Abstract

The problem of a Chinese aesthetic is twofold: at once the problem, historical and philosophical, of aesthetic theory in China, and the problems created for us when we try to interpret that theory. On finding that the solutions of Leibniz's famously conciliatory Lettre sur la theologie naturelle des Chinois repose on a hastily negotiated peace between several linguistic modes, the dissertation reopens some current quandaries and options in comparative poetics. It then looks into the speculative poetics of the commentaries attached to the Chinese Shih Ching . After tracing this extensive commentary literature to the school of the philosopher Hsun-tzu, it becomes possible to assign it a new import, and particularly to redefine the meaning of pivotal concepts like "nature," "rule" and "example"; whereupon it becomes urgent to reread a number of the Shih Ching's odes. Part of the commentaries' poetics consists in making aesthetic experience the model for political mediation, an allegorical strategy given further definition by a comparison of parallel passages from Hegel's Asthetik and Philosophie de Geschichte. What is a "prosaic" constitution? How is the political negativity of China, for Hegel, identical to, perhaps modeled on, the ill-formedness of unsuccessful literary genres? The theoretical difficulty of defining a "Chinese aesthetic," it turns out, is as much one of defining "China" as it is of defining the "aesthetic"; indeed, owing to a figure of argument common to the Shih Ching commentators and to Hegel, the two topics are inextricably linked