An Intercultural Interpretation on Heidegger’s Poet

Abstract

For the later Heidegger, the poet is the messenger of Being, insofar as he speaks after the Saying (Sage) of Being. But only when the poet takes the risk of being mad, can he hear the message of Being and bring it out. As such, the poet does not need any human art of poetry. Heidegger calls this kind of bringing-out “techne” in its original sense – but not in the ordinary sense of human technique. This paper tries to discover how the poet in the state of madness without using any human art can still convey the message of Being. I try to answer this question at first with the help of two dialogues from Plato, i.e. Ion and Phaedrus . I then take two Chinese classical poets, Li Bai (李白) and Du Fu (杜甫), as examples to illustrate such interpretation of Heidegger’s concept of the poet.