综合教程 第五册 Unit 13.docVIP

Unit 13 Beauty For the Greeks, beauty was a virtue: a kind of excellence. Persons then were assumed to be what we now have to call---lamely, enviously---whole persons. If it did occur to the Greeks to distinguish between a persons inside and outside, they still expected that inner beauty would be matched by beauty of the other kind. The well-born young Athenians who gathered around Socrates found it quite paradoxical that their hero was so intelligent, so brave, so honorable, so seductive---and so ugly. One of Socrates main pedagogical acts was to be ugly---and teach those innocent, no doubt splendid-looking disciples of his how full of paradoxes life really was. 对于古希腊人来说，美丽是一种美德：一种出色表现。这样的人在今天会理所当然而又无不受嫉妒地被人们称为完整的人。即使古希腊人真的曾经将一个个体的内在与外在区分开来，他们依然会期望这个个体的内在美能够与他其他方面的美相匹配。当那些出身良好的年轻雅典人聚集在苏格拉底周围时，他们发现了一个非常矛盾的事实：他们的英雄是如此地睿智，如此英勇，如此高贵，如此有诱惑力——而且，如此其貌不扬。苏格拉底用自己的丑陋给他的那些天真无邪的，无疑也是非常俊美的始徒们上的其中最重要的一节课就是：生活中充满了矛盾。 They may have resisted Socrates lessons. We do not. Several thousand years later, we are more wary of the enchantments of beauty. We not only split off---with the greatest facility---the inside(character, intellect）from the outside(looks); but we are actually surprised when someone who is beautiful is also intelligent, talented, good. 他们也许听不进去导师的教诲。但是我们不会。几千年以后的今天，我们变的更加小心翼翼地对待美丽之销魂。我们不但十分轻而易举地把二者——内在（品质，智慧）与外在（外表）分割开，实际上，当我们看到一个人既漂亮同时又聪明，有才干，善良的时候，我们会感到很惊讶。 It was principally the influence of Christianity that deprived beauty of the central place it had in classical ideals of human excellence. By limiting excellence (virtus in Latin) to moral virtue only, Christianity set beauty adrift--as an alienated, arbitrary, superficial enchantment. And beauty has continued to lose prestige. For close to two centuries it has become a convention to attribute beauty to only one of the two sexes: the sex which, however Fair, is always Second. Associating beauty with women has put beauty even further on the defensive, morally. 人们将美丽从古典的人类理想的中心地位中分裂出来，主要是受到了基督教的影响。为了将出色（在拉丁