Answer to Nicole's Question

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 in the previous paragraph that "to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation." Clive Bell certainly does not explain this fully. He is very vague about what this world is and what composes it--just as Plato is extremely vague about what constitutes the Realm of Forms. He is wrong in saying that emotion is not correlated to aesthetic experience when he says: "For a moment, we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life."
   I do not feel I could have aesthetic experience without my own experience, specifically, my memories and how my experience has shaped my way of viewing art. Also, Bell asserts: "I wonder, sometimes, whether the appreciators of art and of mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied. Before we feel an aesthetic emotion for a combination of forms, do we not perceive intellectually the rightness and necessity of the combination?" He introduces this notion that art is like mathematics which I find completely unfounded. He calls mathematics an abstract science, which it most certainly is not. (Physics is more close abstract). Art is the abstract science and Bell is very incorrect in saying that mathematics is abstract.
   He mentions the combination of forms in art later in the paragraph, half-contradicting what he previously said about art being its own world. The combinations provoke us to see a work of art and immediately say if it is good or not. But, then to reach this conclusion, we would have to use our emotions and experience. The flaw in Bell's logic is that he does not explain how we can judge art without having emotions, memories, and experience paired with our viewing of the art.