The status of images in the history of many religions and in modern media is mostly an embattled
one. It is mainly because images are thought to be untrustworthy: They lie, cheat, and steal. Whether
in Socrates or in the many critiques of images mounted by Jewish, Muslim, or Christian writers, by
Hindu reformers or by Marxist revolutionaries, suspicions circle around a tenacious distrust of images.
Images lie __(26)__ as they selectively tell the truth, exaggerating aspects of it, or distorting __(27)__ they
portray into whatever priests, tyrants, or merchants want pliant viewers to believe. Images dupe the
unsuspecting, lulling them into views or opinions that are untrue. And images steal belief from words,
the revealed medium of divine self-revelation in the so-called religions of the book. As Socrates might
have put it, images rob belief in the logical procedure of discourse—the __(28)__ movement of intellectual
inquiry from opinion to truth, cheating reason of its rightful place in ascertaining the truth of a matter. Yet the distrust of images presumes something deeper about them. Images work their magic by a
subtle and often irresistible effect on the body: provoking fear, envy, pride, desire, obsession, rage—
all the strong feelings and passions that grip the chest or rise in the blood, creep over the flesh, __(29)__ as tears in the eyes. Images appeal to and rely on the body. It is precisely this that philosophers,
teachers, moralists, clergy, and parents have resented about the power of images. Images are
understood to traffic in the body’s energies and to threaten to __(30)__ the strictures of thought and
conscience that moral authorities work hard to nurture and inculcate.
【題組】26.
(A) rather
(B) since
(C) because
(D) inasmuch
寫作批改
VIP與詳解卡管理
私人筆記( 2 )
