The idea of beauty as the reduction of all explicanda to a single explicans, of all particulars to a single head as Adam Ferguson would say, still allows for a dichotomy in the treatment of beauty; what I will refer to as the appreciation of first and second order beauty.
First order beauty is the most common conception, simply because it is the most obvious. It is beauty in an object as such, and stops there: everything exists for a purpose, and executes its function in the best way possible. It is a constructed beauty – what Hayek would call rationalist and constructivist. It is the result of deliberate design – in fact, anything human designed is done with a form of first-order beauty in mind – whether art, institutions, or urban planning. Its unifying principle is consequential -its unity is in what it does and how it does it.
Second order beauty, on the other hand, is a beauty of process – a meta-beauty. It is more fundamental, and does not necessarily exhibit first-order beauty. Yet the beauty of it is in the robustness: though it does not necessarily generate results with the most beauty in themselves, its results are always suited for its ends. Its unifying principle is procedural – the result is not deliberately constructed as such, but comes about from interactions under general rules.
The difference may be hard to grasp in the abstract, but concrete examples will make it much clearer. The difference is between Esperanto and English. Esperanto is a clean and regular language. It was constructed that way. Everything exists for a purpose, with no vestiges from older ancestors. English, on the other hand, is a messy hodge podge of two major and half a dozen minor European languages. It has constructions (for example do-support on yes/no questions) which from an a priori perspective seem outlandish.
Yet Esperanto is subject to the same rules of language change as English. Should it achieve its goal of becoming a universal second language, it will inevitably split into dialects just like any other – its beauty marred by the accidents of mass-adoption. The second-order beauty here is the process of linguistics, governed by the innate principles of Universal Grammar first articulated by Noam Chomsky. Though English as such may lack the apparent beauty that Esperanto has, the principles of universal grammar in tension with the processes of language change will always produce a language as fit for human communication, as rich in expressive power, and as easy for acquisition as any other, despite their surface differences – even with severely degraded input (i.e., the creolization of pidgins).
Another example is nature versus cities. Which is more beautiful, a forest, or a well-laid-out city? They exhibit, of course, different types of beauty. The city represents the distilled rational principles of habitation that man has learned from nature and experience, and is thus more suited to house him. Yet without conscious and deliberate upkeep and intervention, the city will eventually crumble and fall into disrepair, while the forest survives and thrives just as well without as with human aid.
Second order beauty is exemplified in spontaneous orders. Where first-order beauties require full knowledge, absolute control, and constant vigilance (and are thus easier to create on a canvas than in a society), second-order beauties provide for their own continued existence by general rules rather than specific directives, and in fact are hindered rather than helped by deliberate intervention, simply because deliberate human design can only result in first-order beauty, which becomes impossible to create as the scope makes the necessary knowledge, authority, and vigilance impossible (see Cracked.com for 6 examples of intervention hindering coordination – examples 3 and 4 with regard to nature, and the rest with regard to society as a whole).
The most pervasive example of second-order beauty outside of the laws of nature themselves is the market economy. Its general rules are property rights and contract enforcement. And though it is the result of human action, like language, it is not the result of human design, qualifying it as second-order. The robustness with which it provides for the needs of the consumer, agnostic to which particular firm gets to do so, just as Universal Grammar robustly provides for human communication agnostic to the particular grammatical constructions which do so, is what makes it beautiful.
The attempted substitution of second-order beauty with first-order beauty has been the cause of a great number of evils in human history. The theme of Hayek’s entire corpus is the repudiation of this attempt with regard to the institutions of the market. Though it, like nature, is resilient to a great degree of intervention, experience has shown that neither is impossible to break. The Soviets, in fact, demonstrated this with regard to both: land irreparably laid waste by industrial development, and an economy collapsing under the misdirection of a central authority charged with the impossible task of omniscience. The two are not unrelated, stemming both from the philosophy of man as supremely rational, and the former in fact spurred on by the latter.
A beauty which does not provide for its own continued existence is no beauty at all, which is why an appreciation of second-order beauty is absolutely essential to understanding the universe and seeking truth. Second-order beauty is creation; first-order beauty is only imitation. As rationality is the qualitative distinction between the intelligence of man and animal, so the creation and governance of second-order beauty, something requiring nothing less than omniscience, is the qualitative distinction between the intelligence of man and God.
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