新编英语教程6-U7-Beauty-中英翻译.docxVIP

新编英语教程6-U7-Beauty-中英翻译 新编英语教程6-U7-Beauty-中英翻译 PAGEPAGE3 / NUMPAGES3 新编英语教程6-U7-Beauty-中英翻译 Beauty Susan Sontag 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 person’s “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. 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, talent and good. It was principally the influence of Christianity that deprived beauty of the central place it had in classical ideals of human 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. A beautiful woman, we say in English. But a handsome man. “Handsome” is the masculine equivalent of-and refusal of-a compliment which has accumulate certain demeaning overtones, by being resolved women only. That one can call a man in French and in Italian suggests that catholic countries, unlike those countries shaped by the Protestant version