BY ALEX LAWRENCE
In his book, “The idiot”, Dostoevsky through the character of Prince Myshkin quotes “Beauty will save the world”. Despite seeming drastically over-optimistic at first glance, beauty as a concept may be more prevalent than it seems on the surface. For centuries, the religious doctrines which have shaped our modern world have preached the importance of serving transcendent beauty, a practice we all subconsciously follow in recognising and valuing nature, art and relationships. But what creates feeling of beauty, chemically speaking within our brain? And why is it such a fundamental and powerful emotion, in both literature and our daily lives?
The character of Prince Myshkin is intended by Dostoevsky to represent the epitome of naïve optimism. Seeing the positive qualities in everyone he meets and offering forgiveness at each opportunity, Myshkin personifies the traditional Christian values of love, faith and trust in both one another and God. Dostoevsky as a devoted orthodox Christian undoubtably attributed enormous value to these ideals, having been quoted to say: “even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” Arguably these ideals of which he served his entire life stem from the valuing of the beauty of human experience and the world as a whole. The recognition of beauty is the intuitive understanding and acceptance of ideals greater than the self; it is the humbling of being abstracted from personal desires, joys and sufferings. This selfless recognition is what Dostoevsky believed to be the fundamental message of the Christian doctrine, a concept which he explores through the various characters in his novels and how they interact with both one another and society.
But why then does beauty exist at all? One might perhaps question its biological value given its tendency to act contrarily to the desires and even survival of the individual. When our ancestors would be at serious risk of predation from wild animals, the last thing they would want is to be captivated by the beauty of nature, but yet as an emotional response, it remains. A 2011 study[1] aimed at ascertaining a neurological explanation for beauty found a correlation between pleasurable feelings after listening to classical music and viewing of art and an increase in activity in an area of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). The OFC is responsible for many reward based decision making functions such as the production of dopamine in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a neurotransmitter responsible for the feelings of accomplishment and pleasure when taking actions in accordance with modelled outcomes. Furthermore, this area of the brain is correlated with subjective value[2], implying that beauty acts as an allusion to the ideas and concepts we value and protect to the greatest extent, an idea strongly analogous to the religious notions of the sacred of which Dostoevsky also explores.
Notions of connectedness and extra-personal value also have correlations with the hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin is produced in the hypothalamus, to the greatest extent in women during childbirth and during reproduction, contributing to bonding with partners and offspring. Studies[3] have also shown Oxytocin to be responsible for the creation of social groups and the defining of others as either an “in group” or “out group” member (those who we consider the same and different to ourselves). All these factors work together to create an inherent notion of a system greater than the self within our lives, facilitating cooperation, sympathy and love and ultimately allowing societies to form and flourish. The recognition of beauty is a subconscious allusion to this phenomenon of which is so often focused upon in literature as it is so fundamental to the human experience.
This is what I believe to be the true meaning of the phrase “Beauty will save the world”, that being that our valuing and faith in the systems greater than yourself will ultimately keep us from the suffering and nihilistic tendencies all too common in the modern age. Through his writing, Dostoevsky highlights the sufferings and joys intrinsic to being human and the ways in which these affect both the individual and society as a whole. The religious ideals he personifies through Myshkin are to me the fundamentals of human bonds which stem ultimately from our neurochemistry and trust in each other.
[1] https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0021852