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"New Philosophy of Life: Civilization Revolution" Volume 1 Online Edition
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Part I: The Confusion of Civilization (Introduction)
Number: 0012
(III) Comprehensively questioning and criticizing the "standards for the origin of traditional civilization"
4. Cognitive comparison with celebrity sages
(5) The first half of the twentieth century
In the late 20s of the 20th century, the famous Austrian psychologist Freud pointed out in his book "Civilization and Its Defects", "The so-called human civilization, by which I mean that human life rises from its animal state, and is different from all those aspects of beast life."
"The word civilization describes all the achievements and rules of mankind that distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and serve two purposes — to protect human beings from the harms of nature and to regulate their interrelations."
Freud
Civilization and its shortcomings
The book "The Process of Civilization", which was trial-printed in 1937 and officially published in 1939, was written by the famous German sociologist Norbert Elias, and the publication of this book did not attract much attention at the time due to various reasons such as World War II and his personal popularity. It was not until 1976, when the paperback published by the Zurgan Publishing House came out, that it gradually achieved a breakthrough and became popular, and even became an essential reference book for studying sociology or historical sociology.
In this book, Elias fuses history, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, ethnology and other disciplines to form a larger discipline, hence the name encyclopedic work.
In Elias's view, civilization can refer to either the state of residence or the way of life shared by men and women, as well as legal punishment or food cooking, and almost everything is carried out in a "civilized" or "uncivilized" way. The concept of civilization expresses the self-consciousness of Western countries,...... It includes everything that Western society considers to have achieved in the last two or three hundred years, and it expresses "their technical standards, their etiquette norms, their scientific knowledge and the development of their worldview, and so on."
Elias
Works by Elias
Elias emphasized: "Civilization" refers to a process, at least the result of a process, which refers to something that is always in motion and "forward"; "'Civilization' reduces the differences between peoples to a certain extent, because it emphasizes what human beings have in common, or should be common... If 'civilization' expresses the tendency to colonize and expand, then 'culture' expresses the self-consciousness of a people."
Although Elias mainly studies the social conditions and civilizations of Europe since the Middle Ages, he also points out that the specific meaning and understanding of the word "civilization" varies among the peoples of Western countries. He added: "We are accustomed to seeing civilization as a kind of wealth, a ready-made wealth before us, and how we get to this point is not asked".
British historian Toynbee, once known as "the greatest historian of modern times", in his 12 volumes of magnum opus "Historical Research", which he spent decades forging, he took civilization as the research unit of history, changing the previous historical research method that was mainly based on countries. He believes that human beings have experienced the evolution from primitive society to civilized society, and civilization is the advanced form of society in the past 6,000 years. Civilization, like an organism, has its rise and fall cycle, going through four stages: origin, growth, decline, and disintegration.
Toynbee
Historical research
Toynbee divided what he considered to be 6,000 years of human civilization into 21 civilizations: Egypt, Sumer, Minoans, ancient China, Andean, Maya, Hittites, Babylon, ancient India, Greece, Iran, Syria, Arabia, China, India, Korea, the West, Byzantium, Russia, Mexico, and Yukadan. The first 6 of these are the first generation of civilizations born from primitive societies, and the last 15 are derived kinship civilizations.
Toynbee also believed that civilization includes three aspects: politics, economy and culture, and its Chinese is the essence of a social civilization. In his book, he writes, "Civilization was created as a result of mankind's response to a particularly difficult challenge. However, Toynbee also believed that religious society was superior to secular civilization. So he said, "the revival of a dead civilization represents a regression of existing advanced religions, and the greater the degree of revival, the greater the degree of regression."
By 1962, the French historian Fernand Braudel traced the historical origin of the word "civilization" in his "Outline of the History of Civilization", mainly tracing the historical origin of the word civilization in different Western countries such as France and Germany. He argues that French civilisation is a neologism that appeared in the 18th century, "in its new sense, civilisation generally refers to a state opposed to a state of barbarism." on the one hand civilized people, on the other hand, primitive barbarians or barbarians". "Civilisation is at least a bisemic. It denotes both moral and material values".
Braudere
Braudel's work
Brodeur writes, "Society and civilization are always inseparable (and vice versa): two concepts refer to the same reality".
"The most obvious external sign of these differences between cultures and civilizations is undoubtedly the presence and absence of cities. At the stage of civilization, cities existed in large numbers; And in the culture, cities are still in their infancy."
"Religion is the most powerful feature of civilization and has always been a central issue in civilization, past and present." On these points, Braudel's view is closer to Toynbee's.
Braudel also believes that civilization does not equal Westernization. In this regard, it is contrary to the view of Japanese Fukuzawa Yukichi.
In Braudel's view, the "industrial civilization" exported by the West is only one of the characteristics of Western civilization as a whole. By accepting it, the world is not accepting Western civilization as a whole. The history of civilizations is in fact a history of learning from each other for many centuries, although each civilization has retained its original characteristics. The so-called "industrial civilization" is in the process of synthesizing a common civilization capable of accommodating the world as a whole, and all civilizations have been, are or will be affected by it. However, even assuming that sooner or later all civilizations in the world will eventually adopt the same technology, and even if people's lifestyles are therefore partially homogenized, we will still be confronted with civilizations that are in fact very different for a long time. For a long time, the word "civilization" will continue to be used in both the singular and plural.
Stavrianos
In the 1970s, the American historian Stavrianos wrote in his General History of the World: "The fertile river basins and plains of the Middle East, India, China and Europe, gave birth to the greatest civilizations in history. These civilizations have made Eurasia the historical center of the world in which they play a major role".
Stavrianos made a definition of the discriminating nature of culture and civilization, arguing that anthropologists pointed out some characteristics that distinguished civilization from Neolithic culture, such as urban centers, political power of the state established by institutions, nagons or taxes, writing, social division into classes or classes, huge buildings, various specialized arts and sciences, and so on. Human culture includes tools, clothing, ornaments, institutions, languages, art forms, religious beliefs, and customs. All this allows human beings to adapt to the natural environment and their relationships with each other.
Wallerstein
In 1974, the American historian and sociologist Wallerstein defined civilization as a special connection between worldviews, customs, structures, and cultures, including material and high-level cultures. It forms a kind of historical sum and coexists with other variants, if not always simultaneously, of this phenomenon.
[Human Civilization Exploration Project] Series:
"New Philosophy of Life: Civilization Revolution" Volume 1 Online Edition,
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