Perspectives on Philosophy, Historiography, Aesthetics

While my motives are always existential and my perspectives and methodology dialectical,  my scholarship in historiography, philosophy, aesthetics, also my art is an objectivation of my condition as a Western Armenian native of the Near Eastern world.  Therefore,  all my works are primarily interpretations of my understanding of and response to my  condition in historiographic, philosophical and artistic terms.

Central to my scholarship and art is the strong belief in the social-historical comportment and embeddedness of the social sciences, the humanities and the arts.  Furthermore, as a thinker, writer, historian, artist and educator I consider the perceptive, cognitive, and creative processes interrelated, and identify myself as a critical-dialectical hermeneut. This dialectical perspective is a widely held contemporary way of looking at all issues critically and from multiple also contradictory perspectives, with no assumptions, predispositions, or assumed narratives. It is adopted by modern sciences, pedagogy and social sciences.

Considering all works in the social sciences, humanities and the arts as artifacts of their times and locations, I fully share Theodor Adorno’s idea that “authentic works are the self-unconscious historiography of their times.” [Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Trans. Introd. Robert Hullot-Kento. New York: Continuum, 2002, p.183.] Most basic issues and contradictions in social-political circumstances crystallize in the artifacts making them historical by the objectivation of perception and social consciousness. The process also implies the existential dimensions of scholarship in human sciences as well as the arts.

My historiographic scholarship, also philosophical position and art are direct instances of my circumstances in specific places and times. This is not the same as being a ‘witness’, a term I avoid for its ambiguity and banal implications. The specific architectural, demographic and cultural peculiarities of my birthplace are central to my development. I was born in an eighteenth-century old stone mansion on al-Kayyāleh street, in the ancient quarter of the ‘White City’ of Aleppo (al-Shahbā’). We were next to thousands of years old Sūqs of al-Jdaydeh built on a large, open design plan, with  partially covered rows of shops. The market had its historic ḥammām (bath), a  simple mosque and water-fountains by a fish and coal market, all kept in their original architecture. Next to the Sūq was the ancient Ḥayy al-Ṣalībiyyeh (literally, the district of Crusaders/ Christians). It still housed local Christians, including Armenians, and five churches with related institutions such as schools, monasteries and the Pilgrims Inn (Hogetun). The entire area was enclosed by large and heavy gates that shut at night. The Armenian Church of the Holy Virgin (Surb Astwatsatsin, built by King Het‘um I in the thirteenth century) and the Church of Forty Martyrs (Kaṛasun Mankants‘, built in the fifteenth century), the Haigazian Kindergarten (where I went) were in al-Ṣalībiyyeh. In the same courtyard stood a very old Maronite church and a Syrian Orthodox church-monastery in the back alley. 

On our street, al-Kayyāleh there was a College established by the American missionary associations in the first decades of the century. It developed into the famous Aleppo College in the south of the city. With several other old stone buildings, our house was on an elbow-shaped alley, in turn gated and housing Christians and Armenians. It connected al-Kayyāleh to the commercial street of al-Khandaq.  From our windows I could see the partially burnt (in 1948) old Jewish Synagogue on al-Khandaq, with an interior of rich wood carvings, and the adjacent Jewish Quarter (by then deserted). My father’s engraving-casting shop was on al-Kayyāleh, minutes away from the house.

I grew up in this magical world where history was in stone buildings meters apart. As a child I wondered around the shops of al-Jdaydeh, the mosque, the churches of al-Ṣalībiyyeh, the synagogue on al-Khandaq, passed by the Hogetun, and visited friends in the area.  

Our house, rented shortly after my grandparents arrived in Aleppo, was part of a large mansion with a vast courtyard and central garden and pool. It was so large that two other families too lived in the building comfortably. These were so-called “old Armenians” who spoke only Arabic and had semi-Armenian names. One was Catholic and the other Protestant. They had migrated from Cilicia over two centuries earlier.

Growing up in this ancient neighborhood was physically and literally living hundreds of years of Near Eastern history with its mixed population. From the eleventh century and later, to the present, Aleppo was always a very significant part of the Western Armenian World. Until 1970s, it had the largest Armenian community. Everything in my world embodied a very long history and unique issues about which I barely had remote and often partial notions. Living in this ancient ‘space/stage’ directly shaped my personality and eventually generated the urgency to venture into unchartered territories always looking for missing links and novel perspectives.  

Like many in my generation, I was trilingual and inevitably multicultural. At age one, I began speaking in three languages, Arabic with the neighbors and everybody else in the area, Turkish with my grandparents, and literary Armenian with my parents and uncles. My mother directly channeled her diverse Melkonian education into our upbringing. She always quoted Hagop Oshagan, Vahan Tekeyan and Barsegh Ganachian. French and English came through education.  

I grew up in a very political and critical atmosphere. The seeds of dissidence were in my family. My uncles and father were book lovers, political activists, and authors. The Barsoumian brothers literally built the Simon Zavarian elementary school in the Armenian camp of Nor Giwgh (New Village) in the north of Aleppo. Always passionately, they spoke of the affairs of this school, national-partisan issues of the Dashnak party they belonged to, and the ‘Soviet’ Hayastan. This was my social-political schooling.

I left Aleppo for Beirut at eighteen. In the mid-sixties Beirut was a very different world.

Throughout my childhood, then college and university years, I was acutely aware of a long history of persecutions, migrations and heroic narratives of the Western Armenian World where my distant ancestors came from, deported from Van, to Iran, then to the  Tigris, then Ayntab in Cilicia, finally to Aleppo. I was also very much aware that we were part of the larger Muslim world, with the large shadow of the Hayrenik‘ (homeland) in the northeast (that I visited for the first time in 1979). My first encounters with the place and its ‘natives’ are other complicated subjects. The point is that the national narratives and accounts were disconnected both internally and from the lived realities of the Armenians in the broad Near Eastern region. The history books and literature, also ‘scholars’ were disappointingly elementary and irrelevant.  There were many gaps and contradictions.

The decision to venture into the discipline of historiography came after, and perhaps because of my doctoral thesis on the Islamic sources of Yovhannēs Erznkats‘i, a thirteenth century theologian-philosopher from Erznka/Erznijān. It was a total novelty both in Near Eastern and Armenian studies and contradicted the mainstream images and accounts of Armenian social and cultural histories.

By temperament and education ‒ in philosophy and fine arts ‒  also, being a critical-dialectical person, I chose contradictions as paths for analysis. The paradigms of interaction between the Armenians and their environment often contradicted mainstream narratives. Therefore, they functioned as counterarguments. Methodologically, they were tools in the process of questioning, researching, and formulating counterpoints, hence the inner tension both in my writing and art, that also reflected the spiritual tension. Through the interplay of contrasts, both in my writing and art, I tried to open contexts also horizons for fresh insights and arguments. More than simply syntheses, these horizons are convergences, hence the title of my thirteenth book, Encounters and Convergences.

Philosophically, the initiative is a Nietzschean reversal of the Cartesian cogito. Instead of Descartes’ ‘Cogito ergo sum’—I think therefore I am—, the starting point is my existence/condition, and the concluding point is thinking about it, ‘I exist therefore I think, or must think, ‘Sum ergo cogito’. [Dadoyan, Encounters and Convergences. p. 53.] This is a deeply existential dictum. It has to do with my particular condition at a particular point in place and time, hence its historicity and my inevitable involvement in historiography or critical history.  

My seemingly controversial, and misunderstood theory of ‘the aesthetics of historical thinking/writing’comes at this point. As in the arts, it refers to the totality of 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 oeuvre of history. Essentially, a meaningful work in the humanities, social sciences and arts is an autonomous response to circumstances, and never a commodity on the mundane markets of academia and art.

Well-documented paradigm cases that stood as counter-cases, such as close links between Armenian and Islamic literary cultures, were tools/elements to initiate an overall and comprehensive critique of mainstream and traditional perspectives and accounts in Armenian histories and literature. Commenting on my trilogy, The Armenians in the Medieval Islamic World Prof. Peter Cowe of UCLA wrote, “The counter cases in her groundbreaking study … problematize the teleologically constructed narrative of a stable collective sustained up to the present, as postulated by modern nationalism.”

Over the past decades, the paradigm cases that I often literally excavated from primary, and mostly Arab sources, generated a broader, multidimensional, and dialectical expanse of the Armenian historical experiences in the Near and Middle Eastern worlds, that from the middle of the seventh century gradually became Islamic. Through these volumes, “we are offered an incisive insight on the making of traditional histo­rio­graphy, and the limits of modern philology”, wrote Prof. Marc Nichanian of Columbia. He added, “Dadoyan has an incredible know­ledge of the Arabic sources that had never been read before her in the same perspective — if at all. This new type of historical writing does not aim only at establishing new paradigms for understanding the numerous interconnections between Islam and Christianity in the Near East. It has also a powerful de­cons­tructive effect on the way we understand history since the nineteenth century … Dadoyan's volumes contribute to post-national re­definitions of identity and thus pave the way to a renewed account of the Armenian presence in the Near East (and else­where) in diasporic terms. Their narrative can be read as an anthro­pology in the past tense. On all these accounts, it is not exaggerated to say that Dadoyan's work is revolutionary.”

Referring to my trilogy, Prof. Kamal Salibi of AUB (†2011) wrote: “Seta Dadoyan’s long research and publication in Islamic-Armenian interactions – an important but rarely researched interdisciplinary field – seems to have culminated in this very original and fascinating magnum opus. It brings into a comprehensive whole her “discoveries”, such as Armenian-Islamic urban or futuwwa coalitions, the Armenian translation and adoption of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’), Armenian realpolitik in al-Shām, the Fatimid Armenians, Muslim Armenians, mutual images and apologetic-polemical traditions, etc. Looking at the medieval, and the contemporary Near East as well through ‘Paradigms of Interaction’ is indeed a novel and intriguing exercise for scholars and those for whom history is not a mere and often subjective narration of a past but a perpetual critique and enjoyment … For the story of the medieval Islamic world to be told in full, the Armenian dimension to it needs to be fully addressed by imaginative scholars having complete command of Armenian humanities, and at the same time fully conversant with the Islamic side to the equation. This is the kind of scholar one rarely comes across, but it can exist, as is demonstrated by the pioneer work of Seta Dadoyan in the field.”