Behuniak, Jim P.  "Poem as Proposition in the Analects: a Whiteheadian Reading of a Confucian Sensibility:1."  Asian Philosophy 8, no. 3 (Nov. 1998): 191-202.

Abstract

The writer suggests that ubiquitous references to poetic songs in the Confucian Analects reveal an important dimension of Confucius's political thought. There is, he observes, the idea that things in the world "resonate" with one another. Taking elements from Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy, as well as metaphysical insights from the Han Dynasty text Huainanzi, he offers an aesthetic theory and a supporting cosmological vision that enhances our appreciation of this trait in the Confucian world. With these preliminaries in mind, he then looks at the Analects. He focuses on the term xing, or "stimulation," and shows how this term sheds light on the function of poetry for the early Confucians. He concludes that poetry was thought to behave much like what Whitehead called "propositions" and that this function assumes a world with certain basic tendencies generally associated with Taoist cosmology.