2010年教育部考试中心考研英语翻译模拟试题.docVIP

2010年教育部考试中心考研英语翻译模拟试题(五) 五、艺术的价值 Theories of the value of art are of two kinds, which we may call extrinsic and intrinsic. The first regards art and the appreciation of art as means to some recognized moral good, while the second regards them as valuable not instrumentally but as objects unto themselves. It is characteristic of extrinsic theories to locate the value of art in its effects on the person who appreciates it. Art is held to be a form of education, perhaps an education of the emotions. In this case, it becomes an open question whether there might not be some more effective means to the same result. (46) Alternatively, one may attribute a negative value to art, as Plato did in his Republic, arguing that art has a corrupting or diseducative effect on those exposed to it. The extrinsic approach, adopted in modern times by Leo Tolstoy in What Is Art in 1896, has seldom seemed wholly satisfactory. (47)Philosophers have constantly sought for a value in aesthetic experience that is unique to it and that, therefore, could not be obtained from any other source. The extreme version of this intrinsic approach is that associated with Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and the French Symbolists, and summarized in the slogan “art for art’s sake”. Such thinkers and writers believe that art is not only an end in itself but also a sufficient justification of itself. (48)They also hold that in order to understand art as it should be understood, it is necessary to put aside all interests other than an interest in the work itself. Between those two extreme views there lies, once again, a host of intermediate positions. (49)We believe, for example, that works of art must be appreciated for their own sake, but that, in the act of appreciation, we gain from them something that is of independent value.（50）Thus a joke is laughed at for its own sake, even though there is an independent value in laughter, which lightens our lives by taking us momentarily outside ou