Cosmos
From Anaximander on, early Greek philosophers regarded the structure and regular processes of the world as central to their accounts of nature. However, their understanding of this order differed considerably. These processes might be viewed as harmony or balance and as the result of growth or conflict or an intelligence, or they might be considered the result of random collisions of particles. The order might involve cycles or it might be a single continuous development from a primal state. In some philosophers, order itself exemplifies the goodness of the world. Many of these elements can be found in nonphilosophical cosmologies as well, such as the emergence of the world from waters in the Babylonian Enuma Elish, or the Genesis creation story. What distinguishes Greek philosophers is the variety of their attempts to describe the world as ordered, their reflection on what such an account must consist in, their consideration of the role of divinity in their accounts, and the depth of their attempts to provide rich, unified, explanatory accounts of the world. Scholars do not know who first used the word "kosmos" to describe arrangements of the world or parts of it, but it came to be a common word in denoting this central concept.
Kosmos normally means "fine or beautiful arrangement or order" and can refer to an array of warriors, a hairdo, or a government; by extension, it can apply to cosmetic accessories or even to each of the ten officials in a Cretan senate (that is, the components of an arrangement). In Aristotle's Poetics, it is a technical term for the spectacle of a play and also for ornamental diction. Early philosophers used the word to describe an order or arrangement in the world, but later "the kosmos" could refer to the world itself or at least to the most organized part of it, the heaven: "The kosmos is a system consisting of heaven and earth and the natures enclosed in these" (ps. Aristotle, De mundo 2).
The oldest extant, philosophical use of the word, to describe the balance of changes, occurs in Heraclitus (fr. 30), although a late doxographer, Aetius, says that Pythagoras was the first to name the enclosure of all things "kosmos." Even if Aetius is right (the claim is rejected by most modern scholars), it is indeterminate whether in each case the philosopher meant to speak of all changing elements, or even all things, as an order (the general use) or instead of the arrangement of all things, the world (the privileged use). The latter seems unlikely in early authors, but becomes probable when Empedocles (fr. 134) speaks of intellect darting through the kosmos, and almost certain in Democritus, Diogenes of Apollonia, and Philolaus at the end of the fifth century. Hence, Xenophon could say around 385 BCE that Socrates did not discuss the nature of "the kosmos as the wise call it." Similarly, Plato could have Socrates say that the wise call "kosmos" the whole of heaven, earth, gods, and man, as sharing community and friendship (Gorgias 507E–8A). A fundamental presupposition of the privileged use of "kosmos" is that the world is orderly and well arranged.
There is, however, a fundamental ambiguity even in the privileged use of "kosmos," which also reflects philosophical debates about the nature of the world. In the fourth century BCE, "the kosmos" can be used to refer to the entire world or just the system of stars, planets, sun, and moon. For Plato and Aristotle, the sublunary world is unorderly in comparison with the heaven and one task of the philosopher is to find the order it. The heaven is a better kosmos. But, depending on the interests of the text, the kosmos in some discussions might signify the entire world. Thus Aristotle can also speak of "the kosmos encompassing the earth," the region between the earth and the heaven (Meteor. A 2–8).
For Aristotle, as for most scientists until the sixteenth century, the world was spherical, consisting of three concentric layers, an outermost spherical shell for the fixed stars, then, contained within it, a spherical shell with the planets, sun, and moon and the apparatus by which they move (for Aristotle, an elaborate system of concentric spheres), and the sublunary sphere which has the earth as its center. Hence he distinguishes three senses of heaven (De caelo 9, 278b9–21), the limit of the periphery of the heaven or the spherical shell of the fixed stars (the first heaven), the spherical shell for the planets, sun, and moon are (the lower heavens), the sphere contained by the first heaven or the universe (all three layers). To these one may add the obvious first and lower heavens. It is plausible that in its privileged use, "the kosmos" could refer to any of these.
However, the universe need not be a kosmos, as is clear from ancient discussions of those philosophers who believed in many worlds, Democritus, Diogenes of Apollonia, and Epicurus. The many different systems of stars and earth are all "kosmoi," but neither the disordered universe composed out of all of them nor what lies in between them is itself a kosmos. So too, for the Stoics, the universe is not a kosmos since the universe includes not just the finite world sphere, but also an infinite void outside. Only what they call "the whole," the finite sphere encompassing the heaven and earth, is a kosmos (though within this "whole" there are three different arrangements they describe as a "kosmos": god or the divine moving principle; the ordering produced by this god; and the unity of the two).
In Greek mathematical astronomy, the kosmos is just a mathematical object, so that the connotations of orderliness are irrelevant. The primary goal of Greek astronomers from Eudoxus (fourth century BCE) on include mapping the heavens, determining the sizes and distances of all the bodies of the world, and constructing geometrical models that explain the apparent motions and phases of the heavenly bodies. With few exceptions, such as heliocentric theories (Aristarchus, c. 270 BCE), the kosmos will be a rotating sphere with the earth as center and whose poles determine the daily rotation of the stars.
Anaximander; Aristotle; Cosmology; Diogenes of Apollonia; Empedocles; Epicurus; Heraclitus of Ephesus; Leucippus and Democritus; Philolaus of Croton; Plato; Pre-Socratic Philosophy; Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism; Socrates; Stoicism; Xenophon.
Bibliography
Finkelberg, Aryeh, "On the History of the Greek Kosmos," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 98 (1998): 103–136.
Kahn, Charles H. Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.
Kahn, Charles H. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Kerschensteiner, Jula. Kosmos; quellenkritische Untersuchungen zu den Vorsokratikern. Munich: Beck, 1962.
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