Socrates, Beirut,1963. Plaster cast, 18 cm.

II. Dialectics as perception, thought, and praxis

Aesthetics of Historical Thinking/Writing

(AHCP, April 4, 2024)

I. Historical narratives as artifacts

II. The aesthetics of historical thinking/writing

III. Counterpoints in my historical thinking/writing

IV. The beginnings and the path

I. Historical narratives as artifacts

“Ceci n'est pas une pomme” (this is not an apple) is a painting by René Magritte (1898-1967) made in 1964. A seemingly simple sentence and bizarre reminder to the viewers that what they see is an image of an apple, as he saw and painted it, sums up a powerful aesthetic theory about the arts and literature.

Magritte, who painted fully dressed in a dark suit, tie and bowler in the corner of his living space, means that the painting is an artifact and as such a different entity with its own type of existence. In sum, the similitude of the object in the painting to something out there, in this case an apple, is irrelevant to its truth content and aesthetic value.

I suggest that the same can be said about a historical text. It is not history, it is an artifact. It is just an artifact made by someone at a certain point in time and circumstances, arrived at by certain methods, from certain sources, and with certain interpretations. It is very common to have different, even contradictory accounts of the same episode.

Even though Herodotus (484-425BC) is known to be the “father of history”, in my view The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (d. c. 400 BC), an Athenian general, is one of the earliest books of history. In the form of a meticulous report of the events of the war (431-404 BC) – as Thucydides repeatedly emphasized – the book is more of a sharp political-philosophical analysis of the war, politics and human nature in a superb narrative and refined language. It has its aesthetic as an artifact created by a superior mind about a specific episode in Greek history. The other mostly partial accounts of the war do not suggest a similar image of the war, even if the basic events are the same.   

Another case of the same period is the story of the trial and death of Socrates in 399 BC, five years after the war, which ended in the defeat and downfall of Athens. The event has two accounts by two very different contemporaries: Xenophon, a military man, and Plato, a young, erudite Athenian nobleman. Even though the proceedings in both are similar, two distinct characters of Socrates and radically different images emerge from each. While the Socrates of Xenophon is a slightly boastful, annoying moralizing old man, it is hard to imagine Western philosophical thought and intellectual culture without the legacy and image of the Platonic Socrates, as drawn in The Apology of Socrates, one of the early dialogues of Plato. The Apology practically marked the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition, that Alfred North Whitehead described as a “series of footnotes to Plato.” A careful reading will detect the beginnings of the Socratic dialectic perspectives, existential, even critical thought there.

From epics, mythologies, poems, chronicles to modern histories, historical thinking/writing has been one of the most ancient and important literary genres. The Greek word historia meant inquiry, or search of knowledge, not story, account, report or record. Many tend to forget the roots of this discipline.

In recent times traditional historians have come under attack for logically loose narratives, unfounded criteria, unquestioned assumptions, and intuitive methods. Because mainstream approaches, still maintained by many, are based on a questionable epistemology, rigid essentialism and sometimes underlying ideologies and mere beliefs.  One of these beliefs is that things have identifiable essences/meanings, and that based on this certainty, it is possible and necessary to construct historical narratives as unmediated reflections of the past. The confidence to have attained certain knowledge of things historical, past and present, lacks epistemological and empirical grounds. 

The belief held by many mainstream historians that a historical writing is history, is like saying the image of an apple is an apple. Therefore, the idea that various studies are accurate reports and re-enactments of the past arrived at by ironclad research methods, is no longer acceptable. [9] The impassioned observer, and the “objective chronicler” are impossibilities, and there exists no comprehensive "recording machine.” [10] Almost canonical descriptions and grand narratives with claims to universality are things of the past, but they remain artifacts with their peculiar aesthetic. As H. White (1928-2018) says, history is “invented” as much as it is “found.” There is a subjective and deep structural content created by the historian/writer, which is the "metahistorical element”, that cancels the claim to universality. [11]

Philosophy of history, or critical examination of historical thinking/writing is very recent. It concerns not just philosophers, but all scholars in social sciences and the humanities because historical knowledge concerns everyone. It is not only philosophers who ask questions. The opening up of historical analysis to interrogation is at the heart of contemporary thinking, and there can be no sharp distinctions between so-called history proper and philosophy of history. Furthermore, philosophically sound perspectives are vital for everyone, because people learn about themselves and their world from history books too. What they learn makes a difference in what they do or may and will do. As someone said, “history is too serious to be left to historians alone.”

II. The aesthetics of historical thinking/writing

Both the process and the product of historical thinking/writing have their aesthetic. By the aesthetics of historical thinking/writing I mean the totality of the questions, perceptions, sensibilities, contradictions, tensions, insights, visions, as well as the formal and methodological criteria that go into the making of a relevant and engaging text in historiography, which by dictionary definition is the critical study of historical narratives, writing and accounts, also widespread beliefs in the public.

I also posit that this comment applies to any artifact in many disciplines and areas. Because all meaningful artifacts are/must be essentially autonomous responses to lived experiences,  Elbernis, and never commodities on the academic and the intellectual/academic ‘markets.’ I totally adapted the concept of Heideggerian “situatedness”, almost instinctively long before I even read him, comes in this context. 

For Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), a student of Husserl, the scientific attempt to step back and examine an object ‒ in the social sciences and the humanities one may add ‒ leaves it out of its actual context. He therefore introduces his notion of “Dasein”, literally “being there/here”, in which the self and the world belong together in a single entity. The concept focuses on the contingent situatedness of the human condition in a set of spatial-temporal circumstances, that are not entirely of their own making, and that they cannot leave behind at will.

There is an ontological unity in the concept of Dasein or “being-in-the-world.” This is ‘situatedness.’ It means the interconnectedness of perceptions, reactions, social-historical experiences and circumstances. Understanding and reflecting human situatedness are simultaneous motives and objectives.  We can never achieve a complete, or so-called objective interpretation since we are limited not only by language but our historical situation as well, our situatedness. [12]

For philosophical hermeneuts, and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) in particular, what matters is not the process of reaching understanding, it is what happens to us over and above it. Furthermore, hermeneutics is not about the recovery of existing meanings, but instead, it is the creation of meaning. There is an intersection, rather, a convergence, and a fusion of “horizons.” Understanding combines previous and new meanings, Gadamer defines “horizon” as the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. The horizon of the past, out of which all human lives and traditions come, is dynamic, and the hermeneutic act is a fusion of horizons of the past and present. In the end, as Gadamer suggests, truth does not necessarily exist in the world alone, it is continually fixed and unfixed in our continual relationships with our world/s, hence its essentially dialectical nature. 

Both my scholarship and art are essentially occasions and contexts for encounters and convergences. While the former mean confrontations and dynamic relationships with everything, the latter are meetings, and the generation of new “horizons”, where things come together both for understanding and aesthetic enjoyment. Circumstances change, so do the “horizons” of encounters and fusions. As new writings and artworks unfold new insights, and despite bleak foresights, possibilities of change seem to be more possible.  The sensitivities of artists and intellectuals, also the depth of their understanding vary, but always their work reflects their distance from and concern for these issues. In the end, the “truth-content” of the given work becomes the measure of its significance and value.

III. The counterpoints in my historical thinking/writing

Clearly, my perspectives are critical-hermeneutical, non-essentialist and not Armenocentric. My works deviate from, and often contradict mainstream traditions, norms and practices in Armenian Studies. My last and sixth volume in the subject of Islamic-Armenian interactions was Islam in Armenian Literary Culture. Texts, Contexts, Dynamics (Louvain, 2021). I wrote and published five other volumes and a few dozen extensive studies in the same line. The discipline that I initiated is novel, not only for the data discovered, but because it could only be possible by a radical shift in philosophical and methodological vantage points on the Armenian historical experience. A phenomenological, holistic and critical approach to historiography as a critical and interdisciplinary field opened novel aspects of the Armenian historical experiences. The resulting panorama, rather geoglyph manifested an infinite variety of Armenian historical experiences and new paradigms in the broad Near Eastern region. Inevitably, my works stand in direct contradiction to mainstream accounts, including recent ones.

From the beginning, my foundational argument was the following:  If, from the middle of the seventh century all the Armenians in their homeland and the larger habitat from eastern Asia Minor to the South Caucasus and the Tigris, including the modern Republic were part of the Islamic world, and if until a few decades ago the entire region, from the Black and Caspian seas to the Mediterranean, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt, was still the oikumene or habitat of most of the Armenians, their history too was naturally part of these locations and peoples. This is an obvious situation. Armenians lived there as integral elements and their world was governed by the same laws that governed the region. In elementary Newtonian terms, the law that makes the apple fall is the same that keeps the moon in orbit.

However, this is a rarely adopted or even accepted perspective on things Armenian. But in most Arab histories of the region, this is how Armenians were seen and referred to. In these texts, the Armenians and what is known as Armīnyah are very broad concepts. Not because in Arab histories Armīnyah is a much larger area than the one referred to in Armenian histories, but because the Armenians, or al-arman are considered as natives of the larger region and referred to whenever and wherever found. In contrast, in traditional also modernist Armenian histories restrictions on class, faith and location greatly narrowed and distorted all accounts. Many episodes and phenomena that I discovered in Arab sources, such as the Fāṭimid Armenians, are instances. Therefore, I argue that since history has no secret pockets and private laws, things Armenian are also things Near Eastern and must be conceptualized as such. This has not been the case, and this is where my historiographic position and work take their urgency, relevance and legitimacy. 

As referred to earlier, countercases have been my tools to reveal discrepancies. They are counterpoints. These are well-documented paradigmatic cases that stand against and contradict traditional perspectives and narratives. Over decades, the counterpoints that I excavated from primary, and mostly Arab sources, were counterarguments for a broader, multidimensional, and dialectical expanse of the lived experiences of the Armenians in the Near and Middle Eastern worlds. This philosophical-critical approach suspended commonly accepted narratives and practices of mainstream Armenian histories.

Someone has said that cultural meanings and images are like traffic lights, they are valid only for those who move on those roads. However, if someone decides to take other, more direct and “scenic” routes s/he will bypass those lights, and they will simply lose their significance and legitimacy. Obviously, mainstream ‘traffic lights’ are not routes to so-called historic ‘truths’, they seem to be paths to public legitimacy and positions. For fresh starts, these ‘lights’ must be set aside, because explicitly and/or implicitly they are based on assumptions and agendas. As accounts of the past or present, they are simply symptoms of existing problems. Furthermore, like Adorno’s “culture industry”, the historical ‘goods’ of Armenian mainstream narratives are not only mass produced but also designed as per the criteria of the cultural diplomacy of local, partisan and/or national Armenian institutions in dominance in the Republic and everywhere. In view of the relativity of most, if not all cultural ‘traffic lights’, all accounts will have to be deconceptualized or simply overlooked. The paradigm cases that I found were practically counter-cases, counterarguments, or counterpoints.  I therefore took counter-routes with no institutional ‘lights’ to move to new and unbroken grounds.

IV. The beginnings and the path

On the existential level, for me personally – a multi-lingual and multi-cultural Armenian native of the Arab world with ancestors from the East and the West of the West Armenian World – being an intellectual and a historian meant actively participating in the traditions of my region and ‘being’ historical and philosophical, not just ‘doing’ history and philosophy. Art too was just a manner of responding, perhaps a talent too, but always a regulative-balancing force. From the beginning, as a perceiver-thinker-writer-artist, in my responses, thoughts and praxis, I was aware of the inherently hermeneutical nature and the liminality of my opposition. My understanding of things Armenian seemed to cross the limins, or the thresholds, connecting different worlds, the known and the unknown, the concealed and the unconcealed.

My interest in the Armenian historical experiences in the Islamic Near Eastern world was triggered by a ‘discovery’ I made as a graduate student in philosophy. I demonstrated that an obscure medieval text entitled Views Gathered from the Writings of Tajik Philosophers by Vardapet Yovhannēs Erznkats‘i (d. 1292/3), written around 1260 – as I showed ‒ was simply a beginner’s summary of the tenth century Islamic esoteric compendium of sciences, known as the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity or Rasā‘il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’. In Armenian Studies the Views was believed to be an original work but with a reference to Islamic culture, made at a much later period in the career of Yovhannēs.  I demonstrated that this could not be the case, and more importantly, the initiative to summarize an esoteric compendium in a beginner’s language and background revealed a very different social-cultural urban stage at the time in Erznka and Asia Minor, or the Western Armenian World, that was very different from the one granted in Armenian sources.

“Humble” Vardapet Yovhannēs from Erzinjān/Erznka, as he identified himself, threw an even bolder, more intriguing, and in turn undetected bridge into Islamic urban culture: In 1280, he wrote the Constitution for the “reform and regulation” of the urban coalitions, or the Armenian Brotherhoods of the manuks (synonym of Islamic fatā) of this cosmopolitan city. As I demonstrated in several studies textually and in detail, this Constitution had no precedent in Armenian literature and was a direct adoption. Yovhannēs simply Christianized and Armenized ‘Abbāsid Caliph al-Nāṣir’s (r. 1180-1225) reform decree and futuwwa literature of the early thirteenth century.

I also argued that it was the cosmopolitan urban circumstances and extra-ethnic and religious nature of the Armenians that allowed the application of an Islamic Futuwwa Constitution, by the Church, at Erznka and the other cities of the Eastern Asia Minor. Much later, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Constitution was still applied in the Armenian communities in even East European cities. 

Furthermore, based on the poetry of a younger contemporary and compatriot of Yovhannēs, Costandin Erznkats‘i (b. circa 1250) – also closely related to Arab-Persian futuwwa poetry and coalitions – I argued that often described as hedonistic and chaotic young men of the cities — which in fact they were — both by medieval Armenian and Islamic authors, the folklore of these youth coalitions lay the grounds for the secular and post-medieval and cosmopolitan culture of the urban lower and middle classes in the entire Near East. This is basically my initial argument: the Armenians were integral parts of this wide world, hence the interactive nature of their lived experiences and the necessity to review mainstream historical accounts.

In philosophical hermeneutics the case of the Views- Rasā‘il would be called “relevant information.” It means new knowledge, which becomes a new tool for understanding a problem. It has an ontological significance too: given this new knowledge, the same topics and objects will not be seen in the same light anymore. New knowledge will smash our horizons and force us to seek and form new ones for inquiry and understanding. “Relevant information” may overturn all relationships, because it has transformative dimensions. Our awareness of ourselves will increase and both as individuals and community, we may find alternative ways of seeing and interpreting things.

Indeed, the case of Views-Rasā’il signaled the beginning of a long path before me. With no roadmap or institutional or even moral support from peers, the journey into understanding the Armenian historical experience in the Islamic worlds started as a lone venture into twilight zones and unchartered territories of things Armenian. Specific cases, or counter-cases were my guides and tools.

The obvious hypothesis, which was also my foundational preposition and from the beginning, was that there are things in Armenian and Near Eastern intellectual and social cultures that must be specifically categorized and studied as primarily ‘things Islamic-Armenian.’ Furthermore, taken as distinct themes, they generated their own peripheries for a novel discipline of Islamic-Armenian studies, which was relevant, contemporary, otherwise interdisciplinary, holistic, and critical.

The discipline, that I initiated was an alternative route that would break the impasse created by mainstream, often nationalist and presumably academic accounts of things Armenian. More importantly, it would also reveal the methodological and philosophical insufficiencies of the micro-Armenological and verbose studies recently at large.

Begun in 1987, the research and studies for the degree of Doctor of Sciences in Philosophy literally marked the beginning of a new discipline, Islamic-Armenian Studies.  It was a response to my condition as an Armenian native – including all my ancestors – of the Near Eastern World, simple as that. My Dasein, or ‘being there’, my ‘situatedness’ in that world of which I was part, was the context for all the processes. The work made sense and pleased me to have opened a new Armenian geoglyph much closer to and expressive of the lived experiences of all the Armenians, and in particular those in the western Armenian World. I started composing – as one does in a painting or a musical piece ‒ a novel, rich, and beautiful expanse of things  Armenian in unique patterns and dynamics, hence the aesthetic of these texts (six volumes during three decades from 1991 to 2021, and many studies). [13]

The Centenary of the Genocide in 2015 prompted my bilingual book on the Armenian Conditionin Hindsight and Foresight. As editor and author, I worked on a mammoth “catalogue” of sorts, entitled The Catholicosate of Cilicia - History, Mission, Treasures. [14]

The Artwork and the Dialectics of Truth Content

(Scheduled for May 2, 2024 at AHCP, delivered at AGBU, NYC, March 3, 2025)

Theoretically, this is the most ‘aesthetic’ pillar of the dialectical-hermeneutical-discursive triangle. The first pillar was philosophy, the second historiography, the third art. It is in two parts.  

In Part One, after a brief discussion of aesthetics as a branch of philosophical sciences and its development, the focus is on some foundational concepts: the autonomy of art, its cognitive import, the social-historical embeddedness of arts, the ‘culture industry’, hermeneutical ‘horizons’, and ‘truth-content.’ In the end I propose my theory of concretization as an alternative theory of aesthetic judgment. Part Two is dedicated to the presentation of the book, Encounters and Convergences. A Book of Ideas and Art, which occasioned the talks. Twenty-one of my drawings from 1975 to 2022  (in two phases, 1975-1991, and 2022) are featured in this part.  

PART ONE

I.  Aesthetics, theories and development

II. My aesthetic and four foundational themes

A. The autonomy of art and the “culture industry”

B. The cognitive import of art

C. The social-historical comportment

D. An alternative approach: Concretization and the artwork

I. Aesthetics and Foundational Concepts

Coined during the Enlightenment after the Greek word aisthetikos or sensory perception, aesthetics is the ‘science of perception’, because all artworks are objects of perception. Since they are objects of knowledge too, aesthetics is often called philosophy of art.

The first to reflect upon the arts were Plato and Aristotle, the latter more systematically. Most philosophers refer to art, focusing mainly on its ontology, or ‘what art is’ also its status and role. Art has been defined differently, as imitation, madness, catharsis, beauty, taste, judgment, pleasure, understanding, play, expression of emotion, psychological needs, spirituality, and insight. At present the question about the nature of art is essentialist, too narrow and somehow anachronic, leaving out vital issues related to the arts.

At the end of the eighteenth century, or the Age of Enlightenment, Kant’s (1724-1804) Critique of Judgment (or the ‘third critique’, written in 1790, after the Critiques of Pure Reason, then Morals) was the first modern book of aesthetics. For the first time Kant introduced the concepts of the formal autonomy of art and aesthetic judgment. A few decades later, in the nineteenth century, Hegel (1770-1831) brought up the intellectual import of art, and especially its cognitive and historical significance. Marx’s (1818-1883) contribution was to highlight the social embeddedness of the arts. Nietzsche (1844-1900) defined art in existential terms as a necessity to survive the suffering and chaos of life. Soon, Freud (1856-1939) explained its deeper psychological dimensions. In 1930s and later, the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School, and Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) in particular, developed a most intriguing aesthetic theory since Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. Adorno made a synthesis of the previous theories but in an original and powerful critical-dialectical context. Practically, he is the initiator of a contemporary discipline of aesthetics as an important part of the humanities and social sciences.

II. My Aesthetic and the Four Foundational Themes

A. The autonomy of art and the “culture industry”

First formulated by Kant, the concept of the autonomy of art metamorphosed into a more comprehensive aesthetic theory in Adorno’s work. However, while by autonomy Kant meant the independence of art from desire and practical purpose, Adorno brought autonomy into the artist and the creative process.  In this perspective art is defined as an autonomous expression of total human freedom, opposed to all that hampers it. This is indeed an idea that is hard, rather impossible to ignore or dismiss.

As discussed earlier, the concept of autonomy is central to the theory of “culture industry” initiated by Adorno and his teacher Max Horkheimer around 1930s. A legacy of the Frankfurt School, it is now a widely accepted theory. As a societal phenomenon, the content of an artifact – be it scholarly or artistic – is inseparable from its truth content, hence its legitimacy, while untruth and irrelevance mark its failure. As we look at the marketplace of the arts, culture and entertainment, and despite seeming and apparent liberalism, abolition of criteria and rules, there is massive standardization as a powerful policy. As Arthur Danto (1924-1913) puts it, there exists an “artworld”, and there are art-markets. Therefore, the focus is on the marketability of the artworks, meaning and relevance seem to be irrelevant. Inevitably, artworks have become commodities, accents and often screams. Mixed with mass media, social media and entertainment, the arts are also instruments of homogenization and standardization. The public stands outside and anyway is a captive audience that often cannot even enjoy the artworks because it cannot relate to or understand them. Fashion and pop arts are in the same situation as instruments of homogenization. 

Over a century ago, in totally different social-political-cultural circumstances, most artists of the absurd, Dada, readymade, avant-garde, and related movements presented their works on wings and cushions of certain philosophies of “contemporary art.” These practices are still very dominant and assimilated into the fabric of consumer society.

However, as Jorgen Habermas (1929-2026), another critical theorist, says, their modernism is now “dead.” One cannot talk in any seriousness on the aesthetic path drawn, truth content and justification in the works like Tracey Emin’s (1963-) “My bed” (an actual filthy bed), Mary Kelly’s (1941-) postpartum “stuff”, the cut-out-dead sharks of Damien Hirst (1965-), and thousands of similar works. Their aesthetic message and legacy are limited and consumed in the initiatives. There is no cognitive nucleus or challenge, and it is hard to imagine that an artwork can stand on an abstraction, a reification in the mind of the artist, or an article in a national paper by a self-proclaimed art-expert. Major museum shows, verbal appendices in papers, publicity and sale value may have a temporary role in the propaganda and sales, but they are not part of the work, therefore aesthetically and in the long run irrelevant.

B. The Cognitive import

Initially a legacy of Hegel, the cognitive aspect of art was further elaborated by Adorno, but  differently. “Every artwork”, says Adorno, “if it to be fully experienced, requires thought, therefore stands in need of philosophy.” [16] As carefully planned artifacts, works of art have their inner logicality, which however is different from discursive reasoning. Yet, like in a syllogism, one step follows the next by a formal necessity, and the work gains its logical consistency, coherence and unity. For Adorno aesthetic logic has a greater degree of latitude than ordinary logic. [17] I believe that great artworks defy ordinary reasoning without negating it.

C. The social-historical comportment and embeddedness of the arts… was an aspect of aesthetics that developed during the nineteenth century and metamorphosed with greater force in Critical Theory. According to the latter, contradictions in social-political circumstances crystallize in the “truth content” (in Adorno’s phrase) of the work, hence their social comportment.[18] Therefore, the “truth content” of an artifact is necessarily historical by the objectivation of genuine perception and social consciousness. [19][19] Ibid., p. 191.  It is the historical outcome of an artist’s response and treatment of an experience.  Authentic works, says Adorno, are the “self-unconscious” historiography of their times, [20] and La Guernica of Picasso immediately comes to my mind.

D. An alternative approach to aesthetic judgment: Concretization and the artwork

Based on these few concepts outlined above, and as an alternative approach to aesthetic judgments, I suggest a paradigm shift from the artist to the artwork. My alternative theory is that the artwork is all there is. I suggest shifting the focus from the ontology of art, or “what art is/should be,” to the artwork itself as a concrete entity, a thing-in-itself. It is something created in solid aesthetic form and a content that has a specific social and historical comportment, or a bearing. By truth content I understand the unity of the formal structure and the meaning of the artwork, which develops through their internal tension. Critical judgments about the work must therefore consider the internal dynamics of the work and the aesthetic-intellectual-social-historical totality, or its situatedness, at which it starts and which it reflects. Therefore, truth content is not a metaphysical concept, or some sort of essence that hovers outside the artwork in the mind of the artist; nor is it a construct. It is deeply human, historical, utopian in its reach, yet firmly rooted in specific circumstances. It is the way in which an artwork simultaneously challenges the way things are and projects how they could be existentially more relevant. [21] A true artifact is a journey to encounter new knowledge and sensibilities, both by the artist and the viewer. It must be worth taking, and the more enriching it is the greater is the work is.

PART TWO

I. Encounters and Convergences. A Book of Ideas and Art

II. The Quest and the Path

Encounters with strife and suffering

Wartime Art and Aesthetic

III. Spirit of matter

I. Encounters and Convergences. A Book of Ideas and Art

An amalgam of philosophy and art, this Book of Ideas and Art, as per the title, is written as an oeuvre, or a statement about my art and scholarship in terms of encounters and convergences. While encounters mean confrontations and dynamic relationships with everything, convergences are meetings and the generation of new “horizons” where things come together for understanding and aesthetic enjoyment. Circumstances change, so do the “horizons”, both in writing and art.  

The purpose of the book is to communicate in words and images encounters and convergences with challenges and contradictions at different phases of my life. It is therefore self-reflective in conception, cross-disciplinary in scope, dialectical in method, hermeneutical in approach, and artistic in expression.  

In the case of both my scholarship and art, the effort to arrive at “horizons” for convergences has been existential or directly related to the meaning of my existence. I strongly share the hermeneutical perspective on the relationship between the inquirer and the object of knowledge. The researcher is part of the research, so is the artist of the work. They are one in the cognitive as well as the creative process to reach new meanings and understanding. The sensitivities of artists and intellectuals, as well as the depth of their understanding, vary, but their works always reflect their distance from and concern for these issues. In the end, the truth-content of the given work becomes the measure of its comport and value.

Understanding my social-historical situatedness, or my condition, has always been both a motive and a purpose. This condition, that I share with a great number of Armenians, is being a multilingual and multicultural Armenian native of the Near East, with immediate family and ancestors driven from the extreme West and the extreme East of the Armenian World. It means having multiple hyphenated identities and inheriting multiple legacies of ancient and modern civilizations, peoples, cultures and faiths, including my own. In the processes of acculturation, this condition required an urgency to understand the Armenian historical experience in comprehensive and critical terms, and not through assumptions and semi-epic narratives on the cultural marketplace, hence my work in philosophy and history. Researching, writing and painting meant engaging in discourses and debates within myself and with the different worlds and communities I was part of. Both my scholarship and art required ‘being’ historical and artistic in a personal and direct manner, and not just ‘doing’ history, philosophy and art by training and career. I wrote and painted at specific periods and in response/reaction to specific circumstances. Therefore, the second part of the book, ‘The Quest and the Path’, had to be structured on a schematic autobiographical grid. 

Opposed to conventional and so-called strictly academic or primarily artistic practices, this book is also an illustrated argument, of sorts, in support of my aesthetics (as briefly outlined earlier), and my interdisciplinary perspectives and career. Like other contemporary thinkers, I consider dichotomies between disciplines, and narrow specializations artificial and “schizophrenic,” as F. Jameson (1934-) puts it. Furthermore, isolating art and artists as distinct entities miss and distort their social, historical, intellectual and aesthetic significance and dimensions.

II. The Quest and the Path

This part is in four chapters. I trace my path from my birthplace Aleppo to universities in Beirut (majoring in fine arts and philosophy), marriage, travel to London to study figure drawing – that I immensely enjoyed ‒ then back to Beirut for graduate studies in philosophy, teaching at AUB, working for my Doctor of Philosophical Sciences. A cataclysmic experience with an art instructor in my undergraduate years halted my art. I returned to art in 1975, at the beginning of the civil war in Lebanon that ended seventeen years later in 1991, so did my first phase of drawing. Only after three decades, in New York and during the Covid 19 Pandemic, I went back to my art.

 Our backyard, 56 Woodstock Rd, London, 1966. Pencil 56.5x35.5

Encounters with strife and suffering

We were in Dayton, Ohio, when the war started in Lebanon in the spring of 1975, ad I immediately made the First News.  Back home, “encounters with strife and suffering”, as I put it, forced me to return to the drawing board.

My situatedness, both as a Lebanese and an Armenian witnessing turmoil and migrations within my community because of insecurity and uncertainty, were the motive force for two important studies in Western Armenian culture, the first in art history and the second in philosophy (both in Western Armenian). The first, Lebanese-Armenian Painting in the Light of the Crisis of Identity (1984) was on the phenomenon of Armenian painting in Lebanon.  This was an art that Armenians never had back in their habitats in Turkey. It first appeared in Lebanese post-Genocide circumstances and as a response to them. I therefore argued that it should be studied and classifications be made based on the types of responses to the Armenian condition and crises of identity in a different world. The second book, Pages of West Armenian Philosophical Thought (1987), was an extensive study of the intellectual aspects of and trends in the literature of Western Armenian Awakening during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [22]

Clearly, I wrote and painted in response to challenges and contradictions seeking terms of understanding. My research and artworks simply sum up my encounters and convergences in the process. The initiative was a Nietzschean reversal of the Cartesian cogito. Instead of ‘Cogito ergo sum’—I think therefore I am—, I started at my existence and moved to the thinking about it, I exist therefore I think or must think, ‘Sum ergo cogito’.

First news, Dayton, OH, 1975.  Pencil, 30x21.5 cm

Wartime Art and Aesthetic

This is the title of the third chapter of Encounters. During the seventeen years of the war and perpetual street battles, from 1975 to 1991, just as life was wartime-life, in turn art could only be wartime art. It traced a trajectory which took its beginning in the immediate realities of the war, and by the force of its convergence in the present moment, gave the works their truth-content and aesthetic legitimacy. Under the circumstances, I could not understand salon, studio, so-called abstractions, and decorative artworks, nor the assumed freedom of art of the mundane. I often wrote in the papers but was not lauded for my critique. 

The human condition in wartime and massive suffering was central to my thinking, and inevitably, the human figure became dominant in my work. For right or wrong reasons, wars were fought by people and affected all people in every possible respect. While somehow life went on, many suffered, many died, many survived, yet everywhere all waited for deliverance.

Sniper fire, Beirut, 1976. Ink, 42x25 cm.