How does Clive Bell establish that the aesthetic world is a "world with emotions of its own" in which "the emotions of life find no place" (267)? Do you think he explains this fully? Can you think of reasons or examples as to why he is right/wrong?
Bell states, "We seem to have recognized intellectually the rightness of its forms without staying to fix our attention, and collect, as it were, their emotional significance. If this were so, it would be permissible to inquire whether it was the forms themselves or our perception of their rightness and necessity that caused aesthetic emotion" (Bell, 266).
Bell compares inherent recognition of forms to a mathmetician in the heat of his work. Now, he goes on to imply that the forms themselves, much like mathematical equations, are timeless. For the Pythagorean Theorem worked exactly for us as it did for Pythagoras. He states that like this, great significant form is timeless, and not attached to any particular culture either. In this way, of being devoid of time and human life, does he then make his otherworldly statements. Bell elaborates on pure aesthetic emotion, which he thinks is much different from recalling previous experiences or feelings, and in this do we see light shed on the "peculiar" aesthetic emotion. This is another premise to his conclusion that emotions are in a world of their own, and that they have no place in life.
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