Beauty will save the world
An interpretation
It’s still harvest, but barely. Sitting outside, you feel winter stir. I felt it as I sat in a moor-top basin: a place where the valley-side crests and dips down into a dark cliff, yellow gorse bursting from its irregular shelves.
Sit with your back to that rock face, and the land’s dip constrains your world to the sky and a circle of twenty foot: just bilberries, bracken, and passing rooks. Yet if you become still, the basin grows. It teems with stories. A spider prepares her ambush. An ant discovers a kestrel’s leftovers. A sycamore seedling survives an unpromising birth between rock and wind.
Stand, and the basin becomes a notch in the rim of a larger one, for the valley widens here and narrows again a few miles downstream. Opposite, dark moors, crowned by an ancient hillfort, bend a sheltering arm around green fields scattered with sheep. In the bottom, road and river twist together. Where the valley widens, so does the road. Village windows glitter in the sun. It is beautiful.
The belief that ‘beauty will save the world’ is sometimes attributed to Dostoevsky. This is not, though, straightforward. The sentence appears in his novel The Idiot; but its main character, Prince Myshkin, is never actually seen to say it. Instead, it is attributed to him by others who are mocking or criticising him; and it is difficult to take these passages as an endorsement of the idea. The same is true of the rest of the book. Myshkin’s admiration of beauty is ambivalent, he says ‘I have not prepared my judgment. Beauty is a riddle’; and the book ends tragically for him and for its two female beauties. Besides, Dostoevsky also gives powerful voice to other views. Consider this from The Brothers Karamazov:
‘Can there be beauty in Sodom? Believe me, for the vast majority of people, that’s just where beauty lies—did you know that secret? The terrible thing is that beauty is not only fearful but also mysterious. Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart.’
If Dostoevsky did believe that ‘beauty will save the world’, I doubt he saw it as a simple or automatic process.
Nevertheless, the line has great power. It feels true, important, prophetic. Dorothy Day loved it. So, whatever it meant to Dostoevsky, it is worth paying some attention to. Beauty will save the world. What does that mean?
One reading hinges on beauty’s status as an ultimate value, like truth and goodness, pursued for its own sake. On this interpretation, beauty is more immediately apprehended than the true and the good, so it serves as the handmaiden that leads us to them. As I sit in the moor-top basin, my eye is drawn to a circling buzzard. Contemplating its beauty, I am drawn out of myself. My selfish ego crumbles a little, and in some small way I better understand that I am not a whole world, just part of one. Thus humbled, I edge a little closer to the true and the good. In this way, Dostoevsky’s line is woven into a pretty tale. A pretty tale, but a lying one.
The first lie is that beauty necessarily draws us out of ourselves. It might. It might not. Often beauty plunges us deeper into our selfish little egos. Consider a handsome man with a chiselled body standing in front of a gym mirror. He admires each muscle group in turn and then reflects upon the harmonious whole that they form. The beauty is real and so is the narcissism it fosters. Or consider a man sat alone in a moor-top basin. He knows that he alone sees a tiny hidden world, its ten thousand lives. He feels honoured. To be honoured is to be special, and to be special is to be superior. The selfish ego, always comparing, congratulates itself on its own aesthetic and spiritual development. This is the usual path, the way most aesthetic movements slide from the ferocious beauty of their birth to cliques and petty treachery.
The second lie is the idea that only beauty, of the ultimate values, can draw us out of ourselves. Truth and goodness are quite capable of doing this. An archaeologist spends the day bent double, sifting dirt and rubble. At dusk, she uncovers an ugly brown fragment of pottery. A tiny truth about long dead people envelops her consciousness, and she entirely forgets her hungry belly and aching back. Or a young man in a foreign land is helped by a stranger who owes him nothing and expects nothing. Years later, remembering, he does the same for a traveller in his homeland. The old good draws him out of himself and into a new good. The true and the good do not need a handmaiden, not even beauty. They are here themselves, down in the dirt and the horror with us.
The third lie is the idea that being drawn out of yourself will always lead you to the good and the true. It might. It might lead you away from them. The mob chants in unison, awful and sublime; and, forgetting themselves, its members performs atrocities they could not have managed alone. Or addicted to a smartphone, the modern loses their self to the news feed: eager to know what is happening, how their media tribe interprets it, and how it reveals the evil of their enemies. As they chase the truth, they drown in an ocean of lies.
The fourth and final lie is the one Dostoevsky exposes when he has a character remark that for most people Sodom is beautiful. It is the pretence that evil and lies cannot be beautiful. In reality, they usually have a glamour that good and truth do not. Neither evil nor lies are constrained by reality, so they can promise whatever they want. A man leaves his family to be with a pretty young mistress. A politician promises an elegant solution to an intractable problem. The first is wrong, the second a lie. Neither is uncommon.
Yet the real problem with the story about beauty leading us away from our selfish little minds is not that it is false. The problem is that it entirely misses the point. The line does not say ‘beauty will save us’. It says ‘beauty will save the world’. Do we think we are the world? The story about beauty leading us out of the ego-trap is only another manifestation of the ego-trap. It was never about us. It was about the world.
What does it mean to say that beauty will save the world? What does it mean to say the world is a thing that can be saved or needs to be saved?
To take these questions seriously, a genre of childish lies must be discarded. The usual use of ‘saving the world’, aside from in Hollywood blockbusters, is connected to causes such as campaigns against nuclear weapons or for the protection of the environment. These things are never really about saving the world. We could detonate all of humanity’s nuclear weapons and burn all of the remaining fossil fuels in a day and the world would nevertheless survive. Life would survive too, and flourish again, even if many species would not. We lack even the power to harm the world, and so cannot save it. These campaigns are about saving ourselves, and so irrelevant here. The line says that beauty will save the world.
Beauty will save the world. To understand this, it cannot be approached merely as an intellectual proposition. The whole heart must attend. The line’s emotional weight is central. Unless it is grasped, nothing is. As a first approximation, its emotional message is something like ‘beauty is consequential’ or ‘beauty matters’.
Even this first approximation is a challenge. Our culture pretends that beauty does not matter, that it is ‘only skin deep’. To worry too much about beauty is equated with superficiality. This is hypocritical. Western modernity is the most thoroughly aesthetic society in history. Politics has been reduced to posture. Public morality is understood in terms of what an action ‘signals’ to others. Religion, where it valued at all, is valued for the way it makes the believer feel, not for any objective truth it holds. We pretend to find aesthetics shallow so that we can hide the way that we have reduced everything to the shallowest of possible aesthetics. ‘Beauty matters’ is a direct challenge to all of this nonsense.
The line is stronger yet. It doesn’t say ‘beauty matters’ in the superficial manner of this civilisation. It doesn’t say ‘beauty matters because of the way it makes us feel’ or even ‘beauty matters to us’. It says that beauty matters to the world. In other words, beauty objectively matters. This is not beauty as our culture understands it. It is not beauty understood primarily as the capacity of something to arouse a sense of appreciation in a human witness. If it is in the eye of the beholder, then the beholder must be God. To say that beauty will save the world is to affirm the objective existence, regardless of our petty human minds, of both beauty and the world.
The line goes beyond even this. It does not just say that beauty objectively exists and objectively matters. It says that beauty will save the world. Beauty is of overwhelmingly central importance to the world itself. What does this mean? Here, the plodding words of an essayist struggle to keep pace with the gallop of the prophet, but perhaps I can point where I cannot tread. When we perceive beauty, we perceive pattern. It need not be a simple pattern, and we need not grasp it all; but mere random noise without context has no beauty. So it is, too, with the world. Mere undifferentiated random noise is not a world. In other words, the thing that we grasp when we grasp beauty is the thing in the world that makes the world itself possible. It is the driving force of creation. Weil puts it this way:
Justice, truth and beauty are the image in our world of this impersonal and divine order of the universe. Nothing inferior to them is worthy to be the inspiration of men who accept the fact of death.
And, being Weil, she makes no concession to everyday complacency when she draws out the logical political implications:
Above those institutions which are concerned with protecting rights and persons and democratic freedoms, others must be invented for the purpose of exposing and abolishing everything in contemporary life which buries the soul under injustice, lies and ugliness.
They must be invented, for they are unknown, and it is impossible to doubt that they are indispensable.
Image: Sunset in Ravenscar, North Yorkshire by Stacey MacNaught (CC BY 2.0)
Br. F-
Beautifully written and much to think about. I am certainly guilty of using the line in a vaguely aspirational way. It is good and useful to think on it more deeply.
I also take this question in a Platonic sense a la The Symposium. Which is not the metaphysic of choice these days, to say the least. That there is a practice of beauty that goes beyond--way beyond--mere aestheticism. The latter uses beauty, as you suggest, as a kind of stimulant or even as a palliative. What does it mean to be raised up to *Beauty Itself*? Does that even make sense to us anymore? Probably not for most people. Though we may still get intimations of it when something beautiful does make us less self-centered and shallow, even if only for a fleeting moment.
It's been a while since I read The Idiot, but I think this question in the novel is made more complicated still. Prince Myshkin contemplates a decidedly unbeautiful painting, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein. He does so at the residence of Rogozhin, an atheist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_of_the_Dead_Christ_in_the_Tomb
Myshkin says the one could lose one's faith looking at such a painting. Rogozhin responds that he has, in fact, lost his faith. It is safe to say that no Orthodox Icon painter would depict Christ in this manner. An icon painter would always paint Christ as beautiful. Christians believe Christ is God and therefore Beauty Itself. What does it mean to contemplate Christ as bearing what looks like nothing more than a brute, animal and therefore senseless death? What does it mean to confront that for any of us, Christian, atheist or otherwise? It is indeed a religious question, but not only that.
A quote from another atheist character, Ippolit, who says in reference to the painting:
"Nature appears to the viewer of this painting in the shape of some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, strange though it is—in the shape of some huge machine of the most modern construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being—such a being as by himself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of this being alone! The painting seems precisely to express this notion of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subjected, and it is conveyed to you involuntarily."
So this brings up a deeper question about the meaning of our lives. It isn't merely about aesthetics, in the limited sense of the word. It asks what is beauty in a purely materialistic universe? Is it nothing more than a trick of the brain that can alleviate for us--for reasons we can never begin to explain let alone understand--the pain of the brute meaninglessness and absurdity of human existence? Or even why the universe exists at all rather than nothing? Does the deeper sense of beauty that we all experience and appears to connect us to the transcendent become a lie and a cruel joke?
It is worth considering. Though I don't see a simple way to answer any of those questions. There may not be an "answer" if we mean that in a kind of syllogistic, propositional sense. It is the question and answer of our whole life. This is what makes Dostoevsky so powerful to read.
Anyway, thank you for your beautiful and deep reflection. A lot to meditate upon. I hope you are well. -Jack
P.S. I wonder what Kierkegaard would have thought of all of this?
I read this lovely piece twice, so thanks for that.
Perhaps you are a little hard on the moorland observer, whose humility when truly *seeing* (including his place in the scene) I recognise from my own best moments of ‘shrinking’. If that makes sense.