COSMOS + TAXIS | Vol 5 issue 1 | 2017

CO SM O S + TA X IS Bruce Caldwell’s observation that “[b]y the 1960s Hayek was seeing complex orders everywhere” is something that struck a cautionary note in our thinking about jazz (Caldwell 2000, p. 19). Indiscriminate use of the concept (known as “concept creep” in the psychology literature) would of course empty it of meaning, a fate that has befallen many a key term in social philosophy. However contested a concept may be, theorists should be able to: (a) point to the logical independence of spontaneous order (in other words, a given concept shouldn’t be analyzable in terms that presuppose that very concept); (b) pick out and identify all and only the things to which the concept applies (that is, the extensional and intensional adequacy to use philosophical jargon); and (c) explain the functional adequacy as to why one would need a given concept (what work or role would a given concept have to fulfill?). We therefore think it useful to briefly expound upon what we understand the concept to be. The notion of spontaneous order is inextricably part and parcel of the five-faceted cornerstone to Hayek’s philosophy of social science: the other facets being complexity, the dispersion of knowledge, rationality and methodological individualism. Spontaneous order connotes the idea that as a result of innumerable and perpetually dynamic (tacit and explicit) interactions among multitudes of agents, sociality and culture are emergent phenomena. The idea is that socalled “emergent” phenomena cannot be reduced to their constituent parts without remainder; the corollary being that the consequences of the interaction between the constituent elements cannot be predicted. Spontaneous order is closely related to emergent phenomena in other domains (notably in biology, physics and computational intelligence) and is variously termed as self-organization and complex adaptive systems: all variants have a similar logical form. For Hayek spontaneous orders are essentially information systems. A healthily functioning spontaneous order or communications mechanism promotes “computational” efficiencies, a complex coordination mechanism for diverse wants, preferences, interests and goals. Tampering with this mechanism is at best going to deliver unforeseen consequences; at worst, unforeseen negative consequences most notably the corroding of sociopolitical freedom. Hayek’s early invocation of spontaneous order had Marxist and socialist centralizing (top-down immergent) tendencies as his target. Later this concern morphed into taking to task the general Cartesian constructivism or rationalism (“conscious” aforethought) that inheres in much of sociopolitical theorizing, orthodox economics included. The upshot is that for Hayek there is a necessary link between the dispersion of knowledge and sociopolitical freedom in complex societies, or, in the current argot, knowledge economies. The standard criticism leveled against Hayek’s conception of spontaneous order is that there is a perceived tension in that spontaneous order is deemed incompatible with patterns of traditional behavior that Hayek recommends. To a large degree this aspect loses its force if one grants Hayek the idea that a truly spontaneous order naturally embodies the resources (customs, laws and morals) for both the preservation of existing patterns of behavior but also to accommodate the development and acceptance of other novel patterns of behavior. Though the market is a paradigm example of a spontaneous order, for Hayek, it had no special ontological status—it is one spontaneous order among many (science, law, democracy, language being other prominent orders—see diZerega 2013). With this in mind we are confident that jazz as a sociocultural phenomenon is a star instantiation of spontaneous order (Koch 2013). A word of caution. The spontaneous order that is jazz does have a double aspect: the socio-cultural-historical soup from which it emerged (Marsh 2017)1 and the structural dynamic of the music itself with its own internal tensions between tradition and revolution, often congealing around one individual such as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, and the last notable, Miles Davis. While the discussion that follows does not take place under the rubric of aesthetics per se, it does have intimate implications. Jazz music presents specific challenges and aporia (puzzles) for the philosophy of music: our present interest here, the ontology of jazz, ontology being a key disJazz as a Spontaneous Order