Reason, Practice, and the Illusion of Hierarchy

We tend to make several default assumptions about the world that are far less reliable than they appear. Two are especially consequential: that reason is the only trustworthy way of knowing, and that theory and scholarship stand above practical ability. On the surface, both assumptions seem to honour knowledge. In practice, they often compress complex forms of understanding into a single hierarchy: reason above feeling, theory above practice, credentials above ability.

This makes judgement easier and authority easier to establish. But it obscures the limits and proper roles of different human capacities.

Reason is indispensable. It is the set of capacities through which we organise experience: classifying, comparing, inferring, and placing what we perceive within conceptual frameworks. Civilisation, science, law, and technology all depend on it. Things that can be explained, argued for, and tested are usually more dependable.

Yet an important premise is often forgotten. The systems of civilisation are not the world itself, nor are they a complete and direct presentation of it. They are interpretive frameworks shaped by human perceptual capacities, language, and history. Over time, they can become powerful and useful tools for understanding ourselves and the world. They can also harden into boundaries that prevent us from moving beyond present cognitive limits.

Reason is not our direct response to reality. We first receive information and then process, analyse, and classify it. That reveals human capability, but it also reveals its conditions and limits. What cannot yet be fully explained by existing theories or logic is not therefore absurd, and certainly not necessarily unreal. Much apparent absurdity may arise not from the thing itself but from the inadequacy of our concepts, knowledge, or scale of observation.

Two cases should be kept distinct. Persistent equivocation, disregard for evidence, and confused inference are properly called irrational. But experiences that are difficult to articulate, not yet explained, or expressed mainly through emotion and intuition should not be dismissed so quickly. More accurately, they are aspects of experience that present rational frameworks have not yet adequately processed.

Mature rationality therefore does not immediately audit, judge, and exclude every piece of affective material. It retains its critical power while acknowledging its own limits and making room for what is not yet understood.

The second mistake is to arrange scholarship and practice in a vertical order. Scholarship is particularly good at abstraction, explanation, generalisation, verification, and the transmission of general knowledge. Practice is particularly good at getting things done amid real constraints, concrete materials, and changing circumstances. Neither is inherently superior. They are different structures of capability.

A PhD in nutrition may not be able to cook a genuinely enjoyable, healthy meal suited to a particular person. An excellent chef may not be able to fully explain the metabolic and nutritional mechanisms involved. This does not establish a ranking between them. One knows more about why; the other knows more about how. One builds explanatory frameworks; the other achieves results in contact with reality.

The best arrangement is not a choice between them but mutual correction. Practice without theory can remain trapped in habit and unexamined experience. Theory without practice can become self-enclosed conceptual circulation and eventually lose contact with its object. A chef who understands some nutrition can better grasp why a method works. A nutrition researcher with real experience of cooking and eating is less likely to get lost in concepts alone.

These two errors take different forms when viewed through the broad historical tendencies of Eastern and Western cultures. This is necessarily a rough comparison. Both traditions are internally diverse and have long influenced one another. No tendency should be treated as a fixed national essence. Still, long-standing institutions, educational systems, power structures, and habits of life do shape a society’s default order of judgement.

In China, Confucianism is no longer a formal governing system, but some of its structural effects remain powerful. Traditional society emphasised order, roles, proper names, and relations of rank. The individual was often understood first as an occupant of a place within family, work unit, social networks, and a larger collective, rather than primarily as a bearer of independent rights. Such an order can sustain cooperation and responsibility, but it can also encourage people to see the world as a sharply tiered pyramid.

Within this structure, what stands higher is easily assumed to be more correct, more reliable, and more worthy of deference. The old saying that nothing surpasses study can then become more than respect for learning. It can turn into excessive faith in degrees, titles, institutional affiliation, and authority. Whether someone truly understands a problem or can do a job well may matter less than which university they attended, what qualification they hold, or which institution endorses them.

This intensifies both errors. Reason comes to mean officially recognised discourse, while theory is treated as a form of knowledge naturally above experience. The object of faith is no longer knowledge itself, but the social status attached to knowledge after it has been organised into a hierarchy.

The recent public discussion surrounding writer Jiang Fangzhou’s master’s thesis and degree is a revealing entry point. Formal scrutiny and treatment of alleged breaches of academic standards are necessary and should not be blurred. But the intensity of the response also reflects the accumulated force of labels such as “teenage literary prodigy,” “elite-university master’s degree,” and “public intellectual image.” In a field such as literary writing, where work, experience, language, and long-term development should be the central measures, a degree should not be the core proof of a person’s value. In a culture that places exceptional weight on educational credentials, however, it easily becomes an important badge of identity.

More revealing still is the broader pattern in which people who have already gained recognition through their work and public influence may continue to seek the symbolic confirmation of an elite credential. We cannot infer any one person’s private motivation from an outcome. Structurally, though, it shows how deeply educational hierarchy can enter self-evaluation. A person may already have succeeded creatively and become publicly visible, yet still feel that something more formal and higher-status is needed. The creativity, experience, and judgement demonstrated in actual work appear to require final ratification from theoretical training, an academic institution, and a degree.

The danger begins when the credential is treated as proof on a level above real capability. People may then pursue that proof while neglecting the rules that ought to govern its acquisition. What the public feels collapsing in such cases is not only an academic credential, but also a cultural hierarchy and a personal aura built around it.

This hierarchical psychology may seem to conflict with another common tendency: a willingness to take available tools, combine and adapt them freely, and solve an immediate problem on the principle that something workable is good enough, even when it does not follow the original design closely. In fact, the two tendencies can be mutually consistent. Both direct attention toward external results. One seeks officially recognised status, credentials, and authority; the other seeks immediately visible function, speed, and effect. In both cases, less attention may be given to whether a system is internally coherent, whether its underlying structure is sound, and who will bear its long-term maintenance costs.

This is not an argument that Chinese people lack originality, nor that rapid application and flexible adaptation have no value. On the contrary, these capacities can be exceptionally strong in the diffusion of new technologies, product implementation, and adaptation to particular situations. Existing tools may be recombined boldly and pushed beyond the uses their designers anticipated, producing genuine practical innovation. The problem lies elsewhere. When this expansion at the application layer is not supported by sufficiently robust architecture, clear boundaries, and long-term maintenance practices, risks accumulate. A system may grow quickly in the short term but become difficult to maintain; features proliferate while the structure becomes increasingly fragile, and instability or collapse can follow as complexity rises.

This offers an application-level illustration of the argument above. Theory is not inherently above practice, but good practice is not simply whatever works for the moment. Mature practice must respect structure, boundaries, causal chains, and long-term consequences. Theory helps practice see constraints that are not immediately visible; practice tests whether a theoretical structure is genuinely effective. Theory detached from reality becomes empty circulation, while instrumentalism without structural self-awareness can mistake short-term effectiveness for long-term reliability.

Western societies are not the simple opposite. Their longer traditions of individual rights, contract, occupational division, and public debate often make them less inclined to place everything within one vertical hierarchy. A plumber, carpenter, chef, or software engineer can ordinarily possess a clear professional dignity grounded in demonstrated competence. Vocational education and manual skill are not necessarily treated as choices for those who have failed academically. This makes it easier, in many Western settings, to recognise the parallel standing of different kinds of expertise.

But the West has not escaped these errors. It expresses them differently.

One modern Western distortion is to treat what can be measured, quantified, statistically represented, and experimentally repeated as the only trustworthy reality. Pain, loneliness, dignity, or existential meaning can be reduced to scale scores, clinical diagnoses, behavioural data, or economic indicators. There is nothing wrong with scientific method. But when it becomes the belief that whatever current methods cannot measure is not real, science has turned into scientism. Here too, a useful instrument of knowledge is mistaken for the whole of reality.

Western societies also have their own division between academic systems and practical life. Universities often reward publication, citation, theoretical novelty, and academic standing without rewarding, to the same extent, whether a theory survives long-term contact with reality. Modern corporations and governments can swing to the opposite extreme, reducing practice to efficiency, profit, and measurable performance. The former loses contact with reality; the latter compresses reality into short-term outcomes. Neither is complete.

The Chinese version of the problem therefore tends to appear as dependence on hierarchy, credentials, and authority. The Western version tends to appear as excessive faith in method, data, procedure, and individual judgement. The first can value who speaks above whether what is said is right. The second can value whether something can be proven and quantified above whether it genuinely reaches human life.

Both traditions contain blind spots and resources. The Chinese sensitivity to relationships, experience, situation, and holistic consequence is not inherently inferior to abstract reason. The Western commitment to individual independence, professional dignity, and public argument can prevent authority from becoming an unexamined conclusion. The aim is not to choose East or West, nor to choose reason over feeling or theory over practice. It is to let these capacities place limits on one another.

Reason must be corrected by experience. Theory must return to practice for testing. Personal judgement must remain open to challenge from other people and from reality. Knowledge should not be a set of symbols for assigning rank. It should be a capacity that enables us to understand the world more accurately and act within it more well.