This reminds me of your essay on love, that love is a function of sapience, that love is undetectable, and that love's manifestations differ because of context. Could it be that love and beauty are different interpretations of the same thing? Or could love be what beauty becomes once our conscious awareness deepens the experience of beauty?
What prompted this train of thought was your idea of different levels of beauty being the result of delving deeper into context and increasing conscious awareness, i.e., greater understanding. Perhaps it is that beauty itself doesn't exist in degrees or levels, but our appreciation and experience of it does. As our understanding increases, of the context within which we and the beautiful thing exist, so does our feeling of its beauty.
So why that first level? What allows us to begin that process of delving deeper and appreciating more? I suspect it's simply the emotional response. Unless I'm hugely mistaken, there's no doubt that we're born capable of experiencing emotions. We can't understand or interpret them, but we still
feel them (and apparently remember them at some deep level). So when we first encounter something that fits, but is surprising in a positive way, or something expected, but with an aspect that exceeds our expectation, we respond to it with glee. At that point we probably don't know any words, let alone "beautiful". Eventually we learn to make the association. Similarly with love.
And then not long after we hit puberty we start combining the two. "I love you, you're so beautiful!" And things really start to get confusing
