芝大小文书6选1

范文

（2019年）如果宇宙中的物质数量有限，Olive Garden（以及其他餐厅，它们的食物无限的概念）如何提供真正无限的汤、沙拉和面包？

你可以使用任何你希望的分析方法来解释这一点——物理学、生物学、经济学、历史学、神学……正如你所知，选择是无穷无尽的。

—来自Yoonseo Lee，2023er

The human mind tends to dislike inconsistencies. Possibly for this reason, philosophers created (or discovered?) the “law of non-contradiction”: for example, something can’t be limited and unlimited at the same time. So if there’s a limited amount of matter in the universe (clearly an assumption, but let’s grant it and see where it takes us), how can Olive Garden serve an infinite amount of food (not that I’d complain about more breadsticks)?

Both Eastern and Western philosophy have, perhaps without realizing it, struggled with the Olive Garden dilemma for centuries. One possible answer lies in the condition “at the same time.” True, matter in the universe might be limited at any single point in time, and so is the amount of food Olive Garden can produce, but Olive Garden is making food ALL THE TIME! 

Chemistry, biology, and environmental science all teach us that matter and energy recycle, something mirrored in Neo-Confucian cosmology. In the li-qi (principle-matters) system,  the li of the universe is fixed, and the qi at any time is limited, but as time goes on, the qi breaks and reorganizes itself according to the li, destroying and creating matter endlessly. 

The Hegelian dialectic, while working a little differently, shows the same thing. The Thesis and the Anti-Thesis are limited at a given point in time, but as their conflicts grow and materialize over time, a Synthesis is formed -- creating stuff endlessly! (Well, maybe until the “end of history.”) The Daoist dichotomy of Yin and Yang goes a step further: “The Supreme Void divides to The Two; the Two give birth to The Four; The Four create The Eight….”   

As the two essential elements group and regroup themselves, myriad creatures are being created, disintegrated, and recreated. The spirit of this self-generative binary paradigm is continued in modern Computer Science, where groupings of 0’s and 1’s generate infinite possibilities. Although the computer has only limited storage, variations with time create limitless images on the screen. 

Similarly, although the universe has only a limited amount of matter, over an infinitely long period of time Olive Garden can surely serve limitless amounts of food. Even if the amount of matter in this universe is finite, we have no way of knowing it -- the universe could be bound, but its terminus is beyond our perception. Similarly, the food at Olive Garden could in fact be limited, and the customers might simply perceive it to be limitless because they can’t see its limit. In other words, the food of Olive Garden is made infinite by the customers!

As German philosopher Immanuel Kant formulated in his Critique of Pure Reason, the unperceivable world -- the thing-in-itself, aka the secrets in the kitchen -- is unknowable and could be finite or infinite. But what makes it seem infinite is our limited capacity to know, or in this case, to eat. I’m sure many creatures of enormous appetite (myself included) have tried to eat an Olive Garden empty, just as those of outstanding intellect have tried to explore the metaphysical reality of the world, but as far as I know, none have succeeded. This makes the food at Olive Garden effectively infinite. 

Political theories offer tantalizing possibilities for explanation, until each is devoured in time. The combination of the self-generating matter of the universe and the limited capacity of mind -- parallel to the continuously refilling Olive Garden salad bar and the limited appetite of each of us -- can lead to a feeling of frustration. I remember a time when I almost finished off the salad bar, but seconds later they refilled it. Nothing could encompass how I felt at that moment besides the word “frustration.” 

Francis Fukuyama, one of my favorite contemporary political philosophers, likely had the same frustration when he concluded in 1989 that “history has ended with the globalization of liberal democracy,” only to be proven wrong as cultural and ethnic conflicts arose in the 1990s. Fukuyama’s teacher, Samuel Hungtington, then tried to capture this new political zeitgeist in his “Clash of Civilizations,”  only to be proven incomprehensive when ideological conflicts took place again in the Middle East in the 2000s. 

Numerous other theories arose to make sense of our geopolitics, and some did a good job --  for a period of time. As the situation itself keeps changing, those theories inevitably become less accurate and less relevant. Political phenomena in the world, like the food at Olive Garden, just keep presenting themselves ceaselessly, and neither our minds nor our appetites seem capable of fully handling them. 

Hence, we start to question the question. Things -- food and the world -- seem so limitless and overwhelming that we start to doubt whether there’s only a limited amount of matter after all. Maybe the initial proposition itself is wrong! As I wrote this previous line, I finally realized how infinity is truly possible: it is our very ability to doubt, to think outside the box, to question fixed propositions, that is truly infinite.

My favorite philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, acknowledges as much: true, no single account of the world is fully accurate,  but in attempting to formulate those accounts, we create many different ways of looking at the world -- many mini-worlds to ourselves. Each “paradigm shift” is a complete revolution of thought, a collective “thinking outside the box,” a fruit of human creativity, which is limitless and leads us closer and closer to the ultimate reality. 

I guess that’s why Olive Garden is so popular. (906 words)

提示+分

1.语言、结构和语气。

类似于上面“为什么是我们”的示例，这篇文书提供了一个很好的、快速的钩子，它很好地把握了认真对待题目和对题目的荒谬戏谑之间的界限。

这种语气是这篇文书在整个正文中都能很好传播的东西，并且需要好几份草稿才能实现。

正文段落使用清晰的主题句，让读者能有明确的方向和重点。选词和句式结构也展现出扎实的工艺水平。

最后一句给出了一个很好的、清晰的闭合感，同时又使用了语气助力。

2.给他们展示头脑。

每个正文段落都在一个新方向上做得很好，使作者能够展示TA理解的深度和广度，跨越复杂的哲学和政治思想（黑格尔、孔子、康德、道教、福山、亨廷顿、库恩）。

并且TA可以用有趣的方式去理解，再次“展示TA的哲学肌肉”。

我们读这篇文书的感觉是，TA在学校的常规课外之外，还阅读了很多——这不是严格要求的，但它往往会有帮助。

如果你想成为一个更聪明的人，阅读是一个很好的方式。