This essay proposes a new ontological poetics under the name Poetic Substance (诗性实体论). It argues that the presumption of linguistic transparency — the assumption that language is a transparent medium for conveying meaning — has been an implicit presupposition of Western poetics from Aristotle to the present. Drawing on Nietzschean-Foucauldian genealogy, the essay traces the formation and transmission of this presumption: Aristotle‘s systematization of language asorganon(tool), its transmission through late antiquity and the Middle Ages, its intensification in Cartesian clarity, and its culmination in Spinoza’s geometrical method. However, Spinoza‘s concept ofsubstance as causa suialso provides the philosophical resource for overcoming the transparency presumption. The essay proposes that poetry is not a transparent window onto meaning but a substantial wall — an entity whose meaning, existence, and value are self-caused. Poetic Substance thus shifts the question of poetics from epistemology (“How do readers understand opaque poems?”) to ontology (“How does poetry exist as such?”). The essay distinguishes poetic logic (analogy, metaphor, paradox) from transparent logic (clarity, determinacy) and argues that the two are not opposed but complementary. The result is a new ontological grounding for poetry — one that moves beyond both Orphic transparency and Hermetic closure toward a poetics of thickness, density, and aftertaste.
Bo Xia (Mon,) studied this question.