On the Poetical Characteristics of Chinese Aesthetics

Ancient China has rich but unsystematic resources of aesthetics that integrates aesthetics and poetics. While a very different kind of relation between aesthetics and poetics can be seen in Western classics, where in aesthetics and poetics fell under divergent disciplines and categories, and they have distinct concerns. Classic Western aesthetics basically had a metaphysical commitment, whereas its poetics had an end of epistemology, the implication of which is that " beauty” is normally of no essential interest to classic Western poetics. Before Western aesthetics became a philosophy of art and so to largely take the place of poetics, giving rise to the division and even to the downfall of poetics, it had never predominated the business of poetics. In contrast, because of the worldliness of Chinese aesthetic, Chinese poetry is involved in aesthetics and engages in the concern of beauty, which is the essential interest of Chinese art. Therefore, the integration of Chinese aesthetics and Chinese poetics manifests itself by virtue of poetic statements that embody aesthetic insights in poetics rather than of philosophical propositions.