[优秀习作] issue36 [复制链接]

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电梯直达

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发表于 2003-7-17 01:32:38 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

36"The greatness of individuals can be decided only by those who live after them,not by their contemporaries."

Each society or community has its own elite,who generally serve as a symbol of its prevalent ethos by then.However,how the greatness of individuals can be decided has always been a controversial problem.While I concede that the great individuals' contemporaries might have a much closer observation of them,and hence it is possible that their contemporaries' views on them would be more plausible,I strongly hold that the greatness of individuals can only be decided by those who live after them.

In the first place,the fact that great individuals' contemporaries could have a much closer observation of them serves as a force to undermine the accuracy of their views rather than to enhance it.It is just because they all lived in the same society that could many of the other aspects of a certain great individual influence their opinions about the individual.As it is known to all that people are born imperfect,so are their achievements.Furthermore,many of the great people excel in their specific fields of study only.So while one is famous for one of his or her achievements,which could be in arts,philosophy and nature science,his other aspects such as his life style,his morality or his propensities might be called into question.He is then the focus of controversy,debates over him will go on and on beyond an ending,especially with the involvement of media.Consequently,people have no way to get a comprehensive understanding of him because of the prejudice,jealousy or even hatred that arise,let alone to decide how great he is.In short,his contemporaries are insiders who have emotional connections with him while those that live after him are outsiders who can judge more objectively.

In the second place,past experiences have told us more than once that some significent achievements of the great will only show their value decades or even hundreds of years' time after they came out,which inevitably deprives the great individual's contemporaries of the possibility to make an accurate evaluation on his deeds.For example,when Nicolaus Copernicus,a Polish astronomer,put forward his heliocentricism to the public,people poured scorn on this seemingly crazy idea because at that time,the geocentric theory was prevailing.Hardly anyone could believe that it is the sun rather than the earth that is the real center of the solar system.Although Copernicus based his theory on persistant observations and a large amount of data,the other people simply took him as a lunatic.It was not until many years after his death did people come to realize that the heliocentric theory is right.In this case,the reason why so many people were blind to the truth as well as the greatness of Nicolaus Copernicus is that they are just the contemporaries of Copernicus,technology by then was not advanced enough to enable people to get a better understanding of the universe,nor was the authority enlightened enough to have any kind of this "heterodoxy".Therefore,the greatness of individuals should be better left to those who live after the great rather than their contemporaries to decide.

Admittedly,there do exist reasonable and accurate evaluations on the great which were made by the great's contemporaries.Moreover,even when the posterities engage in the evaluation work,they sometimes turn to consult their predecessors' outcome.Only through this comprehensive analysis can those posterities make fair evaluations on the great individuals.

In conclusion,from what has been discussed above,it must be explained that the greatness of individuals can not be decided by their contemporaries because of the lack of objectivity and an open mind.Instead,it seems more reasonable to leave the job to those who live after the great with reference to the predecessors' work if necessary.