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

Abstract

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 with an aesthetic character, yet their paths diverged profoundly: ancient Greece, mediated by mathematics, developed a rational aesthetics centered on the perfection of the circle; ancient China, mediated by symbols, developed a ritual-musical aesthetics anchored in a symbolic system of square and round. This paper examines how the two civilizations constructed their respective cosmological aesthetics of order and explores their extensions into political and artistic practice. It argues that while the aesthetic nature of order is cross-civilizational, the Greek path led to a mathematical-rational tradition, while the Chinese path led to a symbolic-ritual tradition, which have deeply shaped their political and artistic forms.