The History Of Thought In Twentieth Century: Beauty To Terror

These days, after nine p.m., the streets are really deserted, which is a beautiful feeling for the city, and for businesses is a horrible thing.

The poster on the window of a restaurant shows the reason for this shocking beauty for them. "This June is different because of the world cup, and the world has shrunk."

In the windows of the flat panel TV, green shorts, the short legs of the sportsmen were running with strong legs, and the diners were on the table.

The feeling of "shrinking the world", I think, is a strange feeling. Looking at the coming of the people on the screen, there is a disappearance of the people who are connected. The owner is not entangled but sentimental.

The feeling of narrowing of the world is put forward. It is not the credit of the world cup, but rather the experience brought about by the result of "modern knowledge".

This kind of thing is naturally the result of the revolution of modern communication and information technology, or the social experience "yielding" to "science".

The live broadcast of the world cup is "the end of the earth", and cellular technology brings mobile phone services, so that a large number of people thumbs up people often have "close to the horizon" mood.

Now, there is a thick book. The history of thought in twentieth Century, written by Peter Watson, is trying to outline the whole picture of the world's knowledge. And the most exciting thing about this book is that the author intends to bury and clarify the essence and characteristics of modern thought in the same narrative as encyclopedia.

This ambition has made this book jump out of the way of the entry and compilation of the general history of thought books, resulting in an event linking different spaces and disciplines in a time context, and greatly increasing the readers' reading pleasure. At the same time, for the author, the use of this "narrative" skill has left behind a personalized speculative space of modern thought history.

In his writing of the most important introduction to the evolution of the rules of thought, Peter Watson, in a very important book, uses a discussion style to clearly emphasize his personal summary of the history of thought in twentieth Century.

In this regard, he highly emphasizes the "science", rather than the division of natural science and Humanities in most of the history of thought writing, and the author intends to make up for this defect, rather than the author's unique summary of the characteristics of knowledge production in twentieth Century.

Watson said: "Twentieth Century was dominated by knowledge or" succumbed to science ".

"In addition to the many advances made by science itself and the fact that science has imposed them on humans, various other disciplines, different ways of thinking and ways of doing things are self adjusting and responding to science. They can not ignore science."

I think this judgement is a personal experience for the contemporary Chinese intellectuals.

Of course, when reading this book, did you make a precise analysis of the "surrender" and "response" of Watson's specific texts?

Nature is every reader's own business.

After reading this more than 900 page big book, I am interested in the author's narrative skills in conveying a space-time atmosphere, or in searching for a breakthrough point in the discussion of a contemporary topic.

This kind of "clip point" reveals the mystery, I think it will also give various authors a "Holmes" quest for the author's psychological structure behind the interest.

For example, in a section of "Picasso in Paris", the author describes "all kinds of talents gathered in Paris in 1900."

And then the author's clip came in "the city has 70 daily newspapers and 350 thousand street lamps". The superposition of these two numbers is very interesting, and then the author gave a wonderful jump cut, "the first Michelin guide has appeared."

Is there any more exploration of privacy than watching a private plaything collection?

In addition, I would like to give another example of the mystery of the author's other way of thinking. In the fifth chapter of pragmatism in the United States, the author's starting point is to list the number of universities in the world around 1900. I quote only one thing: "in 1900, there were only 4 universities in China, and 2 in Japan."

Then, after finding the starting point of this discussion, the author made a very solid link between the creation of American pragmatism and the modern university system in the United States.

I think this will also stimulate China's eagerness to discuss "what is the university?"

The human nerves.

So for me, this book can be used as a convenient reference book, but what is more pleasant to read is an interesting search for the author of this book.

Of course, this book is basically western, and this book also invades the hesitation of a typical Western wise man.

The ability, this ability, is not an unconquering complacency to the author, but from time to time it reveals that the authors do not know the profound implication, for example, in the preface, the author is glad to fall down with the great thinker, Quine, and most of his colleagues do not know why he is sacred. Of course, the author also has a deeper melancholy, that is, the destructive power of modern knowledge production. For example, in the final conclusion, the author proposed that China announced the possession of a neutron bomb in 1999. The author said that this is of course the victory of scientific knowledge, but I always see the hidden mystery behind this book in this book which basically does not mention the western world. It indicates the intercultural communication of scientific knowledge derived from modern knowledge production.

Although I also know that in the beginning of this book, the author is not ridiculing that the end point of quantum physics is in the production of atomic bomb.

When the book was published in England, its title was "the beauty of Horror: the history of Terrible Beauty:A History of the People and Ideas that Shaped the" (Beauty:A). This title may better illustrate the author's ambition, as Peter Watson introduced the story of Berlin in the book's introduction.

After many terrorist incidents in twentieth Century, the philosopher and historian of thought died on the one hand, saying, "Twentieth Century has no reason to become the worst century that mankind has ever experienced". On the other hand, it said, "the only thing I can do is to live in peace and happiness in terror."

It is precisely this "modern thought" era of rapid development that a certain paradox of a thinker prompted Watson to think about the status and characteristics of our knowledge production, and to make such heavy writing work with the belief of "evolution" and "accumulation", so as to consolate the coming new century.

However, we are sure that a beautiful new world will never come so easily. Baudelaire's flower of evil is a landmark work in modern society. The name of this poem may always show the beauty of its own suffering.