Li Bai’s Poems And Heidegger’s Thinking

Li Bai and Heidegger, the former is a famous poet in China’s Tang Dynasty, his poetic style being courageous and romantic, and the latter is a distinguished philosopher in the philosophical history of modern Germany, whose thinking attracts many other great minds to go after. Li Bai, in his lifetime, leaves behind nearly one thousand poems, among which many are masterpieces, which make his name a lasting one in China’s poetic circle. Heidegger, with his profound thought in time and being, together with his phenomenological method in the exploration of truth, is also held in high esteem. It is unquestionable that these two great masters are both persons out of the common run. Nevertheless, these two great figures are kept apart temporally and spatially, and they indeed have no knowledge about each other, so we may wonder whether they two, including one’s poems and the other’s thinking, have any similarities or can be put together for comparison. If they actually have anything in common, then what can that be? The doubt may be resolved only after you have explored the deep thinking latent in Li Bai’s poems and have compared them with Heidegger’s theories of being, truth, poetic living, etc. By inquiring into thinking with the aid of poems, or by enjoying poems with the help of thinking, what can we achieve then? Roughly speaking, understanding Li Bai’s poems by way of Heidegger’s thinking, we can find the secret about the life power in Li Bai’s poems. The truth lies in that Li Bai stands on the philosophical altitude of thinking to experience life and being just as Heidegger does. Li Bai has won great admiration for his poetic style, as is well known, but it is his poetic thinking that is the source of the life power of his poems and something really worth studying. By comparing Li Bai’s poems with Heidegger’s thinking, we can find that they two share common ideas in many aspects. Li Bai, versed in the bold and free poetic style, pours his understanding of life, being and language into his poems so that he can perfectly control his poetic language to such an extent which Heidegger terms as truth, freedom and beauty. In general, Li Bai, in his poems, fully exhibits his specific poetic thinking of life, which corresponds right to Heidegger’s thinking of being. Thus they two, although advancing on seemingly diverge courses, actually both have a good understanding of the deep soul of the human being in recounting being and life. Seen from this angle, we have sound reasons to believe that they two, seemingly without any mixed features at the first glance, actually share many fundamental principles in origin.