flâneur

making sh*t (mini-📝 15/100) - by Spencer Chang

spencerchang.substack.com · 683 words · saved by 1 readers

In the Art of Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance, the author brings up the concept of quality and how he pondered the question of what it actually is while a professor of philosophy at university. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem—quality is always relative and derived from our internal notion of quality for other things, which depends on our societal notions of quality in different communities. Can you even approach deriving a definition for quality in the absence of all of that, abstracted to the extreme? The author struggles with this question and more specifically, struggles to come up with an answer to it when teaching his students: how does he know what he’s saying is right? Is he just coming up with stuff to make it look like he knows what he’s talking about?

In the Art of Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance, the author brings up the concept of quality and how he pondered the question of what it actually is while a professor of philosophy at university. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem—quality is always relative and derived from our internal notion of quality for other things, which depends on our societal notions of quality in different communities. Can you even approach deriving a definition for quality in the absence of all of that, abstracted to the extreme? The author struggles with this question and more specifically, struggles to come up with an…

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