Susan Sontag “Beauty”
Chinese translation is taken from http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_67050a870100hwn4.html
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For the Greeks, beauty was a virtue: a kind of excellence. Persons then were assumed to be what we now have to all--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 honourable, so
(1) 對於古希臘人來說，美麗 是一種美德：一種出色表 現。這樣的人在今天會理所 當然而又無不受嫉妒地被 人們稱為"完整"的人。即使 古希臘人真的曾經將一個 個體的"內在"與"外在"區 分開來，他們依然會期望這 個個體的內在美能夠與他 其他方面的美相匹配。當那 些出身良好的年輕雅典人 聚集在蘇格拉底周圍時，他 們發現了一個非常矛盾的 事實：他們的英雄是如此地 睿智，如此英勇，如此高 貴，如此有誘惑力——而
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. 2 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
且，如此其貌不揚。蘇格拉 底用自己的醜陋給他的那 些天真無邪的，無疑也是非 常俊美的始徒們上的其中 最重要的一節課就是：生活 中充滿了矛盾。 他們也許聽不進去導師的教誨。 但是我們不會。幾千年以後的今 天，我們變的更加小心翼翼地對 待美麗之銷魂。我們不但十分輕 而易舉地把二者——"內在"（品 質，智慧）與"外在"（外表）分 割開，實際上，當我們看到一個 人既漂亮同時又聰明，有才幹， 善良的時候 我們會感到很驚訝。 ，
someone who is beautiful is also intelligent, talented, good. 3 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...
