The greatness of individuals can be decided only by those who live after them, not by their contemporaries.Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you t

The author asserts that the greatness of individuals cannot be determined by their contemporaries, rather critics of their succeeding era are a better judge of their talents. In my opinion the above statement does not merit a black and white response, either completely agreeing or disagreeing with the statement. There exists a variety of factors which can influence the judgment of critics, who were contemporaries of the said great personas, and although the arbiters of the later era are emancipated from such encumbrances that does not imply that momentous nature of the achievements of the erudite can only be judged by these later critics.

To elaborate, one can take the example of Galileo, a noted physicist of the sixteenth century. When Galileo endorsed the Copernician model in his discourse, essentially proving that the belief purported by the catholic church that the Earth was at the center of the universe, was completely wrong, his work was ridiculed by most of his contemporaries and he was persecuted by the Catholic church, forcing him to lead the remainder of his life as an expatriate, banned from pursuing and disseminating scientific knowledge. In the modern age, however, Galileo is regarded as one of the greatest human minds of the millennium, and his heliocentric theory provides the foundation upon which all other concepts of astronomy are based.

Another such paragon which is quite conspicuous in the annals of history is that of Sebastian Bach, a renowned composer of keyboard music of the seventeenth century, now regarded as the greatest musician of all time. Though he was quite well known in his time, he had not achieved the heights of fame which he has attained, posthumously in the decades after his demise. In fact, during his lifetime he was criticized for being constricted to the Baroque style of the sixteenth century, and his church compositions were said to be laborious and lacking in quality as compared to his contemporaries.

However, if we consider the case of Otto Hahn, Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Heisenberg, Pauli and other of the twentieth century, we see that that were considered as quite famous personalities in their own lifetime. Their achievements however, shared a common theme of exploring the intricacies of the atomic form and energy, a field which was very much in the forefront of research in the era in which these great individuals lived. Such an analogy can also be drawn for the artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Boticelli, Raphael Santi, Michaelangelo and others. Their artistic masterpieces were also considered in high regard by their contemporaries and they all belonged to the age of the Italian renaissance, of which their styles are reminiscent.

Therefore, from the above example one can draw a quite interesting conclusion that the achievement of individuals were recognized by their contemporaries in seemingly those particular cases, when their works supported the outlook of the concomitant age. However, whenever these individuals tried to go against the flow, purporting something which belied the general belief of their contemporaries, they were lambasted for it. This factor is of trivial value for the critics of later age, who tried to evaluate the individuals by judiciously contemplating the enormity of his achievements. Thus although the judgment of contemporaries are impaired, it would be wrong to construe that they always failed to properly judge of greatness of the scholars, who lived in their time.