Everyone has heard about the pathetic fallacy, but there is another fallacy, the exact opposite of the pathetic, that is of far more importance. This fallacy, which was first named and analyzed by Charles Hartshorne, is called the prosaic fallacy.
Science tends to cast a cold eye on life and the world of nature, and all of us have, in differing degrees, learned to see with the eye of science. This is good, as far as it goes. But when it goes too far, as it does in a strictly materialistic science, it can constrict our ways of seeing and perceiving.
Our vision can be so impaired that we miss the wildness and the beauty of the world around us. The world of sensory experience offers an aesthetic width and depth of feeling that we miss when looking from a perspective that abstracts from the concrete totality of living nature.
“The child and the artist, being less obsessed with practical and intellectual concerns, find the world more vivid and absorbing. But most of us select out aspects of experience for attention and use. We are thus left,” as Eugene H. Peters says, “with a pragmatic skeleton of concrete experience.”1
And when we are left with only a skeleton, what is missing is life itself.
One of the core doctrines of process philosophy is the idea of panexperientialism: that the enjoyment of experience goes all the way down in nature. The world of nature, on every level, is an ever-moving, never-ending “ocean of feeling.”2 This is a basic intuition of many poets and it finds vibrant expression in the works of William Wordsworth.
We can even call it “mind,” if “mind” is understood as a variable and not as a constant. This means that no matter how lowly the life form, or how primitive the particle, “mind,” or at least the “germ” of mind, is active in all the dynamic unities present in the natural world, that is, all entities that act and feel as one—such as atoms, molecules, living cells, all animals, up to and including humans, and God.
If feeling, or experience, is enjoyed by all the dynamic or natural unities in the universe, then to deny such experience, or “mind,” to the lower members of this ascending scale, and to assert that they are lifeless stuff—this is to commit the prosaic fallacy.
To see nature in this way is to see only what Whitehead calls vacuous actualities (empty shells, mere surface, mere behavior)3 and not to behold robustly living entities who enjoy creative experience, individual unity, initiative, and purpose—with each of the foregoing four terms understood as variables that can be generalized to include an extensive range of values.
Under influence of the prosaic fallacy, the world of living nature is still there in all its freshness and fullness and wildness, but our perception delivers a domesticated version. Rather than perceiving, and feeling, the full spectrum, we take in only a narrow band. As Hartshorne observes, we suppose “the world to be as tame as our sluggish convention-ridden imaginations imply.”4
After commenting on the pathetic fallacy, Hartshorne writes, “But there is another fallacy, more insidious among trained minds, which one may call the prosaic fallacy: the error of supposing that what is not, for our casual inspection, obviously endowed with a life of its own is thereby shown to be mere lifeless stuff or bare structure without inner quality. Surely the world is not obvious. Think of the history of science, of the microstructure or megalostructure of things, both different even in principle from what direct perception for ages led people to think.”5
To supplement the eye of science, we need to learn to see with the eye of a poet, for, as Hartshorne adds, “The world is not so tame as prosy people are apt to suppose.”6
Continuing with Hartshorne:
“But, as I am fond of remarking, the ‘pathetic fallacy’ is a danger of which the prosaic or apathetic fallacy is the opposite counterpart. Reality is not as dull as many sober souls imagine. One scientist recently remarked, ‘Nature is stranger than we think. Perhaps it is stranger than we can think.’ ‘Feelings of atoms’ or cells are strange enough; but they may fit the evidence better than feelings of planet earth, or of the oak tree beside my house, which may have been alive when the Pilgrims first crossed the Atlantic.” CH, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, 250.
“Wholly mindless matter can never be demonstrated, it can only be asserted. And Popper claims no certainty for his negation here. His only argument for mindless matter is that mind requires memory, and atoms can have none. My reply is that memory . . . is shown by the influence of the past of the individual on its present, and I wonder how physics can reduce such influence to zero while still maintaining even partial individual identity. All causality is influence of the past on the present. I feel my ignorance here and I admire Popper in that he does offer a definite argument against psychicalism. Otherwise all I ever find are vague appeals to common sense or to the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ against which I balance the ‘prosaic fallacy.’ Unimaginative people—and to talk about the feelings of atoms does make demands on imagination—are not going to understand nature. Physicists now know that nature is ‘stranger than we think, perhaps stranger than we can think.’ (Was is Bohr who said this?)” CH, “Some Under- and Some Over-rated Great Philosophers,” Process Studies 21, no. 3 (fall): 171-72.
“What I call the prosaic fallacy is almost as naturally human as the poetic or pathetic fallacy. The world is neither the fairyland of primitive cultures nor the great machine of early modern science. Nor is it merely a vast but mindless organism. It is rather a vast many-leveled ‘society of societies.’ Enormous imagination and courage, combined with careful weighing of rather complicated chains of evidence, are required if we are to arrive at much idea of this cosmic society. There is no easy path, whether sentimental or cynical. But we are not even fairly started on the right path if we overlook or deny the pervasive indistinctness of human experience or the evidence in direct awareness of two levels of feeling, the second derivative, logically and temporally, from the first.”7 CH, The Zero Fallacy, 159.
Does God write the world in prose? Surely not. Whitehead invites us to see otherwise when he writes that God is “the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”8
Notes
1. Eugene H. Peters, Hartshorne and Neoclassical Metaphysics, 97.
2. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected edition edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, 166.
3. If the idea of “mind” is sufficiently generalized, then mind, as Hartshorne says, “is not confined to a corner of nature but is everywhere in it, just as behavior is. But mind is the substance, and mere behavior, in the sense of spatio-temporal change, is the shadow, the skeletal outline only, the causal geometry, of nature.” Hartshorne, “Physics and Psychics: The Place of Mind in Nature,” in Mind in Nature: Essays on the Interface of Science and Philosophy, edited by John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin, 90.
4. Hartshorne, “Physics and Psychics: The Place of Mind in Nature,” 95.
5. Charles Hartshorne, Creativity in American Philosophy, 173.
6. Charles Hartshorne, unpublished manuscript used by Hartshorne in course at the University of Texas; cited in Hartshorne and Neoclassical Metaphysics, Eugene H. Peters, p. 97.
7. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 346.
This Post is Chapter Four in my book:
Hartshorne’s Discoveries: 34 Examples of Philosophical Truths Discovered by Charles Hartshorne, Truths He Revealed in a New Light, and Intellectual Errors He Corrected