Unit 15
Aesthetics
Preview
Beauty is a virtue which no one can deny. But in the history of human life, people's attitudes towards it have changed a lot. The ancient Greeks, following Socrates' pedagogy, kept a balance between beauty inside and beauty outside. Christianity, depriving beauty of classical ideals of human excellence, t beauty adrift, and associated it only with women. In order to prop up the mythology of the "feminine", women need to get some critical distance from that excellence and privilege of beauty.
Text Reading
'Warm-up
What is beauty?
Beauty is a vital and central element of human experience. It is associated with pleasure, which influences personal choices and cultural developments. Poets prai it, artists strive to capture it in their works, moralists warn against its deceiving influence, scientists ek to uncover its crets, and philosophers reflect on its illusive nature.
Plea discuss your understanding of beauty with your partner. The following words and expressions may be uful for your discussion.
perceptual experience, generating pleasure, feelings of attraction and emotional well-being, visual field, feminine, masculine, xism, xual lection, xual feelings, human appearance and natural scenery, morally good, appropriate, pleasing, talent, good reputation and behavior, direct experience, unreliable, inparable, ugliness, artistic beauty, natural beauty, cross culture, cultural values and traditions, aesthetics
• Beauty vs. ugliness.
How do we judge what is beauty and what is ugliness? The following are some definitions. Discuss with your partner and give your own definition.短发发型图片
Beauty:
• a characteristic of a person, a thing or an idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, or satisfaction.
• an entity which is admired, or posss features in a particular culture, for perfection.
• being in balance and harmony with nature, which may lead to feelings of attraction and emotional well-being.
Ugliness:
• a property of a person or thing that is unpleasant to look upon and results in a highly unfavorable evaluation.
• aesthetically unattractive, repulsive, or offensive.
第一名英文怎么写>蛋卷头发型图片 • having visible characteristic, and internal attribute.
似乎拼音
• How has beauty acquired the overtone of xism?
Beauty has been attributed to women and therefore has acquired the overtone of xism both in China and the West. However, such a trend has developed in different routes. Tell the different process through which beauty has undergone such a change in China and the West.
Text
Beauty
Susan Sontag①
[1] For the Greeks, beauty was a virtue (a particular good quality or habit): a kind of excellence (the quality of being extremely good). Persons then were assumed (believed) to be what we now have to call—enviously (admirably)—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 (from a ric
h family or a family of high social class出身名门，出身高贵的) young Athenians who gathered around Socrates② found it quite paradoxical (藏红花的作用absurd, illogical, unexpected荒谬的) that their hero was so intelligent, so brave, so honorable, so ductive我的同桌作文200字 (xually attractive)—and so ugly. One of Socrates② main pedagogical (教育学的, 教学法的) acts was to be ugly—and teach tho innocent, no doubt splendid-looking disciples (persons who believe in and follow the teachings of a religious or political leader) of his how full of paradoxes (contrarieties矛盾, 相反物) life really was.
[2] They may have resisted Socrates' lesson. We do not. Several thousand years later, we are more wary of (cautious of) the enchantments (the state of being under a magic spell) of beauty. We not only split off (to parate sth from, a larger object or group)—with the greatest facility (a natural ability to learn or do sth easily)—the "inside" (character, intellect) from the "outside" (looks); but we are actually surprid when someone who is beautiful is also intelligent, talented (gifted), good.
空格
[3] It was principally (chiefly) the influence of Christianity (the religion that is bad on
the teachings of Jesus Christ and the belief that he was the son of God) that deprived beauty of the central place it had in classical (traditional in style or idea, connected with or influenced by the culture of ancient Greece and Rome) ideals of human excellence. By limiting excellence (virtues in Latin) to moral virtue only, Christianity t beauty 索拉查盆地灵魂兽adrift (adj. no longer attached or fixed in the right position)—as an alienated (foreign), arbitrary (subjective, not eming to be bad on a reason, system or plan and sometimes eming unfair), superficial (not concerned with anything rious or important and lacking any depth of understanding or feeling) enchantment (attractiveness, charm). And beauty has continued to lo prestige (the respect and admiration). For clo to (=nearly) two centuries it has become a convention (rule, habit or tradition) to attribute beauty to (to say or believe that sb is responsible for doing sth) only one of the two xes: the x, which, however Fair (beautiful), is always Second. Associating beauty with women had put beauty even further on the defensive (protecting sb/ sth against attack), morally (spiritually)③.
