issue36 evaluate the greatness of individuals?[自由女神小组第16次作业]

hedou992UID: 2199425

TOPIC: ISSUE36 - "The greatness of individuals can be decided only by those who live after them, not by their contemporaries."
WORDS: 527          TIME: 上午 60mins          DATE: 2007-2-27

提纲：
1.不可否认后人对前人的评价更客观，更妥当。而同时代人的评价往往受限制于时代及社会条件。
2.同时代人的评价有时却是最可信的，因为他们和当事人能直接接触。
3.后人评价前人的依据也大都是由伟人的同时代人记录下来的史料。故而同时代人的评价是个基础，也是关键。

Should all of the greatness of individuals be decided only by people who live after them, as the author asserts? I agree that junior descendants play an important role in judging the greatness of individuals lived before, however, contemporaries can appreciate the greatness of individuals properly because they live with them and even can communicate with them face to face.

Admittedly, people who live after the great individuals will have a higher level to judge those individual's greatness. Absent constrain of the times and societal level, modern people will have a facilitation to evaluate the ancestor's greatness or accomplishment. For example, Chairman Mao, a great man who changed the fate of the China, was even regards as a God in his later life by his people. One reason about this is people released from the old China owe all of this to their great leader--Chairman Mao. So people respect him in a crazy way. Until his death and after many years of innovation, people cannot evaluate him in an object measure. That is he also made mistakes and he was not God after all. So, from this case, we know that the view from the descendents is more objective.

However, when we mentioned the critics from descendants, we should make clear that all these critics are made based on the historical material passed by previous people. We may see the contemporaries’ importance in deciding the greatness of individual's from the following two aspects. First of all, as the contemporaries can live with the great people and contact with them directly, they can get the direct experience about the great people. See, most great people's biographic books were all written by the close people who live around them. One of Deng Xiaoping's biographic books is written by his daughter. Only these close people lived by great individuals can expressed the real fact of them and more important their works will more credible.

Secondly, the material we used to evaluate individuals all wrote by ancestors. In other word, when we evaluate an individual who lived in the past whether he or she was greatness, all we can do is to collect the historical material about him or her and to synthesis them to draw an objective conclusion about them. Maybe we have learned more knowledge and obtained large number of materials no matter positive or negative to the great man, so that we can deduce a more objective view about the great man than their contemporaries can did in the past. However, we can not omit that we are based on their contemporaries’ critics that can we do a good job in evaluate great man. After all, the great man’s contemporaries work make our nowadays’ evaluation about them possible. Without them, we even don’t know who the great man was in history.

In sum, I concede that to decide an individual’s greatness those who lived after them play an important role undoubtedly insofar as they can synthesis all the evaluation no matter good or bad to obtain an objective view. However, in my view contemporaries’ work in evaluating the great man in their times can never be neglect.