The Aesthetic Formation of Worldviews: A Civilizational Comparison between Ancient Greek Kosmos and Ancient Chinese Tianxia

The relationship between order and beauty is a fundamental proposition shared by Chinese and Western civilizations. The ancient Greeks used “Kosmos” to name the universe—a term that simultaneously signifies order, arrangement, ornament, and beauty. Ancient China, by contrast, took “Tianxia” (All under Heaven) as its political framework while grounding it in the cosmological scheme of “round heaven and square earth” (tianyuan difang). Both civilizations based order on cosmology and endowed it wit