Eugene Halton

This essay from 1999, republished in Notre Dame Magazine online in July 2023, explores how the 1950s were a time of fundamental transformations in American society, a time when the United States went fully megatechnic. The hugely increased power of military, corporate-industrial and “big science” institutions developed during the 1950s signaled the transformation to megatechnic America, with atomic bombs and nuclear testing, automobiles and televisions as key symbols of that transformation. Figures such as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller illustrated the battle between national security dictates controlling nuclear bomb testing and responsible science. Since the Second World War the United States has been problematically guided by a power-oriented culture, which, in the names of national security and convenience, has tended to reshape America toward an increasingly hierarchical model of society based on the system requirements of a machine. This same era gave birth to a generalized economic prosperity in the United States, to the civil rights movement, to feminism, literary and artistic innovations, and to other openings of public equality and freedom. Yet the magnification of bureaucratic-corporate structures in that postwar, cold war prosperity has ultimately tended to restructure America against the basic requirements of democratic community.

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 Halton’s multiple works as the earlier basis for what Russell Belk later called "the extended self" in 1988, for which he got credit while Halton’s original ideas were marginalized or excluded. In addition, Halton also developed some of these ideas as "critical animism," (see text) a predecessor to what is now termed, "the new animism." First example: "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." Eugene Halton, quoted in Joan Kron, Home Psych, 1983.

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 social life. In the third chapter, he concentrates on the aspects of liminality and communitas found in Ndembu ritual and expands these in the remainder of the book to universal categories of human experience. His masterful ethnography opens up to reveal the fundamental reality of the subjunctive mood in human affairs: the ritual process. In Turner's analyses of the Isoma and Wubwang'a rituals of the Ndembu of Northwestern Zambia, one sees the fantastic interplay between human affliction and symbolic renewal, between human communities and a natural environment teeming with signification. The Ndembu are revealed to be a people with a deep appreciation of the complexity of existence, and endowed with a sophisticated technics of meaning, a vast architectonic of felt, expressive forms through which to journey to those borderlands beyond human comprehensibility: death, the dead, the call of the mother-line, fecundity, transformation, the interstices of social structure. Turner reveals himself to be an initiate, not only to the rites revealed to him by the Ndembu, but to the centrality of ritual itself in tribal society and human affairs. Trained in the British structural-functionalist approach to social anthropology, Turner notes how the incessant call of the drums made him feel that he "was always on the outside looking in." Soon, however, Turner and his wife and collaborator Edith discarded their theoretical ear-plugs and answered the invitation of the drums. As observers and co-participants in Ndembu ritual the Turners' began to blaze a trail toward a new anthropology.

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 Mead and a nominalistic one (which Lewis and Smith claim has no value) illustrated by James and Dewey. They argue that Chicago sociology, including Herbert Blumer, was under the influence of the nominalistic pragmatism, and that Mead exercised little influence during his lifetime. The argument is based on an ahistorical, a priori "metatheoretical" realism-nominalism distinction that claims to be based on Peirce's discussions of realism and nominalism. Yet the authors support their understanding of realism by appealing to Mead’s discussion of “contact experience,” and claim that Peirce’s realism must be based in non-symbolic “pure resistance.” Ironically, such a view represents the main tenet of nominalism, that only individual particulars are real, and amounts to a denial of Peirce’s category of Thirdness as reducible to the “pure resistance” of Secondness. Lewis and Smith attempt to correct the subjectivist tendencies of symbolic interactionism yet would problematically replace them with an equally subjective view of what constitutes objectivity: individual reaction with an object. American Sociology and Pragmatism tends to present a monistic universe hinging on a nominalistic interpretation of realism, a single-visioned view that places more emphasis on labels than on the substance and pragmatic import of a theorist's thoughts, resulting in serious distortions pro and con. Yet it also has opened up for serious questioning the whole foundations of symbolic interactionism and Mead's place within pragmatism and Chicago sociology. Though the authors claim to be "revisionists," it seems to me that they are also "fundamentalists" in safely preserving Mead at the center of a history they claim he did not significantly influence. In my opinion the ongoing controversy will result in a broader understanding of the antecedents of contemporary symbolic interactionism, one that will call for Mead's now dominating role as the sole representative of pragmatism for many American sociologists to be reevaluated and placed within the context of the quite substantial contributions of Peirce, James, and Dewey.

Qualitative immediacy (also termed quality in its philosophical sense and aesthetic 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 of aesthetic experience, and its relation to the general pragmatic conception of the self. The importance of the "I" in Mead's view of the self is seen as similar to Firstness in Peirce and aesthetic experience in Dewey. Those turning to qualitative approaches ought to consider qualitative immediacy as a genuine addition to our understanding of human communication.

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-action. Culture and biology are often treated by social scientists as though they were oil and water, not to be mixed. I am fully aware of the assumed nature-culture dichotomy, but I reject it, not because I am a sociobiologist, quite the contrary, but rather because I am a semiotician, and my studies of signs have led me toward a critical reconstruction of the concepts of nature and culture. In my perspective, culture is a living, social metaboly of signs, not limited to a convention but in transaction with the inmost recesses of the person, and with the qualitative, physical, and significant environment. The question is not whether culture is a “system” or not, but whether we shall continue to conceive of culture as an inert, mechanical system or code, incapable of self-critical cultivation, or as a “living system”--a way of living--fully open to contingency, spontaneity, purposive growth and decay. Putting the “cult” back into culture requires a reconception of the relations between human biology and meaning, and between non-discursive, non-rational reason and modern rationality. Such a reconception involves considering how the technics of the biosocial human body itself form the primary source of culture.

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 a diminished role as a central element of religious sensibility in the world religions, particularly in the Abrahamic religions. Given the issue today of ecological unsustainability, including massive die-offs of wildlife and ever-increasing global human population and consumption, the legacy of those world religions face the question I consider here: Can religion transcend the earth in the long run? With the Axial Age/Moral Revolution, comes the possibility of transcendence of the world per se. The moral revolution/Axial Age represented significant changes in civilization, to be sure, but it can also be taken, as I do, as a second phase in the radical shift to anthropocentric mind already begun with the advent of agriculturally based civilization. The axial ideal of transcendence connects to a larger ideal, manifest not only in the legacies of the world religions but in contemporary science and technology, of a philosophy of escape from the earth. I show how ideas of axial transcendence, celebrated by scholars such as Jaspers and Bellah, nevertheless involve an unacknowledged tragic cost, the forgetting of the earth and its lessons and limits as central to what I have termed elsewhere, “sustainable wisdom.”

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 asking people what their things mean or observing how they use or don’t use them, to backtracking their history, or contextualizing them in broader cultural context. The transition from hunter-gatherer life to that of agriculturally-based civilization some twelve thousand or so years ago was a great watershed of consciousness, not only radically altering the relation to the living environment, but also producing the origins of materialism. One of civilization’s dubious distinctions was to introduce poverty as well as property and wealth. Consumption is clearly a driving force on the globe today, powering economies, promising identities, providing a cornucopia of commodities. Technoculture is at its center, both in material devices and in the ideas they communicate about how what one has affects what one is and can be. The problem of materialism is not whether to have materials for living, but in allowing them to become goals in themselves.

This piece continues ideas developed in my essay, Mind Matters, through responding to the critique of that essay by Peter K. Manning. Manning cannot conceive that human conduct involves full-bodied semiosis rather than disembodied conceptualism, and that the study of human signification requires a full-bodied understanding. The ancient Greek root phren, basis for the concept of phronesis, is rooted in the heart-lungs-solar plexus basis of bodily awareness, and provides a metaphor for a discussion of bio-developmental, biosemiotic capacities as crucial for human culture. Manning’s use of Wittgenstein is contrasted with the outlook of Charles Peirce. The intense attunement to and reverence for animals and plants in hunter-gatherer peoples is more than some conceptual collective representations system or interaction order or psychological belief system, explainable by Durkheim or Goffman, or Jung’s universal structure of the “collective unconscious,” or by neural net theory. It exemplifies how those peoples are in real learning relationships to the instinctive intelligence of their habitats, deep learning expressed not only in trial-and-error experience but also in the sense of wonder, communicated in ritual life. Mind is found literally in those transactions, not in isolate brains or disembodied conceptualism.

The author criticizes ways in which academic disciplines 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 philosophical pragmatism, as well as his own experience of them, Halton goes on to appraise ways in which these traditions have tended to become contracted to limited textbook canons. Donald Levine’s Visions of the Sociological Tradition provides a case in which the broad influences of European intellectual traditions, for example, Nietzsche, are included in his sociological history of European sociological traditions, whereas similar influences, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thorstein Veblen, Jane Addams, Lewis Mumford, or even C. Wright Mills, are excluded from his account of the American and Chicago traditions. Admitting that academic disciplines represent skewed forms of bureaucratized intellect rather than progressive traditions allows one to admit those who are not members of the club into the dialogue of social thought and the social sciences.

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 fantastic realists cultivated a precisely controlled craft informed by traditional methods and modernist sensibilities, incorporating collectively the entire range of Western painting, past and present, in their attempts to come to grips with a shattered world. New York Abstract Expressionism and Viennese Fantastic Realism, two mid-twentieth century art movements, represent diametrically opposed ways of painting, yet both schools sprang out of surrealism. The Fantastic Realists were widely known in Europe and hardly known in America. Given the dominant abstractionist tendencies of post-World War Two art this is understandable. For these reasons Janschka’s openness to the techniques of the New York School in the early 1950s forms an unlikely meeting point of seemingly irreconcilable positions, one suggestive of possibilities for the meeting of abstraction and figuration, and more broadly, for addressing contemporary dehumanizing abstractionism, which I discuss in this essay.

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 knowledge, the modern era gave birth precisely to the non-empathically responding world, the schizoid ghost in the machine, which now threatens to dissolve both humanity and the natural world. We must find the means to correct the mistaken premises which form the modern error. The time has come to find a new way of renewing reason, a project requiring a transformation of values and outlook as vast as those which took place in the axial age or the modern age. The renewal of reason will involve opening the gates to the entire historical and prehistorical heritage of humankind, to renew the archaic values of family, household, neighborhood and local community and the sympathetic relations they engender, to renew those organic and communicative essences of play, dreaming and mother-infant nurturance which are our human-mammalian legacy and crucial for the development of the spontaneous self, and also making a life-sustaining world culture with self-critical institutions capable of supporting and protecting the vitality of local ways. Without the hope of such a thoroughgoing transformation, we are likely to continue to go the way of the earth’s ozone shield into corrosive self-extinction

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 retains the enlightenment ideal of rationally-grounded societies, and a theory of meaning rooted in a developmental logic of world­historical rationality. Habermas seeks to find a via media between totalitarian closure and relativism, to show why the modernist project of a universal reason is still viable, and to propose a “public” discourse of rationally-grounded argumentative speech, or communicative action, as his answer. Despite the widespread attention Habermas’s work has received, and despite my sympathy for issues Habermas has raised, I show why his project is fundamentally flawed because of its uncritical assumption that only critical rationality can provide a legitimate standard for communicative reason: reasonableness is far more than that constricted view. These flaws become particularly evident in examining his analyses of myth, action, lifeworld, George Herbert Mead, and the “three spheres” of modernity.

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. Yet more than a half century before Jaspers, the originator of the first nuanced theory of what Jaspers termed the axial age, John Stuart-Glennie, mapped out a contrasting philosophy of history that allowed a central role to nature in historical human development. This essay concerns issues related to my book, From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution, and begins with a discussion of how I came to uncover the forgotten work of John Stuart-Glennie. Although Jaspers and Stuart-Glennie each drew similar conclusions regarding many of the facts of the moral revolution respectively the Axial Age, there are significant differences in their philosophies of history, concerning, for example the problem, whether history can be regarded deterministically or as an open whole, and whether nature can be a source of profound spiritual significance and even transcendence or whether that realm is limited to historical consciousness. I also briefly discuss two other overlooked contributors, namely D. H. Lawrence, who wrote on the phenomena twenty years before Jaspers, and Lewis Mumford, who is one of the first writers to draw from Jaspers' work. I then respond to four diverse scholarly essays on my book, delineating in the process my own philosophy of history as a progress in precision, paradoxically counteracted by a regressive contraction of mind.

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 active contributor to the fledgling Sociological Society in London in the first decade of the twentieth century. Stuart-Glennie’s most significant idea in hindsight was his theory of what he termed in 1873, “the moral revolution,” delineating the revolutionary changes across different civilizations in the period 2,500 years ago, roughly centered around 500-600 BCE. This is the era currently known as “the axial age,” after Karl Jaspers coined that term in 1949. Stuart-Glennie’s theory of the moral revolution is framed within a three-stage view of history, the first of which involved an outlook he characterized as “panzooinism,” and sometimes as “naturianism.” This theory of aboriginal and early civilizational outlooks is also notable and worthy of consideration in contemporary context, and as a contribution to “the new animism.” The chapter concludes by considering whether the moral revolution/axial age, whose effects have continued for the past 2500 years, is sustainable in the age of the unsustainable Anthropocene.

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 relatively “unmatured” hominids found themselves immersed. The passionate attunement to, and inquiry into, earth-drama, in tracking, hunting, foraging, rhythming, singing, and other arts/sciences, provided the trail to becoming human, and provide external grammatical structures that became the basis of human language and animate mind. I outline my new philosophy of history as a progress in precision, counteracted by a regressive contraction of mind. The progress associated with history since the beginning of agriculturally-based civilizations can be considered as a regressive contraction from animate mind of our hunter-gatherer evolutionary past, to anthropocentric mind, and finally to the ghost in the machine world-view of mechanico-centric mind. Contemporary consumption culture represents an inversion of the original conditions of the human self, and indeed, targets aspects of developmental neoteny to condition conformity to its rational-mechanical system imperatives.

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 BCE in a variety of civilizations, most notably ancient China, India, Judaism, and Greece, as part of a broader critical philosophy of history. He continued to write on the idea over decades in books and articles and also presented his ideas to the fledgling Sociological Society of London in 1905, which were published the following year in the volume Sociological Papers, Volume 2. This article discusses Stuart-Glennie’s ideas on the moral revolution in the context of his philosophy of history, including what he termed “panzooinism”; ideas with implications for contemporary debates in theory, comparative history, and sociology of religion. It shows why he should be acknowledged as the originator of the theory now known as the axial age, and also now be included as a significant sociologist in the movement toward the establishment of sociology.

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 University Press in 1981, it has been translated into German, Italian, Japanese, and Hungarian. The Meaning of Things is a study of the significance of material possessions in contemporary urban life, and of the ways people carve meaning out of their domestic environment. Drawing on a survey of eighty families in Chicago who were interviewed on the subject of their feelings about common household objects, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton provide a unique perspective on materialism, American culture, and the self. They begin by reviewing what social scientists and philosophers have said about the transactions between people and things. In the model of 'personhood' that the authors develop, goal-directed action and the cultivation of meaning through signs assume central importance. They then relate theoretical issues to the results of their survey. An important finding is the distinction between objects valued for action and those valued for contemplation. The authors compare families who have warm emotional attachments to their homes with those in which a common set of positive meanings is lacking, and interpret the different patterns of involvement. They then trace the cultivation of meaning in case studies of four families. Finally, the authors address what they describe as the current crisis of environmental and material exploitation, and suggest that human capacities for the creation and redirection of meaning offer the only hope for survival. A wide range of scholars - urban and family sociologists, clinical, developmental and environmental psychologists, cultural anthropologists and philosophers, and many general readers - will find this book stimulating and compelling. Translations: Il significato degli oggetti. Italian translation. Rome: Edizione Kappa, 1986. Der Sinn der Dinge. German translation. Munich: Psychologie Verlags Union, 1989. Japanese translation 2007. Targyaink tukreben. Hungarian translation, 2011.

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 cause the kinds of anti-Nature and de-humanizing or inequitable policies and practices that now pervade our world. Far from romanticizing Indigenous histories, Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom offers facts about how human beings, with our potential for good and evil behaviors, can live in relative harmony again. Contributions cover views from anthropology, psychology, sociology, leadership, native science, native history, native art.

The great divide of modern thought is whether mind is real or naught. 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-bodied understanding of semiosis as the bridge between mind and matter, and human biology and culture. I begin by first delineating the false divide and showing Charles Sanders Peirce’s alternative to it, then explore the implications of a semiotic approach to mind as trans-action, then consider the self-transcending nature of the human body-mind. Finally I outline my ecological, biosemiotic account of mind, which reveals that, indeed, mind matters, and in ways that unexpect-edly resemble the forms of animism that characterized the hunting-gathering foragers through whom we anatomically modern humans emerged.

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 the earth and that which I characterize as “the philosophy of escape from the earth.” The standard story of civilization is one of linear upward progress, a story that I contest with an alternative philosophy of history, picturing history instead as a set of concentric circles. I have devised a new philosophy of history with a three-part approach to understanding human development, taking civilization not as a linear advance of progress, but rather as a progress in precision, paradoxically counteracted by a regression in mind: history as a contraction of mind. I describe three stages in the contraction of mind: 1) animate mind as the evolved outlook of foraging life; 2) anthropocentric mind as representing the contracting transformation of consciousness produced by agriculturally-based civilization; 3) mechanico-centric mind as representing a further contraction from human-centered to a machine-centered consciousness, produced by the rise of modern civilization and the mechanical scientific worldview. Hence, this progressive contraction is marked by a turn from original practical and reverential attunement to the living earth in hunting and gathering societies, or animate mind, to a narrower focus of anthropocentric mind beginning with the development of early civilizations, where the human element became central and the wild devalued. And it moves to an even more narrow focus of mechanico-centric mind, expanding out of late medieval Europe and the development of modern science, where the machine became model of the ultimate, the objectivist filter through which the world is to be understood and made to fit. Far from controlling nature, humans have been consuming it in an unsustainable Malthusian-like trajectory whose limits are being reached in our time.

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 knowledge, connects us with the very conditions out of which the human body evolved into its present condition and remains a vital resource in the face of a devitalizing, rationalistic consumption culture. It may be precisely these deep-rooted abilities for what I term “self-originated experience” that can ultimately offset automatism.