From: Helen Fowle (helenfowle@hotmail.com), Thu Aug 16 2001:
>The reason I didn't go back to the greeks in that message is because
>I'm looking more directly at the modern self in the context of new
>technologies, and furthermore related to both sexes. Although I'm
>not up on my greek and roman history, I believe much of the
>fascination in the body was male orientated, though there were
>obvious exceptions.
I don't think that "fascination" is the right word to use in the
context of the Greek's philosophy of their bodies. I also don't agree
with the view that the body image of the ancient Greeks was mostly
male-oriented.
For the first, I think that "reverence" might be a more suitable
word than "fascination". The Greek's view of their bodies was
strongly coupled with their view of their natural world, in that
they saw beauty and harmony and felt it was their duty to preserve
it, and their place in it.
For the Greeks, the human body was a masterpiece. They would make
sure to do everything humanly possible to promote its health and
therefore, its beauty. They would go to the gym (heh.. gymno in
Greek means naked..), exercising every day, bathing every day in
private or public baths, cover their skin with olive oil and herbs
to moisturize and scent it. You can follow some of their body-care
in the old stories. For example, in Homer's Odyssey, every time
Odysseus passed through, yet, another calamity and was in a place
where he could recover, the first thing that he would do before
feasting his face was to bathe and anoint himself with olive oil.
The mind-body link to the Greeks was very strong. Health was
important if you wanted to be beautiful: in mind and in flesh. In
fact, the mind was considered to be a bit more important because the
beauty of mind was identified with virtues like justice and honesty,
for example.
The Greeks took the mind-body link one step further to the arena of
"action". The aesthetic of the body and the health that accrues from
physical fitness was a symbol and evidence for the reality that
every individual has the power to translate word into deed and to be
men and women of action, and not of just talk.
[Did you know that the early Greeks preferred their athletics nude?
They invented the Olympic Games on this basis. ]
About your perception that the Greeks interest in the body was
male-oriented: it's sadly true that Greek women could not vote or
hold office, however Greek men insisted on incorporating strong
female characters into every aspect of their art and literature.
The women are present in the Greek art: which is logical since the
Spartans, Argive, Eleusinians, and Athenians felt that Artemis,
Hera, Demeter, and Athena alone, respectively, were their patron
deities. Upon skimming through the "Greek Art" chapter of my college
art history book, I saw equal numbers of Kore (maiden) and Kouros
(young boy) statues (interestingly though, she is always clothed)
from about 600 B.C., other famous statues like "Hera" from Samos,
and the flying female Gorgon on the Temple of Artemis at Corfu. Then
about one or two hundred years later, the Greeks sculpted the female
form magnificently: the Dying Niobid (this one alone is a
masterpiece in uniting motion and emotion!), the Three Goddesses
from the pediment of the Parthenon, and Nike from the balustrade of
the Temple of Athena Nike.
There are some very strong women in the Greek literature, but I
don't know yet if they act with the same kind of body-care as the
male characters. Consider this story premise, however:
In Aristophanes' Lysistrata, a comedic play he wrote during the
Peloponnesian War (431-403 B.C.), he wanted to show the insanity of
war. In this play, the women of Greece barricade themselves on the
Acropolis and go on a sex strike, in order to convince their
husbands to try end the war. The play premise mixes fantasy and
reality, to show that the women's efforts are just as silly as the
men's war efforts (or is it really that silly to give up an
undending war, in exchange for a resumption of sex?).
I can only imagine (!) how a Greek from two thousand years ago would
feel about their transhumanist bodies today. In their daily life
from long ago, their actions seemed to show that they felt that the
human form was a "gift" and perfect as it was, and therefore, it was
their moral duty to take care about it. However, their bodies were
strongly linked to their philosophy and their natural environment,
so one can speculate, too, that if their philosophy encouraged
modifying one's environment to suit oneself, then the body
modifications should naturally follow.
One interesting fact-finding effort you can do now, in order to try
to learn how different cultures in different countries feel about
body-modification, is to see how "accepting" is the culture of the
human body, in general. How? Take a look at the number of existing
naturist resorts (or, at the very least, see how common or uncommon
you would find topless women). There are worlwide networks of
naturist resorts and naturist societies (a search on the Web will do
it), as well as published books for where these places are located.
I would say that one mark of a civilized country is the number of
its nude and topless beaches/resorts.
Amara
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Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com
Computational Physics vita: finger agraps@shell5.ba.best.com
Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
********************************************************************
"Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still."
--a Chinese Proverb
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