Issue36--Thrive小组第8次作业~~限时间400字不到....

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TOPIC: ISSUE36 - "The greatness of individuals can be decided only by those who live after them, not by their contemporaries."
WORDS: 364          TIME: 00:45:00          DATE: 2/19/2008 14:19:27

Can the contemporaries decide the greatness of an individual? The question has been asked for centuries. On one side, people are trying to determine who have achieved a great success in the past; on the other side, they are judging people in their time. The author claims that such greatness of individuals can only be decided by their contemporaries. I basically disagree that the greatness should be determined by later people.

There is no doubt that one's greatness could be judged by people who live after him; and sometimes, there could be several cases that the contemporaries are not well judged. One example is Vincent Van Gogh, he's artwork, however amazing, was not accepted by his contemporaries, they even consider him as mad. Without later critics who discovered the meaning of his paintings, he could not be as famous as in nowadays, even child have heard of him. Another example is Nicolaus Copernicus, he's theory that the earth is not the center of cosmos was considered as heterodoxy, and he died because of this; however, subsequent scientists marked him as one of the greatest astronomers through the history.

Nevertheless, a person's importance could be distorted after a certain period of time, especially a long period of time. There exist several great individuals who were eventually forgotten nowadays, no matter how much they did. Or there is a possibility that some important documents about one individual was finally got lost, and thus nobody in the following time could decide how great he or she is. For the above reason, totally depend on the ones who live after those individuals are not a perfect way to judge people.

What is more, it is not impossible for contemporary people to judge one's greatness. Many great individual were discovered when they finally achieved success. Isaac Newton was considered a brilliant physicist and mathematician when he discovered the theory of the universal gravitation, and invented calculus. Now people's attitude about him remains the same toward him.

In a nutshell, people in any century should not entirely leave the hard work of deciding individual's greatness to their following historians; they have to keep their mind on their contemporaries.