It is Raining, the Sky is Sad: Cross-Cultural Remarks on Poetic Thinking

This paper offers some cross-cultural remarks on poetic thinking, a term associated with Heidegger in contemporary philosophy. As the Chinese word for poetry has the meaning of contemplation of expression, the paper employs essential ideas in Chinese poetics and cites representative Chinese poems to illustrate respective arguments. Starting with sensing and relating, the paper goes on to discuss the idea of poetic logic, the relationship of the reading/experiencing subject and the structure of the artistic text. Then it comes to the major section that formulates a framework for the discussions of different aspects of poetic thinking. A hierarchy of poetic quality of linguistic propositions is proposed. In the last section, the paper argues that in order to see poetically, we need to nourish our poetic self or to embody the poetic in ourselves. Poetic thinking is to live and experience poetically. Whether or not our beings are intrinsically poetic is not important, what matters is living poetically, and poetic embodiment is a dynamic process during which we grow and flow with the poeticity of all things.