Meaningful Sense Perceptions: Existential and Transcendental Phenomenology in Jawdat Haydar’s Poems

Abstract

In their transcendental and existential dimensions, Jawdat Haydar’s poems manifest philosophical notions akin to those of Edmund Husserl’s theory of consciousness. As a centenarian poet who has embraced diverse cultures, he reveals an unwavering desire to bridge the cultural and human divide between East and West in a style reminiscent of Husserl’s notion of intersubjectivity. In poems that abound with beautiful, rhythmical and transcendental sense perceptions occurring within constant cyclical time, Haydar blends Self and Other rendering an otherwise bleak state of existence an aesthetic and transcendental dimension. His hybrid identity and what Husserl refers to as intersubjectivity, are the basic profound drives behind his poetic blending of the beautiful and the sublime easing his transition toward a reconciliation with his once dislocated and displaced state. This paper attempts to reveal phenomenological features in some of Haydar’s major poems and establish how his meaningful sense perceptions project experiences of sublimity and transcendence in such a harmonious blending of image and reason, that man’s existence acquires an enduring sense of beauty instead of the overwhelmingly depressive and futile post-war states..