Eugene HaltonUniversity of Notre Dame | ND · Department of Sociology
Eugene Halton
Doctor of Philosophy
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Introduction
Education
September 1973 - June 1979
September 1968 - May 1972
Publications
Publications (83)
In 1873, 75 years before Karl Jaspers published his theory of the Axial Age in 1949, unknown to Jaspers and to contemporary scholars today, Scottish folklorist John Stuart Stuart-Glennie elaborated the first fully developed and nuanced theory of what he termed “the Moral Revolution” to characterize the historical shift emerging roughly around 600 B...
The Meaning of Things explores the meanings of household possessions for three generation families in the Chicago area, and the place of materialism in American culture. Now regarded as a keystone in material culture studies, Halton's first book is based on his dissertation and coauthored with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. First published by Cambridge U...
Most discussions of art have traditionally focused on the intent of the artist or on the realization of his or her idea in the object. This chapter, however, is concerned with the wide range of meanings of personal art objects in the home, ranging from gifts, mementos, and status markers, to aesthetic meanings. It represents the author’s early atte...
Jürgen Habermas’s two-volume Theory of Communicative Action is at once an attempt to develop a socially-based theory of action as an alternative to the subjectivist and individualist underpinnings of much of social theory, a “two-level concept of society that connects the ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system’ paradigms,” a critical theory of modernity which ret...
Contemporary semiotic has been greatly influenced by the philosophy of Charles Morris. Morris undertook to synthesize some of the principal philosophical movements of his time in a new “science of science” based upon the study of scientific method as a sign system. The branches of this metascience were to be “syntactics,” “semantics,” and “pragmati...
English manuscript version of Afterword to German translation of Victor Turner's The Ritual Process.
The Ritual Process is a pivotal book in the body of Victor Turner's works. The first three chapters, drawn from Turner's Henry Morgan lectures at the University of Rochester, reveal the richness and subtlety of his analysis of tribal ritual and soc...
Notes on and excerpted quotations from Eugene Halton's theory of the self (and mind) as continuous with and involved in its objective surroundings as extensions of the self. These notes provide evidence for my multiple works as the earlier basis for what Russell Belk later called "the extended self" in 1988, for which he got credit while my origina...
Dematerialization can be taken variously as meaning less materials used in objects technically, a less materialistic outlook on consumption, or as the virtualization of communication and interaction. These ideas are reviewed here. Considering material culture and technoculture in this light raises questions about contemporary materialism and techno...
Consumer socialization, as will be further defined and discussed here, is the process whereby one acquires the skills to consume, as well as the values associated with being a consumer. This can involve identification with the role of consumer in consumption society or a critical awareness of the problematic nature of being a consumer and of consum...
The rise and legacy of world religions out of that period centered roughly around 500-600 BCE, what John Stuart-Glennie termed in 1873 the moral revolution, and Karl Jaspers later, in 1949, called the axial age, has been marked by heightened ideas of transcendence. Yet ironically, the world itself, in the literal sense of the actual earth, took on...
Material culture and technoculture not only provide openings to study culture, but raise questions about contemporary materialism and technology more generally as well. Material culture tells a story, though usually not the whole story.
The meanings of things are various, and finding out what they are requires a variety of approaches, from simply a...
When painter Fritz Janschka arrived from Vienna to teach at Byrn Mawr College in October, 1949, he entered a culture seemingly as alien to his art as one can imagine. Janschka is one of the cofounders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, a group of painters who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna shortly after World War Two. The fa...
I claim that the underlying premises of the modern era - e-r-a - are false in a way that carries catastrophic consequences. Despite the many genuine achievements of the modern world—which I for one would not want to live without—the spirit of modernity has been one which denigrated the basic conditions of human being.
In the name of freedom and kn...
A Long Way From Home: Automatic Culture in Domestic and Civic Life criticizes tendencies toward automatism in American culture and calls for a recentering of domestic and civic life as a means to revitalize social life.
Keywords: Automatic Culture, Autonomy Versus Automatic, Moral Homelessness, Materialism, The Great American Centrifuge, Consuming...
Published in Existenz, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2018. A full pdf is available on the journal Existenz website:
https://www.existenz.us/volume13No2.html
Thus far most of the scholarship on the axial age has followed Karl Jaspers’ denial that nature could be a significant source and continuing influence in the historical development of human consciousness....
This chapter examines the lost legacy of John Stuart-Glennie (1841-1910), a contributor to the founding of sociology and a major theorist, whose work was known in his lifetime but disappeared after his death. Stuart-Glennie was praised by philosopher John Stuart Mill, was a friend of and influence upon playwright George Bernard Shaw, and was an act...
History can be understood as involving a problematic interplay between the long-term legacy of human evolution, still tempered into the human body today, and the shorter-term heritage of civilization from its beginnings to the present. Each of us lives in a tension between our indigenous bodies and our civilized selves, between the philosophy of th...
Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First Nation Know-How for Global Flourishing’s contributors describe ways of being that reflect a worldview that has guided humanity for 99% of human history; they describe the practical traditional wisdom stemming from Nature-based relational cultures that were or are guided by this worldview. Such cultures did not c...
"Music is Rhythm, Rhythm is Life." This maxim, uttered by former Motown drummer Bill "Sticks" Nicks to my class and me a few years back, opens a portal to what being human involves. Most accounts of what it means to be human make cognitive capacities, language and reflective thinking, the be-all and end-all of human distinction. But think about it:...
The word spectacle means something that is viewed, with the connotation of something impressive being displayed, a “show” to be viewed by numbers of people. The term “spectacles of consumption” may refer to specific events or places linked with consumption or to a more general sense of consumption as a pervasive visualizing ideology, which presents...
In 1873, John Stuart-Glennie elaborated a theory of "the moral revolution" to characterize the historical shift from roughly 600 BCE in a variety of civilizations, as part of a critical theory of history. Stuart-Glennie's account of the phenomena later described by Karl Jaspers as "the axial age" preceded Jaspers by 75 years, and provides an origin...
The human body, psyche, and social relations can be understood as the result of adaptations and emergent modes of conduct in the course of evolution. Frequently adaptation is viewed in the light of a utilitarian conception of survival, but I wish to pursue another perspective, what I call dramatic evolution (Halton 2013). Dramatic evolution, though...
Karl Jaspers published his theory of an “Axial Age” 1949, which was translated into English in 1953. He claimed credit for elaborating the first full theory of the axial age. Yet 75 years earlier, in 1873, unknown to Jaspers and to contemporary scholars today, folklorist John Stuart-Glennie elaborated a fully developed and nuanced theory of what th...
Stuart-Glennie, Jaspers, and Mumford not only all wrote on the moral revolution/axial age, but also drew from their discussions of that revolutionary age its place in a potential transformation in the future, which this chapter discusses. These were not histories of a transformative but finished chapter of human development, but rather of a still u...
Stuart-Glennie, Jaspers, and Mumford all took the implications of the moral revolution as more than merely historical, as holding significance for understanding contemporary life and the future of humankind. This chapter turns to the contemporary context of the ideas of these figures, first by briefly examining Robert Bellah’s recent book, Religion...
Stuart-Glennie did not limit his theory of history to the history of ideas, but also proposed to substitute for “the absolutist conception of the atom an entirely relative term, bioticon, fit for life, lively, of or pertaining to life.” This chapter describes his idea of the bioticon, its relation to panzoonism and his causal theory of history. Stu...
Mumford was one of the first thinkers after Jaspers to elaborate on the idea of the axial age, in 1956, along with Eric Voegelin, who first took up the theme of the axial age the year after Mumford in 1957. Though Mumford wrote on the axial age early, a few years after Jaspers’ publication, his multiple writings on the idea over the years have rema...
Religions, as Stuart-Glennie conceived it, is rooted in intuitions and conceptions of causation, developed out of relations to the physical and social environments. This starting point allowed a perceptive, and experiential element to religion as expressive of life-experience, not simply of human sociality per se. Stuart-Glennie characterized the o...
Prehistory was for Jaspers a “dark world,” literally in the sense that he did not think much evidence was available, and theoretically in the sense that he did not see it contributing to the development of human spirituality. He views the civilizations out of which the axial figures emerged as “little islands of light” in an otherwise unilluminated...
In the words of Charles Peirce from 1901, “man is but a degenerate monkey, with a paranoic talent for self-satisfaction, no matter what scrapes he may get himself into, calling them ‘civilization…’” Peirce’s concept of degenerate monkey draws attention both to our neotenous or prolonged newborn-like nature as “degenerate” in the mathematical sense...
Symbolic consciousness and communication is generally regarded as the most distinguishing feature of humanity. Anatomically modern humans, technically known as homo sapiens sapiens, might be more accurately defined as homo symbolicus, man the symbolizer. For it is in the emergence of symboling that the activities that characterize humanity fully bo...
The author criticizes ways in which academic disciplines, in particular sociology, can be viewed as skewed toward bureaucratized intellect and its requirements and rewards, rather than toward scholarly intellectual life and research. Drawing from the Chicago traditions of sociology and pragmatism, as well as his own experience of them, Halton goes...
If pragmatists conceive of thought as an internal dialogue, then why not externalize that thought as a dialogue in the form of letters to the major pragmatists concerning their ideas in the contemporary world. This piece consists of letters fired off to William James, Charles Peirce, George Herbert Mead, and John Dewey, concerning key ideas from ea...
This article is a bibliographical entry in the Lexicon Grammaticorum: A Bio-Bibliographical Companion to the History of Linguistics.
More and more information is pumped into our media-saturated world every day, yet Americans seem to know less and less. In a society where who you are is defined by what you buy, and where we prefer to experience reality by watching it on TV, Eugene Halton argues something has clearly gone wrong. Luckily Halton, with scalpel-sharp wit in one hand a...
The conceit that either mind is reducible to matter or that mind is utterly ethereal is rooted in a mind-versus-matter dichotomy that can be characterized as the modern error, a fatally flawed fallacy rooted in the philosophy and culture of nominalism. A Peircean semiotic outlook, applied to an understanding of social life, provides a new and full-...
The Trumpeter, Vol 23, 3, 2007, 45-77.
The conditions of hunting and gathering through which one line of primates evolved into humans form the basis of what I term the wild self, a self marked by developmental needs of prolonged human neoteny and by deep attunement to the profusion of communicative signs of instinctive intelligence in which relativ...
Much has been written about the various strategies that marketers use to target variously situated consumers in contemporary society. The more sophisticated of these strategies rest upon the notion that each consumer, as a self, represents a site of contestation over the very definition of his/her selfhood. Whereas the marketers’ objective is to cre...
Charles Peirce claimed that logically "every true universal, every continuum, is a living and conscious being." Such a claim is precisely what hunter-gatherers believe: a world-view depicted as animism. Suppose animism represents a sophisticated world-view, ineradicably embodied in our physical bodies, and that Peirce's philosophy points toward a n...
Drawing from Peircean semiotics, from the Greek conception of phronesis, and from considerations of bodily awareness as a basis of reasonableness, I attempt to show how the living gesture touches our deepest signifying nature, the self, and public life. Gestural bodily awareness, more than knowl-edge, connects us with the very conditions out of whi...
Pragmatism is the distinctive contribution of American thought to philosophy. It is a movement that attracted much attention in the early part of the twentieth-century, went into decline, and reemerged in the last part of the century. Part of the difficulty in defining pragmatism is that misconceptions of what pragmatism means have abounded since i...
Robert Bellah: "This is an original, incisive, and badly needed book. In prose as vigorous as his argument, Halton addresses issues urgent in many disciplines, as well as in our common culture."
In this radical critique of contemporary social theory, Eugene Halton argues that both modernism and postmodernism are damaged philosophies whose accepta...
In dreams we feel like fish in water. Occasionally we surface from a dream and skim an eye over the world on shore, but we again descend with yearning haste, for it is only in the depths that we feel good. During these brief sorties we notice on dry land a strange creature, more sluggish than ourselves, accustomed to breathing in a manner different...
NOTE: A revised and enlarged version of this article appears as Chapter 7: "The Neopragmatic Acquiescence: Habermas and Rorty,” in my book, Bereft of Reason.
Philosophical pragmatism has resurfaced as a significant part of intellectual life in the past decade. What had been a body of thought reduced largely to the influence of Mead in academic soci...
Current conceptions of meaning and culture tend toward extreme forms of disembodied abstraction, indicating an alienation from the original, earthy meaning of the word culture. I turn to the earlier meanings of the word and why the “cultic,” the living impulse to meaning, was and remains essential to a conception of culture as semeiosis or sign-act...
Across several disciplines there has been renewed interest in philosophical pragmatism in the past few years. What had been a body of thought reduced largely to the influence of George Herbert Mead in sociology, has reemerged with significance for semiotics, philosophy, literary criticism, and other disciplines. The reasons for a renewed interest i...
With possible exceptions for pets, stuffed animals, and plants, we moderns do not commonly regard household possessions as animate personalities. Is there a sense in which the animate world of things characterized by animism is applicable to the exchange and possession of material objects in contemporary life? The domestic environment does speak to...
The twentieth-century obsession with meaning often fails to address the central questions: Why are we here? Where are we going? In this radical critique of modernity, Eugene (Rochberg-) Halton resurrects pragmatism, pushing it beyond its traditional formulations to meet these questions head on. Drawing on the works of the early pragmatists such as...
Clearly many gender role stereotypes and social institutions are based on a family metaphor, such as in medicine, where the role of nurse traditionally has been maternal, that of doctor as instrumental and unemotional, and that of the patient as a kind of child. This chapter shows how pets, specifically cats, can become significant partners in a th...
Psychoanalytic object relations theory and symbolic interactionism both emphasize the mediating role of representations in the socialization process, yet the relationship between the external environment and the constitution of these representations is quite different in the two approaches. The inherent subjectivism of the Freudian tradition is cri...
The tendency in semiotics toward unnecessary abstractionism and antinaturalism is criticized. More broadly, a transformation is proposed from abstractionism, with its fetishism of signs, to an animism of signs in which the imagination and the signs it gives birth to not only reconnect with the biocultural heritage, but also animate an idea of cultu...
J. David Lewis and Richard L. Smith provide a history of pragmatism and Chicago sociology based on the positions of realism and nominalism. This issue is indeed the key to understanding pragmatism’s foundations in Charles Peirce’s original formulation. Lewis and Smith claim that there are two pragmatisms, a realistic one characterized by Peirce and...
Two of the approaches at the forefront of contemporary sociological interest in meaning, symbolic interactionism and structuralism, share an interest in the role of signs and symbols in social life, yet take radically different standpoints concerning the nature of signs and the locus of meaning. Symbolic interactionists stress the ongoing process o...
Qualitative immediacy (also termed quality in its philosophical sense and esthetic quality) is of fundamental importance within the pragmatic conception of meaning as interpretive act, and yet it has been virtually ignored by social scientists. The concept is traced through its foundations in Peirce's philosophy, its development in Dewey's theory o...
The premise of my research in this dissertation is that whereas people live in physical environments, we create cultural environments within these: we continually personalize and humanize the given environment as a way of adapting to it and creating order and meaning. The primary purpose of my research is to map out a comprehensive view of the cult...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1979. Bibliography: leaves 167-173. Microfilm.
This article [one of my first publications] is an exploration of ritual interaction in Beverly Simons play, Crabdance. My interest is anthropological: Simons reveals the grotesqueries of a modern world where the forms of relationship and symbolic life have been undermined by a de-humanizing consumerism.
Much of our community life is under the infl...
This paper was the very first publication based on a series of pilot interviews I conducted that grew into my dissertation on The Meaning of Cherished Household Possessions. That dissertation then later developed into the book, The Meaning of Things, coauthored with my dissertation advisor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This initial paper is a case stud...
Projects
Projects (2)
Description
Over the years I have written on related themes of possessions and materialism, consumption, automatic culture and technology. My 1979 dissertation on The Meaning of Cherished Household Possessions later developed into the 1981 book, The Meaning of Things, coauthored with my dissertation advisor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. That work became a keystone in the emerging field of material culture studies, and has been translated into four languages.
A number of articles, and chapters in my 1986 book, Meaning and Modernity, also developed my ideas on possessions and materialism further, such as that: “We create environments that are extensions of our selves; that serve to tell us who we are, and act as role models for what we can become” (cited in Kron, 1983). As I put it in 1984, “Valued material possessions . . . act as signs of the self that are essential in their own right for its continued cultivation, and hence the world of meaning that we create for ourselves, and that creates our selves, extends literally into the objective surroundings.” My idea expressed here of tangible belongings and their meanings as extensions of the self was cited by Russell Belk as the source for the term “extended self.”
I also developed ideas of relations with possessions as a form of semiotic animism; that the self can truly live in its relations to its significant objects and habitats.
In my 2008 book, The Great Brain Suck, I mapped out ways in which the promise of techno-consumerism disguised systemic effects of what could be called “self depletion,” or as I termed it, “brain suck."
I am continuing these and other ideas today in writings which further explore relations between people and things: objects, devices, virtual things, and materialism as a mentalism.
From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution was the title of my book on John Stuart-Glennie, who proposed a comprehensive theory of the phenomena described by Karl Jaspers as the Axial Age some seventy-five years before Jaspers. My project continues with further writings on the significance of the moral revolution/axial age.
