According to the structure of emotional reasoning indicated at the beginning of the course, emotions are triggered by both a report and a rating under the guidance of a rooted belief. Therefore, self-defeating emotions may be caused by either an erroneous rating or an ungrounded report. The fallacy of “over-simplification” is such a sort of ungrounded report, and there are three forms of it identified by the practitioners of philosophical therapy:

Firstly, Over-generalization, which is to categorize realities in a scope broader than what evidences can corroborate. I once had a client who believed that all marketing strategies are to sell things that customers do not want, which is wicked! Hence, he refused to learn any marketing skill which is actually crucial to his business. Here, this client clearly over-generalizes the marketing industry, which created a bunch of problems to have complicated his life.

Secondly, Pigeonholing, which is to squeeze realities into rigidly dualistic categories, such as right or wrong, good or evil, friends or enemies, success or failure, etc. For instance, one of the most deleterious thinking habits of humanity both in history and today is still to fit individuals into nationalistic terms, and then, to characterize nations either as friends or enemies. Nowadays, because some of Chinese-Americans oppose the Chinese Communist party and see it as an enemy, they would accept any American politician as their friend who seemingly dares to confront certain immoral deeds of the party, with a pigeonholing idea that the enemy of one’s enemy is a friend. However, while doing so, they may remain blind to how the policies proposed by the politicians could do harm to their own life, and as a result, they may vote for whomsoever will govern in a way contrary to their own interest.

And thirdly, Stereotyping, which is to stick to pre-established categories regardless of exceptional realities. Since it has been a while for me to write and publish academic articles, I am very cautious to use broad categories to characterize phenomena which are of interest in my field, precisely in order to avoid stereotyping. For instance, whenever I mention the term “Confucianism,” or write the phrase “according to Confucian philosophy,” I try to give my reference to pin down what philosopher in what place at what period of time thinks so, since the term may mean vastly different things across different places and times. For the same reason, for a long time, I have felt uncomfortable to be introduced as a “Chinese philosopher” or a scholar with an expertise in “Chinese philosophy” in varying events, since, as I anticipated, there are prevalent stereotypes about what “Chinese philosophy” means among the audience, and those stereotypes could by no means fit my own approach to the study of Chinese thought.

These three forms of over-simplification are clearly inter-connected. All cases of stereotyping are over-generalization, and once we overgeneralize, dualistic categories such as friend and enemy will be pit against each other so as to pigeonhole their corresponding realities.

Furthermore, all these forms of over-simplification are about the misuse of the basic units of human language, category. According to Aristotle, categories are born from the inductive reasoning, viz., the process to distill generic traits from the observation of samples in groups. Once established, these categories can be put into use in the deductive reasoning through which varying relationships among categories infer different generic traits of those observed samples in groups. Clearly, the soundness of human reasoning according to this categorical method of Aristotelian logic crucially depends upon whether we can reach the exact degree of generality for the exact amount of samples. This would imply that whenever we generalize more than samples can indicate, no matter how consistent our reasoning is, it is not sound. For instance, the deductive reasoning “all swans are white, this is a swan, and hence, this is white” is not a sound one because the generalization “all swans are white” cannot cover all samples of “swans.” When one uses the over-generalized category of “swan as white” to perceive all swans in the world, they are clearly stereotyping swans, and pigeonholing them as either “being swan as white” or “not being a swan at all.” In the latter case, I do not think those black swans would be happy. Therefore, to confront all forms of over-simplification which over-generalize and misuse human categories, philosophical therapists recommend the virtue of “objectivity,” namely, to perceive realities exactly as they are, and thus, to be ready to revise pre-established categories for exceptional and changing realities.

This virtue of “objectivity” in terms of seeing the things as they are is also advocated by Confucian philosophers. For instance, Xunzi’s ethics relies upon the intelligence of exemplary humans to accurately perceive the value of things in the world, and hence, to achieve a state of mind called “vacuity, single-mindedness and quietude”:

“How do people know their Way? I say: with the heartmind. How does the heartmind know the Way? The heartmind is always holding something. Yet, there is what is called being ‘vacuous’. The heartmind is always two-fold. Yet, there is what is called being ‘single-minded.’ The heartmind is always moving. Yet, there is what is called being ‘quiet.’ Humans are born and have awareness. With awareness, they have focus. To focus is to be holding something. Yet, there is some state called being ‘vacuous.’ Not to let what one is already holding harm what one is about to receive is called being ‘vacuous.’ The heartmind is born and has awareness. With awareness, there comes awareness of different things. These differences are perceived at the same time, and when they are perceived at the same time, this mental state could be to be two-fold. Yet, there is what is called being ‘single-minded.’ Not to let one perception harm another perception is called being ‘single-minded.’ When the heartmind sleeps, then it dreams. When it relaxes, then it goes about on its own. When one puts it to use, then it forms plans. Thus, the heartmind is always moving. Yet, there is what is called being ‘quite.’ Not to let dreams and worries disorder one’s understanding is called being ‘quiet’.” (Xunzi, chapter 21, translation adapted from Eric Hutton)

Here, Xunzi urges one’s emotions not to interfere our awareness of the world so that what we already know not bring harm to what we are about to, and what we know one thing not perturb what we know about another. Clearly, this is a Ruist call not to over-generalize, pigeonhole or stereotype.

In an ultimate term, if we admit freedom and autonomy is a fundamental principle for good human living, and accept that each human individual is unique, non-replicable, and cannot be put exclusively in any “category,” then, we need to acknowledge that the difference between any two individuals can be bigger than any two races, ethnicities, genders, societies, economies, countries, and even cultures, because all the latter can be treated as merely categories, but individuals cannot. Precisely because of the essentially non-deterministic traits of human living, we need to continually construct, deconstruct, and refine our categories to adapt ourselves to changing realities in society.

It is because change is a fundamental feature of the reality we humans are trying to deal with, the Confucian tradition also contributed another way to our looking on the function of “categories.” Categories are not only formulaic terms to carry over generic traits of a group of items from one corner of our mind to another. Actually, if whenever we mention a category that is of ethical concern to us, we can simultaneously point out how we practice it in real situations of human life, these categories can be instead treated as performing examples so that we can emulate these examples to find appropriate reactions to our own unique situations.

For instance, in the Analects, when Confucius was asked by students how to understand the cardinal human virtue of humaneness, Ren, Confucius once gave a universal definition of it as “loving people.” (Analects 12:22) However, most often, Confucius’s strategy to explain the concept is to use practical words targeting students’ different situations. For people who are glib and fast to talk, he will say humaneness means reserving a solemn tone of one’s rare speeches (Analects 13:27); for people who traveled a lot and were extremely sociable, he would recommend to find the right friends in order to keep humane. (Analects 15.10) An advantage of this individualized pedagogy is that whenever the category of “humaneness” is mentioned, students will grasp it may mean different things for different people, and thus, they would truly pay attention to specificities before they apply the universal ethical teaching of humaneness.

Similarly, Mencius also thinks of the virtue of humaneness as what distinguishes human beings from non-human beings, and thus, being a category in its own right. However, more importantly, Mencius indicated through a thought experiment that ordinary humans will spontaneously have the feeling of alarm and fright whenever they see a baby about to fall into a well. In this way, Mencius argued that every human has their incipient sprout of humaneness to work on, and the process of being humanized depends upon whether one is dedicated to creating a social environment beneficial for the natural growth of the moral sprout. Again, the good thing for Mencius’s argument on the virtue of humaneness is that after we take the feeling of alarm and fright triggered by that concrete situation as a performing example of the category of humaneness, firstly, we understand it not only intellectually but also in an embodied way; and secondly, we can remain sensitive to our own situations so as to emulate the virtue of humaneness discussed by Mencius while not entirely photocopying it, which means, the feeling of commiseration rooted in the virtue of humaneness may be acted out in diverse ways.

In my view, for human transactions that are of ethical concern, if we can consistently practice this Confucian sensitivity towards the practical implication of categories, and hence, treat categories as imitable examples with no need of photocopying it, it will greatly contribute to avoiding the thinking fallacy of over-simplification.

To continue the instances I gave above, if by mentioning the term “friends” we always bear in mind cases of exemplary friendship in human history, we will hold on to the fact that while using “friends” to categorize humans, what we deal with are still concrete human persons., rather than a lump of abstract generic traits which can be easily pigeonholed or stereotyped by categories.

In a Confucian term, this mindset to categorize while exemplifying realities is once depicted by one very popular slogan in the period of neo-Confucianism: “the principle is one, while its manifestations are many.” Also, in Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Aristotle admonishes us to form the “practical wisdom” so as to apply universal ethical principles to concrete and changing situations. Here, different from the misuse of categories by the thinking fallacy of oversimplification which demands the uniformity of traits of realities in order to put these traits into established, neatly bounded categories, we are called upon to pay attention to how realities within a category can merely bear an analogical resemblance to each other. Hence, evolving situations would continually urge us to refine our understanding of those categories, and modify our reifiable emotional and behavioral patterns.

In my view, for the sake of good human living, we definitely need to make use of categories in this enriched and enriching way.

Dear students in the course of “foundations of morality”:

Among all thinking fallacies we have dealt with so far, the following one, I find, is particularly difficult for me to write about. This is the fallacy of bandwagon thinking, the one that forces people to think, learn and live their lives for the sake of the others, rather than thinking, learning, and being their own person for the sake of their own self.

I said this is difficult for me to write about because, in my life, I have been such a person who tries to think, learn and be myself for so long a time. It started from when I was about 15, when I was in the second grade of my high school, just two years before I entered the college. It was the first time in my life when the bizarre, boring, and unjust phenomena in the educational system of the country where I grew up strongly disillusioned me, and for virtually all my leisure time outside the school fence, I preoccupied myself with reading, thinking and writing in a very private style. But, normally, this sort of writings cannot be much useful for my academic score, and there is a Chinese idiom to call it “drawer literature,” since except tossing those pages into the bottom of one of my drawers and letting them stay there until perhaps disappearing, there is no space in the world for them to lie afoot. And these writings of mine did vanish a lot primarily because of the moving and dislocation of both my home and my person.

You may feel I am bragging myself since “thinking for yourself” is such a slogan frequently evoked by all people with their vastly different views to recruit their followers. This is a bit ironic, I know.  But in the sense that I eventually felt the enormous reward of independent, free, and non-bandwagoned thinking, I am indeed proud of myself, and determined to continue to be so in the remaining parts of my life. However, as I said, it is still difficult for me to directly write about it.

Firstly, this is because once you took “thinking and being for yourself” as an ingrained, unshakable belief, you have almost nothing to write about it, since all things happening to your life, no matter whether they are themselves worth writing or not, are reflected by it, derive from it, and in the most authentic sense of the word, rooted in it. In other words, for people who have been habituated or even trained to do so, independent and free thinking can become a commonplace so banal barely worth mentioning. Seen from this perspective, everything I have written so far for the video lectures, and every exposure you witnessed to my personal life in this course, as well as all your wonderful contributions to my own thought, are all about it. Since all is about it, it emerges everywhere, and hence, I barely feel any need to capture it and write something particular about it.

However, I believe there is a deeper reason for me to feel the resistance from some corner of my heart to write something particular about it. Humans as a species are so inclined to jump into the fallacy of bandwagon thinking that as someone who is habituated not to do so, I have just encountered so many inconveniences (to say the least!) in my life, some of which were definitely depictable as personal traumas.

Let’s start one instance of those inconveniences which are less traumatic. You know I am a Confucian scholar, with “Confucian” here being understood both in the sense of critical scholarship and personal spiritual commitment (yes, for Confucian scholars, these two can blend seamlessly!). However, in 2014, I participated an international conference of Confucianism and philosophy of education organized by a university in the northeast of America. During the first, welcome dinner of the conference, I was so appalled by the fact that every speech, either from the organizers or from invited keynote speakers, and no matter how long or short the speech was, always started from a Confucius quote. Before these speakers said anything solid, they always let “Confucius once said … …” go first! And as a Confucian scholar, I could immediately realize whether that saying of Confucius’s was misquoted or misinterpreted; but the most disappointing aspect was that, due to its unaccountable shallow repetition, the Confucius quoting generated a formulaic and routinely bearing which wrapped the entire banquet with some gaudy certainty of something which everyone present was thought of as must take for granted. I was very unpleasant at that moment because although Confucian studies is a minority in the American academia, this formulaic pomposity still reminded me of how local units of a communist party organize their so-called “life of organization,” as well as every happenstance that George Orwell once so brilliantly described in the animal farm governed by the all-mighty Napoleon. Confucius in the Analects once taught “an exemplary human aims harmony without uniformity (和而不同), whereas a petty human aims uniformity without harmony.” Because of this, Confucius also says that an exemplary human is fond of being social, yet not of forming parties and cliques (群而不党). In other words, an authentic community comprises authentic persons, whereas for a community to become genuinely authentic, it must always contain a structural feature to accommodate diverse views, freshing people, and hence, an intrinsic vigor to grow and renew.

The remaining part of the conference was actually quite pleasant, since many scholars were doing their jobs, delivering great presentations, and discussing ideas. However, because of the distaste the beginning banquet of the conference begot, I was determined to avoid anything similar in my following years of my graduate studies in the U.S. I founded and organized the first student faith group of Confucianism in the U.S., titled as “Boston University Confucian Association,” when I studied in Boston during 2014-2018. I didn’t keep any email list of the so-called affiliates. I didn’t do any recruiting activities normal to many other registered religious groups. Instead, I deeply believed in the pedagogy of traditional Confucianism to urge “it is proper for students to come to learn, but not for teachers to go out to teach” (The Classic of Rites), and therefore, on every Friday night, I just bought pizzas, opened the door of the assigned study room by Marsh Chapel, and then, waited for anyone to come to learn and discuss. This “marketing” strategy didn’t make our group super large, but it didn’t make it super small either, since with generous donations from participants, we never lacked pizzas to eat for the weekly event.

Ok, this is the instance of inconveniences that one’s independent thinking can engender, which is less traumatic. I will briefly (and you know why it needs to be brief) describe another instance that is more so as follows.

Group thinking needs taboos, viz., topics that in-group affiliates cannot even mention, and this is because group thinking is based upon a certain form of exclusive identity, for the sake of which any intrusion from outside the boundary of the group needs to be censored. However, can you imagine taboos are also prevalent in philosophy classrooms? Philosophy classes are supposed to be the most open and free-spirited among all college classes; however, at the country where I grow up, there are taboos of topics hovering and looming around all my philosophy classes. Partly because of this, I decided not to teach there, and thus, to give up my well-secured jobs and leave the country when I entered my thirties. During those tumultuous days of my life, my daughter was also born, and at one moment, I suddenly realized that I may completely lose all previous means of abundance to support the basic material needs of my family, especially including my newly born baby. At that time, I did not have an American degree yet; my savings were being run out; and life was so uncertain and risky down the road that as a more or less intelligent Chinese boy growing up in a middle-class family in China, I had never anticipated my life can go so low.

The above story definitely has a happy ending; otherwise, I would not sit here and write to you, my dear students in the course of philosophical therapy at Washington College. However, the message I do want to convey is that we pay costs for escaping group thinking. Freedom cannot be in any sense taken as granted; it is always hard fought, and hard maintained.

But your question may be, since independent, free, and non-bandwagoned thinking is so difficult for individuals, on what basis do we human beings still long for it, strive for it, and even get trained to acquire it? My answer to this is very simple. No, this is the not the case. Once acquired as a habit, independent and free thought is actually the easiest way of life that humans can ever take for the sake of their good and happy human living, and this is primarily because it makes individuals’ life self-sufficient.

Let’s still use the classical philosophical writing, Plato’s allegory of cave, to make the case. Please just envision how difficult the life is for those chained prisoners in the cave. They compete for the thing everyone uniformly thinks worth competing, viz., to predict which shadow comes next on the wall of the cave; since the standard of success is so narrowly and unilaterally defined, you can also imagine how despondent people constantly feel if they lose the competition. Furthermore, for any of those prisoners who ever thought of the worth of their individual life, it is evident that the worth must rest upon the approval from other group members: you need to be joyful for the same thing, be sad for the same thing, and eventually, try to have a life lived by the same sort of people. Since there could be only one winner for each of this sort of competitions approved by a whole group, we can legitimately ask, can anyone chained in the cave be genuinely happy for their life?

However, if I was the lucky prisoner who happened to climb up the cave, just imagine how easy life could become for me. Firstly, knowing that those chained prisoners would see me as an enemy and try to kill me if I came back to tell them of the truth, I would not deliberately jeopardize my life as such. However, I did feel “sorry” for my chained human fellows, as Plato originally described it; so I would choose to occasionally go back to the cave, dwell after the wall separating the fire and those chained prisoners, to make whatever noise needed to inform them of the truth. But more than that, since I already acquired an ability to climb up whatever cave there is in the world and seek for enriching and inspiring light of wisdom, the majority time of my life would still be dedicated to exploring the wonderful and infinitely rich and diverse natural world and human history.

Using this hypothesized human situation of a freed prisoner, what I try to message is the indescribable ease and reward that one can get from the habit of non-bandwagoned thinking and living. In this situation, we say what we do, we do what we believe, and most importantly, we believe what we know is genuinely valuable for our own life and for the world. In other words, every component of our life, the words, deeds, emotions, thoughts and beliefs are lined up with each other, and all of them keep changing, growing and perfecting while aiming the flourishing of all conceivable human potentialities. In a Confucian term, this status of human being is called “self-contentedness”(自得, zide) acquired through an endless process of making our life genuinely “authentic” (誠, cheng). Keeping it in mind how self-content we can be after we are habituated to authentic human living, we will understand all those told difficulties are actually merely inconveniences that we can exert our willpower to eventually overcome during the process of fleeing bandwagon thinking. It is like the sore eyes felt by the released prisoner when he saw the origin of the light in the cave; yes, it is sore and painful, but definitely worth overcoming given how rewarding human life could be alternatively.

So, with an independent, authentic, and non-bandwagoned thinking habit, there would be no caves in our life. What we are longing for would be neither approval from others nor accomplishments measured by the standard of others. Instead, we would long for authentic human relationships, and valuable human projects from which we can learn from disagreements, grow ourselves through trials, and most importantly, “remain content towards ourselves in whatever situation we happen to enter” (無入不自得, wurubuzide; from the Centrality and Commonality).

Quiz:

1, “An exemplary human aims harmony without uniformity, whereas a petty human aims uniformity without harmony.” Is this a true Confucius quote?

2, According to the existentialist philosophy Heidegger, what feeling does one try to escape when he/she loses him/herself in the “they”?

A, angst of being “being-towards-death”
B, angry of being alone.
C, anxiety of not being accomplished.

3, what is the following proposition unique to the philosophy of existentialism?

A, existence precedes essence
B, essence precedes existence.

4, For the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers, being congruent (which means that your inside matches your outside, and thus, to be transparent) is an important condition of constructive change and personal growth. Is this statement true or false?