Elias's Life Experience

Hiring "Miss" as a tutor was the fashion at that time, and Elias' family could not avoid it. But his father often changed candidates, which made him tired from childhood. Norbert was weak since childhood, and almost all pediatric diseases visited him. To this end, his family did not send him to kindergarten, and hired another male teacher to give him three years of preschool education. 1903 entered the primary school attached to Johannesburg Arts and Sciences Middle School. Pupils in this school wear school uniforms, school hats and write with pencils, while ordinary schools do not have such a style, and write with slate pens. At that time, there were three Jewish cities in Germany, Berlin was the first, followed by Frankfurt am Main and breslau was the third. There are many Jewish students and many Jewish teachers in Johannesburg Arts and Science Middle School. Several rabbis are city councillors and belong to the Liberal Party, which also has some influence on the school spirit.

Elias, who is weak, is at home in Johannesburg Arts and Sciences Middle School, ranking first in academic performance. At that time, seats were ranked by grades: seats with poor academic performance ranked first. According to his classmates, Norbert always sits in the back row, even though he is short. Although there are many Jews in the school, Judaism is not particularly emphasized, and several rabbis only teach the Pope for the occasion. Elias talked about the influence of Prussian humanistic tradition in his school and the deep impression left by several excellent teachers.

Elias is particularly fond of delving into philosophy. In his senior year, he and his classmates organized a philosophical interest group, mainly reading Kant's works, which are famous for their difficulty, and competing for reading speed and understanding depth. Elias is so "trouble-seeking" because he has made up his mind to trudge on the road of thorny scholars and consciously exercise his intelligence. His fascination with philosophy, reverence for ancient Greek and Roman culture and love for German classical literature represented by Schiller and Goethe all laid a solid foundation for his famous mountain career.

Germany's anti-Semitism and anti-Semitism did not begin with Hitler. However, in Germany under the rule of Emperor William, Jews were still protected by law and enjoyed equal opportunities for economic competition. Elias's family is well-off, belonging to the upper-middle class, far away from those "Jews" who peddle along the street and are in rags and full of onion and garlic. Although the ehrlich family converted to Judaism and realized that they were Jews, their German citizens felt more strongly about themselves. Unequal social status and occasional anti-Semitic incidents didn't really hurt them. In their view, this is just the childish behavior of uneducated people and is not worth sharing with them. As Elias wrote in his essay on life, they live a "life of personal, economic and cultural security". Kant's rational critical spirit and Goethe's mind as a citizen of the world opened the door for Jews to integrate into German society. After the drums of World War I sounded, German Jews also rushed to the battlefield to give their lives for the German Empire. Many of them have made outstanding achievements and received due recognition. Until 1938, elias's parents had not woken up from the German dream. That year, they went to London to visit their exiled son Norbert, and his son advised them to stay in London. But even so, my parents will go back to Germany. My father's reason is that what he does is aboveboard and never wrong. I thought I spent most of my life in a country ruled by law, shared the fruits of its prosperity, and let me live a well-off life. But he was wrong and paid a heavy price for it.

After graduating from high school, Elias, who had already made up his mind to take the road of "homme de lettres", entered breslau University in June 19 15, majoring in philosophy and Germanic studies. But as soon as he registered, he signed up for the army like other students. He became a signalman and was sent to the eastern front. His troops suffered heavy losses in the summer battle. Because of his weak constitution, he once fainted on the battlefield and was sent home. He was no longer fit for battle, so he became a health guard stationed in breslau. While serving in the army, I began to study medicine, and it was not until April of 19 19 that I completely decoupled from the army.

Most of his classmates are bleeding on the "glorious battlefield". Elias once described the cruelty of war as follows: "Dirty, muddy, blood, dying horses, dying comrades, intensive artillery fire; I can still recall the scene of advancing to the front line step by step: the guns were fired day and night, and we saw the flash when the guns were fired. The comrade-in-arms next to him played the harmonica, and everyone sang' I once had a comrade-in-arms …' "It was almost a miracle that he recovered from the war, both physically and mentally. Not only that, he became stronger after experiencing the tempering of "exhausted and raw" and the baptism of war. In the war environment, he cultivated a kind of self-discipline ability, which made his body and mind adapt to the environment quickly. This ability undoubtedly helped him spend that long exile and conduct long-term and unknown academic research.

It is my father's wish to study medicine. The latter wanted to study medicine after graduating from high school, but had no money to continue studying, so he pinned his ideal of being a doctor to save his life on his son. Elias didn't want to give up the philosophy he loved. He studies medicine and philosophy at the same time. After he passed the examination of basic medical subjects, he gradually gave up medicine and concentrated on philosophy. However, the knowledge of natural science obtained from the pre-clinical study of medical foundation and anatomy will bring great benefits to his future career. In his "Essays on Life", he once wrote that he knew the facial muscle movements when people laughed like the back of his hand and compared them with apes. The complexity and diversity of human smiling muscles make the richness of facial expressions in sharp contrast with the dullness of animal facial expressions. On the basis of further research, he came to the conclusion that people's feelings are not only the cause of some facial muscle movements, but also feelings and expressions are fundamentally the same thing, and the existence of self cannot be separated from others. It is only in the process of civilization that feelings and expressions are artificially separated. Elias even doubted whether he could construct his own theory about the psychological development of westerners without medical knowledge.

In breslau, he studied under the neo-Kantian Richard Horneswald (Richard H? Niswald,1875-1947). In order to broaden his horizons, he studied in the summer semester of Heidelberg University 19 19, and listened to his old classmate Friedrich Dolf (1880-/kloc- 1 1 years later, the young Feng Zhi came to Heidelberg and praised Gong's moral articles. Elias also attended a seminar in karl jaspers (karl jaspers,1883-1969), and Aristotle suggested that he give an important speech on civilized writers. The so-called "civilized writer" was originally used by thomas mann to satirize leftist writers, including his brother Heinrich Mann. Civilization appeared as the opposite of culture. In thomas mann's view, culture is natural and true, so it is also German. On the other hand, civilization is strange, soulless and divided.

So far, Elias has rarely asked about politics, and the circle of his parents and relatives is also far away from politics. During the war of 19 18, he was elected to the soldiers' committee by his comrades with his excellent eloquence, but this did not change his attitude of staying away from politics. Faced with this politicized topic, he avoided reality, but expounded the formation of civilization and cultural concepts from the historical roots.

In the summer semester of 1920, he studied in Frejborg again in order to attend the Goethe seminar in edmund husserl (1859- 1938), who taught at the University of Freiburg. Honeywald, a tutor of breslau University, was critical of Husserl's phenomenology. He was introduced to Husserl by Edith Stein, a former student and teaching assistant of Husserl. She wrote in her letter of recommendation: "Now there is a young man going to Freiburg to attend your class. I promised him to introduce him to you. It's long overdue. His name is Norbert Elias. The main subject or minor subject is medicine. I was trained in philosophy at Honeywell, but I advised him to temporarily put away his criticism in order to understand phenomenology. " Etit was an extremely devout Catholic who was later killed by the Nazis in a concentration camp. Pope Paul praised her when she visited Germany in 1987.

In the process of writing his doctoral thesis, Elias' viewpoint of anatomical psychology conflicts with his tutor, and actually conflicts with Neo-Kantism. Neo-Kantianism was popular in the second half of19th century and the beginning of 20th century, and then it was divided into Marburg School and Freiburg School. They put forward the slogan of "returning to Kant", but accused Kant of not being thorough enough; They denied the significance of Kant's materialism of "thing itself" and described it as a "limit concept", which expressed the limit of knowledge, not the real thing, and thought that nature was the product of "pure thinking". Elias' mentor Honeywald belongs to neither Marburg School nor Freiburg School, and even put forward the arguments of "concrete subjectivity" and "factual knowledge", but he is still a neo-Kantian at heart. Elias expressed his understanding from the perspective of anatomical psychology in his doctoral thesis Ideas and Individuals, which deviated from philosophical idealism. His emphasis on the working mode of the brain is also incompatible with what Neo-Kantians call the transcendental "spiritual world" of human beings in the field of ideas. Elias believes that nothing transcendental can be true. "I can't turn a blind eye to this: everything that Kant said transcends time and experience is the appearance of causality. This kind of representation with timeliness or natural and moral laws and its corresponding words can only remain in personal consciousness if they are obtained by others. These concepts (or representations) are a kind of knowledge wealth, so they also belong to a person's experience treasure. " Here, he even flatly denied transcendentalism. The tutor could not accept his doctoral opinion, pointing out that "biology is not everything" and asked him to make fundamental changes. At that time, mentoring was like father and son. Without revision, the paper can't pass. It is against one's original intention to make fundamental changes. Faced with this dilemma, he made minor repairs, which not only satisfied his tutor, but also retained his basic views. 1922 passed the oral examination of philosophy, psychology, art history, chemistry and other subjects, and 1924 obtained the doctorate.

Elias' doctoral thesis is full of philosophical terms and abstract arguments, but pays special attention to the order of things; In this article, Elias raised the following questions: how did the previous state form develop into the later form; How the previous economic form developed into the later form; How the previous form of knowledge developed into the later form; How the previous forms of human life developed into today's forms also revealed the information he would study in the future.

A young college student is not kitsch and deceives the world, knowing that his views are out of date but boldly publishing them; In the face of authority that has a decisive influence on one's future, one can stick to principles, but at the same time, one will make some compromises on small issues and show moderate flexibility, which is a valuable quality of being loyal to academics. In the following decades, Elias was not understood by the world, and he was always at the edge of the academic circle, but he had no regrets and never changed his pursuit of fun.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a German named Fischer organized a migratory bird association to reward young people for hiking. At that time, young people flashed all over Shan Ye, and there were bursts of songs, which reminded people of our "training". But this kind of association excludes Jews from participating, and Jews are unwilling to be lonely. They also organized a blue and white association to fight against it, not only for "training" but also for Zionist propaganda. According to the memory of his contemporaries, Elias joined the Blue and White Association in breslau and was an important leader, but his role is still a controversial topic. One thing is clear here: he published an article entitled "Observing in Nature" in the blue and white magazine of the Association, 192 1. This article has nothing to do with Zionism, which this publication is most concerned about, but outlines his academic views and shows the direction and track of his future academic research. This is the first document that he changed from a philosopher to an anthropologist. The "human study" mentioned here is not a "human study" in the sense of "literature is human study", but a science that directly studies people, including the following disciplines: history, psychology, psychoanalysis, ethnology, anthropology, politics, economics and sociology. Elias tried to combine these disciplines to create a theory of the development of human society. He believes that people face the world not as a closed individual, but as a part of the world and belong to the world. He doesn't recognize transcendental things, and all theories need scientific argumentation. If there was metaphysics in his previous thinking, now he is beginning to change to the direction of experience and practice. The purpose of empirical academic research is to find out the scientific scale for evaluating objective things.

Observing in nature not only shows Elias' scientific attitude, but also shows his broad vision and open mind, carrying on the academic research to the end. In this article, he quoted a Latin idiom as his life motto: "Lapadia echosis", which means torch relay in Chinese, and it can also be said that a person's full salary is used to spread the fire. Although the previous salary is used up, the latter salary continues, one after another, and the academic fire will never go out. He is very grateful to his doctoral supervisor, Honeyswald, from whom he also learned a lot. 1966, in a thank-you speech after he won the Adorno academic prize, he once said: "Anthropology and other academic work are all a torch relay: take the torch from the previous generation, move forward and pass it on to the next generation. Generation after generation, the academic torch will always shine on people's progress. The previous generation has created a premise for the later generation to surpass itself. " 1922 After taking the postdoctoral examination, he can no longer count on his parents' financial support, because the Great Depression also made it difficult for them to protect themselves: unimaginable large-scale inflation reduced his father's pension to a negligible level. So he must work hard to support himself. The factory that produces furnace covers and valve covers needs a young man with a high degree of education, preferably a doctor. Elias was recommended to apply, and as a result, he became the sales director of this medium-sized enterprise with more than 800 employees. Therefore, he often travels to Nordic countries to carry out marketing activities. To this end, he has dealt with all kinds of people, and he has also observed the shocking poverty of workers in the economic crisis. He also learned that the reason why factory owners are diligent in making profits is not just to make money, but for the fun brought by competition, but because of complex relationships. Elias has lived mainly in school walls and academic ivory towers. The soldier's experience opened a door to the society, and this kind of "learning quotient" opened this door and had a crucial impact on his later academic career. Many viewpoints in the process of civilization are derived from this marketing experience.

The sales director is an eye-catching position: his salary is high and he can travel abroad frequently. He could have worked happily all his life, but such a life was not what he wanted. He is determined to develop in the university, and teaching and scientific research are his passion. He is confident to be a good teacher and teach people. Among his classmates, he enjoys a reputation for expressing complex things in simple language. He left the factory on 1924 and came to Heidelberg after five years. During this period, the parents' financial situation has improved, and it can also be used for the emergency needs of the only son. It is also necessary to mention that elias is a person who cherishes time. In his spare time, he translated and rewritten some Greek stories and jokes, which were later published in Berlin Pictorial, and he was paid for it. This made him firmly believe that pen farming can also make him maintain his life.

Childhood and youth passed, and his life in Heidelberg began a new page.