and Toynbee because these are popular names that any educated person of the period would have heard about, whether or not they have any contact with philosophy of history. When Frankfort went looking for an intellectual framework within which to formulate his views on history and archaeology, he turned to names that he had heard of, and so he read Spengler and Toynbee. As I said earlier, he read them carefully but ultimately rejected them, and I can certainly see why he did so. But if Frankfort had made the effort to go beyond popular names in philosophy of history like Spengler and Toynbee, he might have discovered the work of Windelband and Rickert, and here he might have found something closer to what he was searching for. Windelband might have given Frankfort the conceptual framework that he was trying to formulate for himself. That’s my conjecture, in any case.

But the problem of the logic of science, and the place of history within science, remains for Frankfort, as it remains for us. Relevant to this I want to draw attention to a particular passage in Frankfort where Frankfort wrote that Toynbee’s work,

“…obscures the fundamental fact that science can study individuals as members of a species only by ignoring their individual characteristics. The historian, following this course, would defeat the very purpose of his work.”

This is particularly interesting to me because the philosopher of biology Ernst Mayr has argued precisely to the contrary, that is, that biology definitely does study individuals as members of a species without losing sight of the individual characteristics. If we were to lose sight of the individual characteristics of biological individuals—the genetic diversity represented by each individual—we would cease doing biology in the contemporary sense. Individual variation is the engine that drives natural selection, so that natural selection cannot be understood without keeping the uniqueness of the individual within a biological population firmly in mind.

For Mayr, evolutionary thinking is what he called population thinking, not typological thinking, which latter is for Mayr a form of essentialism. Biological populations consist of unique individuals. Intuitively, we think of all of these individuals as exemplifying a type, and the type as being characterized by an essential property. Mayr emphasizes that species are not types, but populations consisting of unique individuals. Mayr wrote:

“The assumptions of population thinking are diametrically opposed to those of the typologist. The populationist stresses the uniqueness of everything in the organic world… even the same individual changes continuously throughout its lifetime and when placed into different environments. All organisms and organic phenomena are composed of unique features and can be described collectively only in statistical terms. Individuals, or any kind of organic entities, form populations of which we can determine the arithmetic mean and the statistics of variation. Averages are merely statistical abstractions, only the individuals of which the populations are composed have reality. The ultimate conclusions of the population thinker and of the typologist are precisely the opposite. For the typologist, the type… is real and the variation an illusion, while for the populationist the type… is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking at nature could be more different.”

Mayr introduces the idea of population thinking in a discussion of evolution, but as a principle of natural history we could well ask whether population thinking is relevant to human history also. Is it the case that no two historical events are exactly the same? This is nothing other than the ideographic conception of history that I mentioned earlier. If we liken species in biological thought to societies in historical thought, Windelband’s ideographic science and Mayr’s population thinking are closely parallel, and it would be worthwhile to follow up systematically on these parallelisms. But Frankfort was an archaeologist and not a systematic philosophical thinker, despite his philosophical bent, so his exposition remains mired in confusion.

Even though Frankfort’s book is confused, but there’s still a lot to be learned from it. One the one hand, you can learn how an archaeologist struggles with philosophies of history that represent a tradition of thought about history and civilization that has its own strengths but which is often difficult to reconcile with conceptions native to archaeology. I could say that it’s difficult to reconcile philosophies of history like those of Spengler and Toynbee with conceptions of natural history that most would suppose to be native to a study like archaeology, but, as we’ve seen, Frankfort believes that Spengler and Toynbee have both gone wrong by trying to be too scientific. So it remains a problem how exactly Frankfort ought to be positioned in relation to scientific archaeology.

And on the other hand, you can learn from the archaeological expertise that Frankfort brings to his discussion of history and civilization. I have myself referenced Frankfort’s claim that the distinctive artistic style of a given civilization can develop relatively rapidly and early in the development of that civilization, and remain virtually unchanged for the life of the civilization. In The Birth of Civilization in the Near East Frankfort wrote:

“Flinders Petrie and others have maintained that every significant trait of Egyptian culture had been evolved before the end of the Third Dynasty.”

This is true of Egypt, which Frankfort used as his example, and it’s also obviously true of Byzantium. I’ve said previously that, unless you’re a specialist, it’s difficult to tell the difference between an icon painted at the beginning of Byzantine civilization and one painted at the end of the Byzantine civilization. A millennium of history seems to have left their art untouched. But there are other civilizations for which this is less true, and they present a problem, or, instead of a problem, we can use Frankfort’s implicit criterion as a principle of demarcation among civilizations. But even if we distinguish a new civilization each time a new style emerges, there are still problem cases. Modern Western civilization has changed art styles repeatedly, and it’s not clear that each of these new styles represents a new civilization. Further, we still sometimes put up buildings based on ancient Greek styles, so that we can trace an unbroken continuity of style from classical antiquity to the present, implying a single civilization through all that time.

These problems are closely related to what Frankfort calls the form of a civilization, which comprehends every significant trait of a culture. Earlier I quoted Frankfort on Spengler that Spengler’s concern with the morphology of civilizations was pretty much the only redeeming quality of his work. Frankfort likes the term “morphology” because he believes civilizations to be defined by what he calls their form. Chapter II of Frankfort leads with a summary of Frankfort’s thoughts on the form of a civilization:

At the end of our last chapter we said that the study of the birth of a civilization means watching the emergence of its “form.” We have also seen that this “form” is elusive, that it is not a concrete mould, or a standard which we can apply to our observations to see whether they conform with it. We have described it as “a certain consistency in orientation, a cultural style.” Recognizing it amounts to discovering a point of view from where seemingly unrelated facts acquire coherence and meaning. Even so the “form” of a civilization remains intangible; it is implicit in the preoccupations and valuations of the people. It imparts to their achievements—to their arts and institutions, their literature, their theology—something distinct and final, something which has its own peculiar perfection.

What makes a given civilization a civilization, and which it therefore shares with other civilizations, and also what distinguishes one civilization from another, which is not shared with other civilizations, is the form of a civilization. A civilization has a form, but one form is distinct from another form. Everyone who works on this problem runs into our lack of theoretical terms to describe civilization. Alfred North Whitehead in his book Modes of Thought formulated what he called the fallacy of the perfect dictionary:

“There is an insistent presupposition continually sterilizing philosophic thought. It is the belief, the very natural belief, that mankind has consciously entertained all the fundamental ideas which are applicable to its experience. Further it is held that human language, in single words or in phrases, explicitly expresses these ideas. I will term this presupposition, The Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary.”

This was in part a response to ordinary language philosophers like J. L. Austin, for whom ordinary language was the final court of appeal for philosophical claims. Whitehead rejected this and said that philosophers can enlarge the dictionary. This is what Frankfort was trying to do when he introduced a new meaning for the old word “form”—he was seeking to enlarge the dictionary with a heretofore unprecedented meaning for the term.

Form as Frankfort uses it is what the logician W. E. Johnson called a determinable. The idea of a determinable is an interesting one that isn’t very well known. Determinables are distinct from class terms. An individual is a member of a class if it shares a property with every other member of the class. An individual is an instance of a determinable if it is different from every other determinable. Johnson argued that:

“…two such propositions as ‘Red is a colour’ and ‘Plato is a man’ appear to be identical in form; in both, the subject appears as definite and singular, and, in both, the notion of a class to which these singular subjects are referred appears to be involved.”

Both ‘Red is a colour’ and ‘Plato is a man’ place a specific term under a general term, but Johnson points out that ‘Plato is a man’ is an instance of class membership, while for the relation ‘Red is a color’ he introduces the terminology of determinable and determinate. “Color” is a determinable; “red” is a determinate. Johnson generalizes this beyond colors:

“What is here true of colour is true of shape, pitch, feeling-tone, pressure, and so on: the ground for grouping determinates under one and the same determinable is not any partial agreement between them that could be revealed by analysis, but the unique and peculiar kind of difference that subsists between the several determinates under the same determinable, and which does not subsist between any one of them and an adjective under some other determinable.”

Johnson limits himself to examples from sensory experience, but it’s easy to see that there are other examples of determinables, like historical events, and it’s also easy to see how similar this is to what Ernst Mayr called population thinking. We could say that a coronation is a determinable, and the coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day, AD 800, was a determinate that falls under the determinable we call a coronation. In this way we might be able to make significant use of determinable in the study of history and civilization, since we always run into the problems that Frankfort ran into when he tried to define the form of a civilization.

Frankfort was using “form” as in the “form of a civilization” as a determinable, which makes it possible for every civilization to have a form, but for every form to be distinct from every other form. The civilization of Ancient Egypt represents a determinate that falls under the determinable civilization. It wouldn’t be difficult to assemble more examples of historical determinables, but it would be a lot of work to do this in a systematic way.

W. E. Johnson’s conception of determinables and determinates as distinct from classes and their members, Wilhelm Windelband’s conception of an ideographic science as distinct from nomothetic science, and Ernst Mayr’s conception of population thinking as distinct from typological thinking, all provide us with examples of how science can be developed beyond our conventional conception of what ought to constitute a science. Again, because we have no science of science we can’t adjudicate among these several approaches to scientific thought, but we can further develop them. Frankfort could have developed his ideas further and perhaps fruitfully if he had read beyond Spengler and Toynbee. I can’t really fault Frankfort because he accomplished a lot in his short life. He died before making it to the age I am now.

Wittgenstein said of himself, “With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.” In the same spirit we could say of Frankfort that with his full archaeological rucksack he could only climb slowly up the mountain of philosophy of history. But we now, as Frankfort’s intellectual heirs and assigns, can take up the problems Frankfort posed himself and try to answer them in the light of a conception of science expanded by the insights of Johnson, Windelband, and Mayr, if only we take the time to do so.

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