The end of the 20th century in Europe is a time of transitions, a time of breaking old alliances, of collapsing boundaries and of closing old schisms. Europe as a whole is in a process of transition from being a continent that until recently was split into two hostile political camps to being a united Europe. The idea of a unified Europe is based most of all upon the idea of social sameness built upon existence in a common present measured by a uniform distance from a common past. The idea of European unification thereby emerges as almost completely devoid of historical sentiment and geographical connotation.

This process, however, is still far from being taken as the beginning of a unification of the present in which all European differences are melted down into a racial, social and cultural amalgamation. Rather, it seems much more as if the old European boundaries, which lived out their allotted time as useless stage settings within an historical drama that has been completed, are in the process of being dismantled in order for the stage to be set for the beginning of a completely different play.

The construction of a new boundary always involves the separation of "the different" from that which is "the same." That which is the European "different" can first of all be seen in the countries of Eastern Europe, whose "return" to Europe, to which they feel they belong, depends on their abilities to produce sufficient evidence of their cultural and social "sameness." The observation of differences concerning the success that different parts of Eastern Europe have enjoyed in this respect makes it clear that any generalized conclusions concerning this process as a whole will most probably be misleading. The impression is that their common immediate past and shared social experience of more than 50 years have not sufficed to eliminate the profound differences between East European countries. Indeed, these differences apparently have not even been diminished, not to mention overcome. In such a case, that which is important for explaining the different degrees of success of these countries is rather to be found in their pre-Communist historical past and in their previous positions and roles on the political stage of pre-World War II Europe.

In this general picture, certain Balkan countries stand out as a paradoxical exception, as if the dramatic changes in Europe had there produced the most strange effect of opening the bottle where the "genie of old historical schisms" had been imprisoned. This powerful new wave of "Balkanization" and return to the past is quite opposed to the mainstream European orientation towards the future. One reason for such a profound difference is the fact that while most modern European countries look forward to dissociating themselves from their old identities and accepting new ones, certain Balkan countries have never had the opportunity to construct identities that could be replaced in the newly created favorable conditions. The problem is that societies build their identity through continuing reference to their own pasts (Luhmann 1992, 14), which means that only by drawing upon the difference between past and present can societies be capable of defining those points at which they differ in the present.

A long and tragic history has made it possible for a paradoxical question to be asked at the end of the 20th century: To what extent are the countries of the Balkans, conceived as the soil in which the roots of European civilization once sprouted, part of this Europe today? Can they be defined as "European-style societies" when it seems that their emotionally loaded social experience, their intellectual priorities, and their patterns of thinking and acting not only are not readily seen to exhibit "European" features, but in fact are generally considered to be inferior? To what extent can countries that have no other "capital" besides their overwhelmingly tragic social experience of a chain of continuous losses without any gains ever hope that their historical and social presence be acknowledged, especially if the success of their historical efforts lies mainly in self-preservation?

The question of identity in the Balkans thus somehow has a different context than that in which it is located in the rest of Europe, being instead connected with the question of the identity of Europe as a civilization, not as a continent or a political and economic union. When considered in this respect, the question of identity may be said to concern the nature of the "Id" from which the idea of Europe once originated. Since the "Id" does not "travel," but belongs to a particular place that is unique, its "entity" cannot be borrowed from any other location. The "Id" is the medium in which the "idea of Europe" arose and, being designated as the past, gave it a heading. But can this heading assume an ever-growing distance from itself only in order to return to itself in a form of "Hegelian spirit"?

There has always been an unmarked social space beyond mainstream European experience taken as experience on a stage of action, an unmarked social space where the presence of Europeans has remained unacknowledged. This is the area of the social suffering of peoples who have lived in "virtual nation states," whose presence has never actually been acknowledged, who have been neither the subjects nor objects of action, and who have been deprived of any action for quite real historical reasons. The only possible role that could have been reserved for such peoples is that of observers, who watch the action in which they do not participate and remain compassionate sufferers with a suffering soul in a paralysed body and mind.

The difference between the role of compassionate observers and all other roles is that the former is never accepted as a personal choice and may not even be their own creation. In social life just as in theater, there can never be roles for every possible actor in every possible play. Some actors act while others sit and watch. In terms of social suffering, the essence of this fact lies in the nature of the social role that the individual has not chosen for himself, namely, the role of an observer for whom access to the stage where action occurs is denied. Indeed, the role of observer is no role at all, indicating rather the absence of a social role.

The question is whether the compassionate observer who never acts may acquire knowledge, and if so, what the nature of that knowledge might be. The very consideration that it may be possible to obtain knowledge that cannot be "learned" by any other means is by itself a challenge to the pragmatist’s program idea of "learning by doing" insofar as the latter leaves unlearned a vast area of things that may be learned or known only by observation of action in which one does not participate. This consideration is also a challenge to modern sociological theory whereby the social world is conceived as a world in which there are only two interactive parties and no observers or audience.

To put it in Plato’s terms, observers are those who were not taken on board the "ship of state" (Plato’s metaphor in Statesman and Republic) but were rather left in the harbor, from where they watch the horizon in order to see when the ship will return. Suffering in this sense is quite contradictory to any experience in the realm of action. It is the deprivation of action that brings about the Promethean experience of hopeless waiting and lack of personal choice.

If European nations can be divided into successful and non-successful nations, this fact can hardly be taken as a proof that peoples have inborn advantages and disadvantages. From a thoroughly sociological perspective, these differences should rather be analyzed as social constructions. The question that should then be asked concerns the factors that should be held responsible for the peculiarity of the Balkans as the most enigmatic portion of the European world.

From a Serbian perspective, the trouble with "this place" is that "it has too much history," as a Serbian poet one put it. From a Bulgarian perspective, the trouble with "this place" is its geographic location in that we built a country on a crossroads, "where no one would even build a hut." From a sociological perspective, both of these points are equally important. For example, it is possible to argue from a sociological point of view that the social fate of any given country may be heavily dependent upon and influenced by the historical roles it has previously adopted. In addition, the geographical location of a particular is of great sociological importance to the extent that it designates the point of observation from which the social world is observed. History and geography taken together can serve as a coordinate system in which the phenomenon of the Balkans can be thematized.

The point is, however, that the events of the immediate as well as of the observable past can hardly be blamed for Bulgaria’s constant misfortunes. An analysis of the emergence of the Bulgarian state, along with the emergence of an historical pattern in her fate, create the impression that the continual recurrence of crises was in fact geographically and historically conditioned from the very beginning. Unfortunately, the lack of historical material and written records concerning this "beginning" make it impossible to perform a detailed analysis, but this does not necessarily mean that we cannot offer more than plausible speculations. In this sense, what is true for a human being is no less true for a social system such as a political state or a nation. We can thus talk about a people’s fate as being to a great extent defined by the contacts they have developed with various cultural centers, from the "teachers" or "friends" which they have had, and from the "enemies" whom they have fought. In other words, the participation of countries in the process of European interaction is responsible for the shaping of their European minds.

But in a long historical perspective, no geographically bound system’s position is better than any other since it is simply different. An important principle in contemporary macrosociological theory, which views the social world as a system, is that such differences can account only for the performance of different social functions. Europe can thus be viewed as a social system in which the many different political subsystems have played and continue to play different historical roles, none of which is more important than others according to the differences in their locations in social time and space.

The question then concerns the type of social position that represents a position located on the geographical and historical boundary of Europe, as well as the type of social function that can be ascribed to such a position.

A sociological explanation within the framework of contemporary systems theory in macrosociology (Luhmann 1982) can be found for why a pattern can be observed in the connection between geographic and historical boundaries. According to this theory, the political system of society is the only social system that uses territorial boundaries instead of communication criteria for demarcating its limits. It is then not surprising that geographical boundaries such as rivers and mountains not only frequently coincide with political boundaries, but also tend to recur once they have been established. Indeed, a thorough examination of the history of the place occupied by Bulgaria may convince scholars that history tends to repeat itself in certain particular places.

Support for this hypothesis can be found in the discussions in modern sociology concerned with the process of constructing social reality, according to which it is unsuccessful socialization that raises the question "Who am I?" (Berger and Luckmann 1967, 190). We may thereby speak about European countries that are unsuccessful today because of their historically defined unsuccessful European socialization. It is further important to note that primary socialization creates the pattern for further socializations, which in respect to the primarily internalized "base-world" are only partial realities or "sub-worlds" (ibid., 158). Stated otherwise, the fact that it is apparently impossible for certain countries to assume any significant role is connected with the impossibility of a subjective identification with any of the particular existing roles. It can therefore be assumed that the resolution of this identity crisis may lead to the construction of a completely new role for which there previously has been no pattern.

Today, the signs of identity crisis are evident on almost all social levels. This equally affects individuals, peoples, nations, sciences and even the whole of European civilization, all being equally caught up by the inexplicable desire to know who they are. Identity has become the new catchword in modern social science, which itself is at pains to understand its modern origin. Such a situation, in which individuals, peoples and even entire nations acquire self-awareness, as belonging to a particular social whole according to certain criteria as well as being excluded according to others, is unmistakable evidence for what is known in sociology as an "identity crisis." Indeed, the question "Who am I?" does not seem to have occupied the consciousness of people on such a mass scale since classical antiquity, where self-knowledge had the status of a social imperative.

Although it seems reasonable to claim that any "birthplace" where primary socialization takes place is as good as any other, there is still one special place that is unlike any other because it lacks the basic privilege of any other place, namely, the privilege of granting identification. This is the place that can be defined as a boundary, i.e., as a place located between two worlds that is equally a part of both and yet belongs to neither. Such a state of "non-belonging" may easily be seen as leading to a special type of nihilism that is expressed in self-negation and is responsible for a "neither/nor, but both" attitude towards a divided world.

According to Berger and Luckmann, the main result of the process of primary socialization is the construction of the individual’s first world. But this world acquires a more complex structure with socialization in conflict systems than is the case with normal primary socialization. Although it is still a "theater," it is nevertheless quite different from that which Goffman described because it is a "tragic theater," i.e., it has not only a stage where the two interaction parties act, but also an orchestra where the observer or, as Nietzsche had it, the ideal spectator is situated.

The primary example that will be utilized in the present analysis is the place where Bulgaria is situated today. It is a Balkan country that has remained outside of mainstream European development for centuries, thereby becoming virtually completely invisible within the European context in which it is today situated. From the times of Plato, the essence of the passion and powerful emotion that represents the "Balkan spirit" has always been an enigma for the "civilized world" and has never been successfully decoded. Perhaps this is also one reason why the Balkans, which even the Enlighten-ment could not illuminate, still remain a "dark place" for advancing European civilization.

The drive for self-knowledge has been quite typical of Bulgaria, which for centuries has gone through the agony of trying to "remember" who she was in order to gain the self-confidence that comes only with the knowledge of one’s own history or one’s own self. This creates the impression of a country that pretends to look forward to the future while actually having her gaze fixed steadily in the past. This apparently was true not only during the identity crisis that emerged after 1990, when she considered the possibility of having taken the wrong road, but even during the period in which Bulgaria claimed to be moving forward towards a Communist future.

The consequences of such a crisis are expressed by the fact that it is even impossible for the country to define her national interests, never having had a history of such interests, not to mention the impossibility of dissociating herself from the past and transforming feelings that have been cultivated over centuries into emotionless reason.

The importance of Bulgaria’s particular geographical location can first be seen in the very creation of the Bulgarian state in the seventh century on a supposedly devastated and depopulated territory where the Thracian Odryssian state, which Thucydides had described almost ten centuries earlier as being most powerful and rich, had once been located. On this same territory, the heart of the ancient Thracian diaspora (Fol 1971), the Balkan Mountains became the boundary that divided the Latin from the Greek speaking worlds, making it a most convenient place for observing the differ-ence between the two. Historians maintain on the basis of limited historical material that the Bulgarian state emerged as a result of a unique contract between two different ethnic groups having com-pletely different cultures and patterns of life (Bulgarians and Slavs), who had chosen this European crossroads to begin a common settled life. Insofar as centuries-old popular Bulgarian cultural and ritual practices exhibit essential Thracian features to this day, it can be surmised that the remaining native population served as a kind of reconciliation force for establishing this union. Evidence for this type of social cooperation and cultural interpenetration is also provided by the particularity of the Bulgarian language as a construction of three diverse components, a fact that necessarily reflects the complex process of its formation.

It is very difficult to discover the traces of Thracian presence in Bulgarian history due to the fact that the main medium through which this culture realizes itself is oral tradition. From another point of view, however, it is precisely this type of culture that was most capable of survival during the centuries of Ottoman control, when the Bulgarian state ceased to exist and written tradition was long disrupted. It might thus be said that as the two cultural traditions of body and mind developed by Bulgarians and Slavs declined and almost vanished for a time, languishing without their own guardians, rulers and literate intellectuals, the only guarantor for the continued existence of Bulgarians as people was the invisible "third component."

This seems to have been the case at least when the initial signs of an awareness of the absence of self-consciousness emerged through the efforts of Paisii Hilendarski to write the first Bulgarian history. This history was apparently intended to be a "cure" for the gasping Bulgarian spirit, which had miraculously survived in spite of being divided between two different alien worlds. The "body" had been enslaved by the Ottomans and its physical power channelled through the Ottoman empire, while the "mind" had been enslaved by the Greeks and its communications forcibly channelled through the Greek language.

Under the pressure for assimilation, it is always possible that a people be preserved because of the difficulty in crushing and enslaving the invisible spirit. The spirit has no material expression, leaves no written records of itself, nor does it depend on particular social and material conditions for its maintenance. Apparently all that it required is a medium appropriate for channelling the feelings that no master can control. Regardless of the historical misfortunes some peoples may suffer, their history does not necessarily represent a chain of losses without any gains. But it is also not easy to perceive the "gains" that a preservation of the spirit may bring.

In this respect, historical conditions in Bulgaria have not always been appropriate for cultural development comparable to that of countries who have not shared a similar fate and did not experience a colonization of body and mind. Nevertheless they provided the opportunity for the continuation and flourishing of a culture that has long been considered to be an "extinct species" in the modern civilized world. The unique historical experience of a European country that continuously maintained an observation position on the border of Europe, where two different civilizations were locked in struggle, may be seen as materialized first of all in the particularity of Bulgarian folklore as being representative of a highly idiosyncratic and symbolic culture. One of its most peculiar and unique features is perhaps its antithetical style.

This state of affairs demands a careful examination of the particularities of the place in question and its peoples because their current problems can no longer be viewed merely as results of chaotic circumstances whereby historical events in the Balkans always take the "wrong course." This in fact is the crisis of an oppressed European pre-history whose traces, having never completely withered away, constantly strive to become a matter of conscious awareness. This is the crisis of a place on the border between two continents, which cannot "borrow" an identity from any place else because it is identical only to itself. The Balkans have their own unique spirit, a European spirit that is stationary, remains true to itself and does not change.

During the 500 years of Ottoman control, Bulgaria lost her social and cultural presence in Europe. Although the Bulgarian state was restored at the end of the 19th century, today it is more clear than ever before that she is virtually not a subject within any context of European discourse. The countries that are present in such "European" discourse participate on the basis of accumulated cultural, intellectual, economic and political capital. The question then becomes whether there is something that has been accumulated and not dispersed which is of sufficient value to serve as a basis for exchange and interaction with other European countries.

Even among the Slavic countries, Bulgaria lost the prestige and cultural importance that she once enjoyed by virtue of the creation and spread of Slavic literacy after her system of education was destroyed by invading conquerors. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that she was transformed into a non-written culture and thrown back into the "darkness" from which she had emerged in her successful struggle against the almost overwhelming resistance of the Latin and Greek speaking worlds. As a result, the Bulgarian language not only lost its elegance, richness and grace, but also the honor of being the first written Slavic language (old Bulgarian), through which Orthodox Christian Slavic culture and the social, spiritual and artistic heritage of the Byzantine civilization had once been disseminated.

At the end of the 19th century, Bulgaria had to enter the modern world without the necessary cultural competence concerning the ways in which modern Western culture had been encoded. Bulgaria was neither venerated nor consecrated, regardless of the weight of her history, the extent of her suffering and the preservation of a quite old and unique European culture that dates from a time about which Europe has neither memories nor sufficient records. This situation has not changed much a century later, and the question concerning the place of Bulgaria in European culture is as acute as it ever was.

It is true that Bulgarians survived as a people, that their state was not forever erased from the map of Europe, and that their language was preserved. But does the mere survival of a nation provide sufficient grounds in the modern world for earning recognition and prestige? Can we say that there are no longer any obstacles to the advance of the creative forces and the spirit of the Bulgarian people?

In sociology, "nation" is considered to be a modern phenome-non. It is closely related to the concept of nation state, whose boundaries are either a matter of self-definition, an issue to be determined through negotiation with other nations or both. Nation formation is thus a process of self-definition and self-separation from other peoples, the grounds for which involve such shared features as history, experience, language or even a common enemy. A nation cannot be formed from without.

"Nationalism" is generally understood as a claim for priority or superiority over other nations and people. We talk about nationalism in cases where one nation exalts itself above all others, but in order to use this term we must first be sure that there already is and continues to be a nation. Against this background, the movement of a people for self-definition and nation formation can hardly be considered as an expression of "nationalism" insofar as the term has no legitimacy and meaning when there is not yet a nation. The Bulgarian National Revival, for example, can thus not be defined as a nationalist movement since it was rather a struggle to create the Bulgarian nation. Bulgarian historiography correctly refers to this process as a "movement for national self-determination."

In addition, the concept of "nation" must also be considered in respect to systems theory, according to which it is possible to talk about political systems and nation states only when their boundaries have been drawn from within. Because systems boundaries always belong to the system that establishes them, states whose territorial boundaries have been defined or delimited from the outside cannot be conceived of as social systems.

But it must be questioned whether modern terms can be applied to describe peoples who have never actually become modern, nor even had the opportunity to do so. It is necessary to consider the possibility that a nation may be dismantled under certain conditions, or that it may cease to exist as a system when stripped of the right to participate in interaction concerning its own boundaries.

And what is the "other" of the concept of nationalism?

It is no exaggeration to say that the question of boundaries has always been, as it still is today, the most acute question in the Balkans. The likely reason for this has been the fact that this is a place where many different European interests have clashed and become intertwined, giving rise to a myriad of often conflicting border designations. During the course of a long and complex history, establishing the existential boundaries of certain Balkan peoples has often been a matter of "other-determination" by external authorities rather than self-determination or negotiation. Today there are few existing boundaries that cannot be challenged, and it is virtually impossible to identify just criteria for redefining them that do not leave one or another interest unsatisfied. It is as inappropriate in this respect to appeal to the power of reason as it is to disregard the power of suppressed feelings. Perhaps the fact that peoples in the Balkans once again took a path completely different from that of most of Europe after the collapse of the Communist block is somehow connected with the popular wisdom that "In order to unite, we first have to separate." Nevertheless, still absent from the Balkans is the tradition of self-determination that other European peoples have long enjoyed.

Nationalism as a concept cannot be used to signify both sides of one and the same difference. The "other side" of this difference can only be designated by a term that is virtually unknown in sociological literature. This term is national nihilism.

If we accept Giddens’s definition of a nation as a "collectivity existing within a clearly demarcated territory, which is subject to a unitary administration, reflexively monitored both by the internal state apparatus and those of other states," then we must conclude that the Bulgarian nation was formed in the ninth century insofar as the Bulgarian state then had "unified administrative reach over the territory over which its sovereignty was claimed" (Giddens 1985, 116, 119). It had its own language, script, laws, common religion, high degree of territorial integration under a central administration and ethnic integrity based on the amalgamation of Thracians, Slavs and Bulgars.

But if we accept his claim that "nations and nationalism are distinctive properties of modern states" (Giddens 1985, 116), then the Bulgarian nation could not have been formed before 1878. Given his definition, it is incomprehensible how certain historians could talk about "Bulgarian nationalism" or even "Macedonian nationa-lism" under the condition of the complete absence of states. Furthermore, insofar as Bulgarians themselves did not participate in the process of determining their state boundaries and Bulgarian interests were not taken into account in 1878, then the application of Giddens’s definition becomes even more problematic. We could not justifiably speak of the Bulgarian nation because the demarcation of its territory was not a process of "reflexive monitoring" by internal and external forces and its boundaries were formed by the bureaucra-cies of other states. There is no place for the case of Bulgaria in such discussions of nationalism.

This strange mode of political determination that is based upon disregarding a nation’s own interests and preferring those of others has not been sufficiently studied. It reveals national nihilism to be a paradoxical state of self-denial, self-underestimation and self-dishonor which however, must be considered as being proceeded by a denial of the "other." National nihilism is a state most typical for a people in an identity crisis that has been brought about by a confused history of living on a boundary, a people who have always belonged to no less than two different worlds but have never belonged to themselves. This identity crisis is accompanied by an acute sense of shame, of being different, of being "other," that paralyses the mind and body and makes one incapable of social action.

In summary, the problem for Bulgaria is hidden in its past, the chains of which it carries along in any new future that it enters. The case of Bulgaria thus represents an ideal object in which national nihilism can be studied as a phenomenon having particular social causes and social consequences.

Nihilism is one of the core problems in the works of Nietzsche. Although today there is a much greater need for an analysis of nihilism than there was a century ago, there have been no significant efforts after him to "decode" the spell that has been cast upon human beings, condemning them to permanent negation and a reproduction of the tragic.

Nietzsche distinguishes two types of nihilism, namely, an active nihilism and a passive nihilism. The former is the embodiment of strength and a "sign of increased power of the spirit," but it is also "a violent force of destruction," while the latter is the sign of weakness and is a "weary nihilism that no longer attacks" (Nietzsche 1968b, 13-14).

Within the context of the present discussion, shame will be defined with a sociological reference as the feeling of those who either never had a mask, or whose mask has been removed. Stated otherwise, it is the social suffering connected with the conflict between physical presence and social absence, between the fact of being on stage and having no social role, involving the lack of access to the social medium that defines the boundary of the social system that those who are ashamed observe from without. Shame is the feeling resulting from being enchained and removed from the stage, from the only location where social action is possible.

In contrast, guilt is the feeling of a person who has a social role and, therefore, a mask. Guilt always arises as the feeling of a person on stage who experiences a particular type of distress in connection with the role he is playing, as if the force of circumstances has pressured him into doing what he did. The guilty man would like to step outside of his role, while the person who is ashamed has no role and wishes to have one. Both guilt and shame thus have a point in common in that they are expressions of the feelings of someone who does not want to be in his own social position.

Thus, behind the seemingly disrespectful attitude of many ordinary Bulgarians toward religion, there can still be found a certain correspondence with aspects of Orthodox Christianity that reveal a quite different view of life, or a different point of observation, than that of Roman Catholicism. However, the poorly developed sociology of religion in Eastern Europe does not provide any self-analyses by virtue of which the religious differences between East and West might be clearly seen. Nor does the sociology of religion as developed in the West offer anything more than a view from the outside of Orthodox Christianity. The modern world, generally speaking, considers Eastern Orthodoxy to be an inferior spiritual "branch" of Christianity that is incapable of producing anything of cultural importance comparable to Western Christianity. It is easy to see from such an external observation position what Orthodox Christianity does not have, such as something equivalent to the Reformation, but the application of Western criteria makes it difficult to see what does comprise its actual significance and value.

The particular feature of this "anti-modern" spirit is that it has clearly defined boundaries for its negating activity. "Modern" ideals hold an inexplicable fascination for Bulgarians only when these ideals "live abroad." As soon as they "cross" the border of Bulgaria and begin to "settle down," they lose their foreign halo and magical attractiveness and acquire the comic features of playful imitations.

Since ancient times Europe has been a place where schisms of different kinds replace each other without any of them being resolved. But the possibilities that they might have common roots, might well be different "hypostases" of some unresolved "primordial" problem, and that the history of European civilization is a story of incommensurable polarities that nevertheless communicate with each other, have not previously been discussed. Some of the peculiarities and differences around which European civilization obviously once originated should also be considered as responsible for differences between the "fates" of different nations, peoples, communities, strata, groups and even individuals. It can be argued, nevertheless, that the decisive advances made by the social sciences in recent decades, such as the development of powerful new theoretical schemes and methods, have finally made it possible for such important questions to be raised.

Inquiring further into the causes of the unfortunate fate and suffering of certain Balkan peoples may lead to the particular features of the Orthodox Christian attitude towards the world. Weber described mysticism as being typical for the Eastern Christian Church, and it is also embedded in the Slavophile conception of the community as being tied to the concepts of ancient Christianity (Weber 1978, 550-51). One of its essential features is the conviction that all "actions in the world" are justified only when guided by the feeling of love.

Mysticism is an often noted quality of the Bulgarian spiritual world. Bulgarians often have been seen as "contemplative mystics" who have a quite different mode of behavior than the Occidental ascetics, whose meaning is neither obvious, nor intelligible, nor apparent to the senses. The true followers of a mystical way of life never apply for or perform the role of "God’s instrument," but rather desire and seek to remain true to the role of "God’s vessel." Thus, they do not "act in the world" but rather suffer in the world of action, trying to perform only those actions most necessary for their survival. For the Bulgarian mystics, even the effort to liberate themselves from an unbearable 500 years of servitude, when the "vessel" had already been filled with emotions, would have to be considered as a wish to become "a tool of God" and, as such, a pattern of behavior unacceptable for the true believer.

The fact that this "other" type of mysticism is so typical for Bulgaria should not be surprising. First, it must be noted that the Thracians, who represent the substrata of the Bulgarian nation, were themselves representatives of high-land culture. As a result of processes of colonization and enslavement, as well as migration in connection with the changing centers of European civilization (Greece, Rome, Byzantium), low-land Thracian culture had practically disappeared by the time Slavs and Bulgarians came to the Balkan peninsula. Second, during the 500 year period of the Ottoman yoke, the survivors were once again those people who lived in the mountains, some of whom were never approached by the Turks. Geographical location may obviously provide a natural barrier against even the process of enslavement, and it offers remarkable advantages when it comes to social or natural survival.

If we may speak about a "world-rejecting" attitude on the part of these kinds of peoples, this involves a rejection of the social world, not the natural world, and the reasons for this are rather pre-Christian than Christian. And even when the outer world becomes extremely hostile, there always is a place of security where one may hide, namely, the inner world, which is inaccessible to any kind of colonization or enslavement.

The crying question "Why do I suffer?", to which the ascetic ideal gave a certain meaning (Nietzsche 1968a, 598), is still unanswered in the case exemplified by Orthodox Christians. Theirs is a silent suffering in the shadow of the grandiose stage of European history, and no justification can be found for it in the present.

In the case of Bulgarians, the question is not only "Why do I suffer?", but also "Why does this suffering have neither a beginning nor an end?", for only those things which have a beginning may also someday have an end. Why does the spirit, the very creative power of this people, still remain in chains, even after several "liberations"? One can only wonder how old are these chains and what they must be made of that they have not yet rusted to pieces.

In Greek tragedy, the courageous "tragic hero," for whom suffering was inevitable and losses irretrievable, is capable of learning something through his suffering. He finally acquires the ability to understand himself, others and the general conditions of existence, as the chorus in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon insisted. How can a tragic experience, the traces of which exist solely as feelings about past promises and opportunities that were betrayed but never completely forgotten, be considered as a decisive mode of cognition?

Meaningful suffering, as in the case of soldiers wounded in battle or ascetics who suffer for an ideal, can readily be seen as symbolic capital in Bourdieu’s sense (Bourdieu 1990). But what is the ideal that Bulgarians suffer and wait for, no modern ideal being good enough for them? How can their senseless suffering, which may even remain hidden and unacknowledged, be seen as capital that may have some practical meaning?

From a Freudian perspective, Aristotle’s catharsis is interpreted as that effect of tragedy whereby suffering enables us to remember what has been repressed, resulting in a purging of associated emotions. In this sense, putting an end to social suffering requires a self-awareness of the observation position that is located on the very boundary between two social worlds, analogous to the position of the tragic Chorus in respect to the two interaction parties on stage. It is necessary that observation itself be acknowledged as an alternative source of human knowledge that is fully adequate for a knowledge of the social world, even if observing nature must be assisted by an "instrument" in order to be adequate. In the case of so-called "involved observation" of society, the observer himself is such an "instrument," i.e., a tool that registers all important information from the outside world.

Such considerations seem to provide a sufficient basis for acknowledging that suffering can provide a "symbolic capital" that is accumulated within the soul. Stated otherwise, social suffering is a special technology for creating that particular kind of human sensitivity whereby one is capable of taking the role of the other and understanding him. This makes social suffering the most outstanding teacher of reconciliation skills. The successful completion of humanity’s struggle to eliminate social suffering would mean the total loss of any possibility to "repair" the social system when it becomes caught in an unresolvable communication schism in the course of the process of differentiation. This is because a communication conflict cannot be resolved without the creation of an appropriate communication language having the particularities and style needed for reconciliation.

Certain secrets of this style can be learned from the choruses in the ancient Greek tragedies, for whom the most important role of being the interpreter of both the main action as well as the tragic suffering was reserved. The wisdom of the Chorus was expressed in the fact that it neither took sides nor bestowed justice because every act of justice has two sides.

In this respect, Goffman’s theatrical image of the social world suffers from the shortcoming that its modern design and "a-historical" conception does not allow any place for a Chorus. This makes it quite different from the ancient tragic theater, where the main action between two interaction parties was constantly interpreted and, therefore, finally explained. Such particular skills are not learned from a teacher but are rather acquired as a result of the persistent occupation of one and the same observation position (the Orchestra), where a "third interaction party" is always the "invisible present."

The culture of the soul expresses itself through messages, which can easily be seen as a type of "communicative actions," or as links between communications and actions. Only through messages are we able to talk about things from both sides of one and the same boundary; only in messages does the soul acquire a voice. Because of its quality as a link between present and absent people, the message is not based on individual reason but rather on wisdom or collective reason. In this sense, the "paradox of observation," according to which no social system can be objectively observed, can be resolved insofar as the "third position" is not only an imaginary construction in virtual reality, but also has an actual correlate in the "inside-outside" position of an observer located on a boundary. This is the boundary position that is responsible for the construction of a mind with a non-modern, or even post-modern, structure. The particular quality of such a mind resides in its hermeneutic skills, in the art of bridging seemingly eternal gaps and millennia-old social schisms. With the construction of this new type of mind, the social world acquired that which it was lacking, namely, a force for reconciling social conflict between two equally wrong or right reasons. It is only now that we can see that the pretensions of philosophy whereby it sought to replace poetry were completely groundless. Neither Plato nor any of his successors ever provided final proof that philosophy, the victorious Socratic reason that overpowers its enemies and always plays a game of "One against All," ever was or can be a factor for reconciliation. Since in social life no superior individual reason can justifiably aspire to the role of Absolute Reason, sociologists always ask "Whose reason?" or "Who is the observer?"

However, there is another type of reason, namely, a collective reason that realizes itself through the accumulation of individual reason, of which it is the foundation. It is from this position that the archeology of reason can be written, from the position of the repressed collective consciousness that is the invisible medium which makes both actions and communications possible and gives them a heading. Such media in systems terms are language, money, power and truth, all products of collective labor, all of which undergo conversion-cycles in time and return to themselves.

Suffering as a result of the repression of action can be seen as responsible for the formation of a different type of social self that is always of a collective nature, the self of a member of the Chorus. Even though the theory of social selves is not yet elaborated, it is thus apparent that its main topic of discussion must be the denial of social space for expression and action. The essence of social technology in this respect resides in the repression of action and linguistic expression and their preservation in a non-linguistic form hidden from consciousness. The possibility that the "capital" consisting of the accumulated feelings generated through the repetition of such processes over many generations may be inherited had already been presumed by Freud.

Therefore, continuous suffering and the deprivation of social action accepted as a collective social role leads to the development of a particular culture of the soul that may emerge today as a third type of culture having its own particular and complex "technology." But it appears that the latter was in fact a quite ancient invention. Tragedy was the technology that was initially responsible for the construction of a particular type of social self that comprised the best "school" for cultivating the soul in a dynamic world of continually shifting boundaries. At one point this culture became almost completely extinct with the advance of settled life and the firm fixation of social boundaries. For example, in Aristophanes’s newly built Kingdom of Wealth (Plutus), there was no place for either Peina (Need), nor social suffering, nor oppressors, even if they be gods. The only God who succeeded in entering the area of the new kingdom was Hermes. However, he did so not in his quality of mediator but as a reduced divinity, namely, the God of Games. It is this fact that makes it possible today to maintain that the social agent of mediation is still and always has been present within the kingdom of reason, even though the civilized world has claimed that satyrs and the ancient Chorus have long been nowhere to be seen.

1. It is perhaps in this sense that Derrida appeals not only to find "the other heading" but also "the other of the heading." The other of the heading is the lack of any heading at all, which is an attribute of the place, of the Heideggerian "Ort," where all forces will finally "join and gather" as "in the point of a spear" (Derrida 1992, 25).

2. This is the essence of the so-called "paradox of observation" in systems theory, which claims that modernity as a single world system cannot be observed because every social system is a different —between inside and outside, between system and environment, between present and past. Insofar as the difference is a two-sided form, the possibility of thematizing the union of the two sides of a single difference may be given only in the form of the "excluded third" (Luhmann 1992, 29). That is to say that insofar as the observer can apply a difference as signifying meaning or identity only to one side of a given union, and not the other, another difference is needed in order to observe the union of these two differences. This means that we have to discover a type of observation position which is located somehow between the present and the past, i.e., capable of observing not only the social system in the present as it has been differentiated, but also the social system in the past as an undifferentiated whole (ibid., 219).

3. The very interesting case of primary socialization in conflict systems can be considered as an important addition to the rule described by Berger and Luckmann, who claim that the process of primary socialization is unproblematic in respect to identification (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 154).

4. In the Preface to The Presentation of Self, Goffman made one of the most important comments on the structure of the social world that, regardless of the opinion of the author himself, should not be overlooked. Goffman observes that the audience in a theater "consists a third party to the interaction - one that is essential and yet, if the stage performance were real, one that would not be there. In real life, the three parties are compressed into two; the part one individual plays is tailored to the parts played by others present, and yet these others also constitute the audience" (Goffman 1990, 9).

5. Stage design in the Greek tragic theater was meant to present precisely this three-part type of social world, i.e., a world with two interaction parties and observers who were deprived of participation in social life for some reason (gender, race, appearance, etc.). Surprisingly enough, the ancient Greek poets were more conscious of the effects of social exclusion than the modern world is accustomed to assume. And paradoxically enough, progress in the social world took place through simplifying the model of the social world by means of the deconstruction of the orchestra and the dissolution of the Chorus on the Roman stage. From this point of view, progress today may seem to be the revival of what had been lost in the shift in cultural centers in the ancient world.

6. A clear sign of the consciousness of being observed and the ubiquitous presence of the foreign master can be found in the peculiar fact that Bulgarian folk songs did not depict the image of the enemy even during the period when the Ottoman Empire was most severe and oppressive. This lack of an articulated expression of emotions, along with an unwillingness to name the power that has caused the suffering and pain, can at times produce the strange and paradoxical impression that these people lived in an unreal and even mythological world. However, this does not lessen the suffering.

7. The first history of Bulgaria was written in 1762 by the monk Paisii Hilendarski. He writes in his preface that this had been no easy task because the Turks, as they occupied the Bulgarian lands, burned down churches, monasteries and the king’s palaces, causing the loss of all knowledge, including the Bulgarians’ knowledge of their own history. The information Paisii used was thus collected from Greek and Latin sources, and his main motivation for writing the history of Bulgaria was in fact the painful feeling of shame that drove Bulgarians to substitute the use of Greek for their own language. And since "shame is anger that is directed inwards," he wrote an angry and emotional book (as quoted in Karanfilov 1973, 11). It seems that Paisii discovered through his inquiry into history that the fate of Bulgaria is a product of a mysterious past that had been overwhelmed by feelings and emotions. Paisii also quoted in the preface from the Latin translation of a short Greek history of Bulgarian kings in which a certain Mavrubir wrote: "Thus say the Greeks because of their jealousy and envy towards Bulgarians." The explanation follows that the Bulgarians had defeated the Greeks many times, which perhaps could have been the source of envy. The main purpose of Paisii’s book was to find in the past a "cure" capable of helping the Bulgarian spirit resist an ever-growing oppression.

8. As Paisii made clear, Bulgaria until relatively recently had a history only from the point of view of an external observer. But since this history is not sufficient for self-identification, the self is still missing.

9. Bulgaria is an example of a very strange strategy developed by people in order to gain their liberty. This was expressed in the declaration of an old oracle that liberation will come from the outside and that the Savior will be Russia. The image of the Savior was named "Grandfather Ivan," and the only thing the Bulgarian elders advised as being reasonable was to wait and watch: "Is Grandfather Ivan coming?" This is the motif of a short story well known to all Bulgarians by Ivan Vazov, the greatest Bulgarian writer, in which Grandfather Yozo spent his life watching all day long from a mountain top to see if Russia was coming. The question is why Bulgarians did not want to fight, did not trust themselves and did not think that salvation could come from within. Only the "crazy youths," as they were sympathetically called by the other villagers, did not obey the elders’ advice, and they continued to make their hopeless revolutions both from abroad and from within the country.

All efforts for self-liberation ended in betrayal, failure and massacre. However, this was due neither to a lack of organization, nor to a lack of people ready to die for the liberty of their country. There were many who actually showed the almost non-human self-denial and heroism typical of people who have nothing more to lose. The "paralyzing force" was not an individual fear of death, but came rather from the community’s decision that what must be preserved was not their own lives, but rather the "species" that was threatened with extinction. This psychological side of the behavior of the "sheep" has never been adequately taken into account when historians sought to explain why Bulgarians seemed to be so incapable of liberating themselves. We also need to ask how an uprising that relied on a force consisting mainly of old people, women and children could be successful at those times when the sons actually did fight on the side of the enemies (for example, as janissaries). How could these people rise in rebellion and fight against their own sons?

10. Because of the senseless way in which Bulgaria was industrialized upon the basis of a reliance on cheap natural resources imported from the Soviet Union, it is difficult today to identify a branch of industry on which her post-Communist economy may rely. Through the endless reorganizations of agriculture and the educational system, the destruction of old traditions without their replacement by more effective ones, as well as the orientation to the large and unpretentious internal market of the former Communist block, Bulgaria lost her reputation as a producer for the European market that she had enjoyed before 1944. It also should be noted that Bulgaria did not develop an industrial system capable of supporting her agriculture, as might have been expected. The fact that Bulgaria produced satellite components for the Soviet space program, and robots and electronic devices for the military, but not the machinery needed by her struggling agriculture, sufficiently reveals how Bulgaria has not been guided by "selfish" economic interests.

Bulgaria today is in last place among the East European countries in respect to the amount of direct Western investments. According to United Nations statistics, Bulgaria attracted only US$ 200 million the first five years of post-Communist reform, while US$ 6 billion were invested in only 17 percent of the enterprises in Hungary. Even Albania received more foreign investment during this period than Bulgaria, who can be compared in this respect only with certain of the former Central Asian Soviet republics ("Bulgaria Is the Last," 24 Hours, 6 May 1994).

11. Bulgaria has seemingly never succeeded in producing an event that could place her on the front pages of authoritative European newspapers. Even the overthrow in 1989 of Todor Zhivkov, the longest serving Communist dictator, an event that marked the beginning of the end of the Bulgarian Communist regime, did not assure her a monopoly over the sensational news of the day because, ironically enough, this event coincided with the opening of the Berlin Wall. This is only a more recent example of the constant historical misfortune that has pursued Bulgaria for centuries. From this point of view, perhaps we should discuss something other than chronological time in respect to Bulgarian history, such as time without events.

12. Ehrenberg maintains that "when people and civilizations survive it is again the spirit which plays the decisive part" (Ehrenberg 1974, 173). However, it seems that peoples who have been known for their great suffering neither survived nor were privileged because of some "tremendous power of spirit." On the contrary, they suffered because of it. This spirit demands great sacrifice on the part of peoples because its own value seems to be greater than any individual life.

13. Such considerations are in immediate relation to the fact that Bulgaria after the liberation has always sought an external authority to rule her. This apparently incomprehensible fact, which puzzles historians as well as those who explore the depths of the Bulgarian psyche, must be seen in the light of the more general rule whereby the authorities who rule any compulsory organization (total institutions) are appointed and selected from the outside.

14. The differing degrees of success with which the members of the former Communist block have adapted to market economy raises serious doubts about regarding economic freedom and reforms as a universal remedy. It becomes ever more clear that beyond the economy of the relations of production, which refers only to human physical powers, lies another type of economy, namely, the economy of the relations of production of communications. The question about what should be considered to be communication is also the question about who should be considered as capable of producing communications. This also concerns the issues of possessing a monopoly over the means of communications or over access to them.

Systems theory does not ignore the question of human actors who remain in the environment of social systems. On the contrary, it addresses this matter from a quite different point of view that opens up new perspectives for discussing the question of power. The interaction system begins to exercise its power once it is established, an important aspect of which is the selection of those who will participate in it. This is not the matter of being free to select one or another interaction system in which to participate, even though we would prefer to think so in the supposedly true spirit of democracy.

15. A common misunderstanding is that the "other" of nationalism is "internationalism," a view which is completely misleading. The "other" of nationalism as a concept is not to be attained by a shift to some higher level of conceptualization where national attitudes would disappear as do eggs in an omelet. The "other" of nationalism is rather national nihilism, which represents the antithesis, or perfect opposite, of nationalism.

16. Paradoxically enough, such an attitude can be ascribed to the psychically healthy inmates of Goffman’s total institutions, for whom there is hardly a question of solidarity or loyalty to the institution when a choice must be made between "inside" and "outside." For such people, the realm of freedom

always begins beyond the boundaries of the social space in which they live.

17. There is hardly another such example of self-determination in which the love of other nations outweighs the love of freedom, the reason being that liberation had not abolished "the kingdom of necessity" and did not bring freedom. In classical Greek tragedy, the quality of sacro altruismo is described as being characteristic of such tragic heroines as Sophocles’ Antigone and Euripides’ Macaria, Iphigeneia and Alcestis, who had the common ability to "rise above every selfish thought" (Shuckburgh 1979, xxiv-xxv). But it might be said that they all took the "liberty" of sacrificing themselves precisely because they were not free. It seems that freedom is always a self-achievement. No one can make anyone else free, and freedom is not a necessary consequence of liberation.

18. The roots of either nationalism or national nihilism cannot be revealed without a retrospective reconstruction of a given people’s relationships with other peoples and nations. That which can be seen in the present by students of both nationalism and national nihilism is only the tip of an iceberg whose essence cannot be grasped without diving below the surface in order to examine what makes it rise up out of the water.

19. This theme has engaged the minds of many generations of Bulgarian intellectuals, writers and poets. Classical examples of such phenomena can be found in the few early decades of capitalist development in Bulgaria that brought with them the comic characters of the new bourgeoisie, whose deficiency was seen in their efforts to modernize something that cannot be modernized. On the basis of the strong traditions that survived 500 years of Ottoman subjugation, Bulgaria could not succeed in constructing any modern present of its own. Instead, the "imported present" after being internalized began to resemble a caricature of a "misunderstood civilization."

Another example is the effort to modernize national rituals, folk music and folk dances. The gap between traditional and modern is here so great that they can exist only as completely separated from each other. The peculiar thing about this in Bulgaria is that the traditional, which survived a multitude of enforced social changes, is the more active factor. It does not become more modern in this effort, but rather dissolves the modern into itself as a caricature, such as when modern Western music is played with traditional instruments. The opposite process cannot be observed in Bulgaria. Tradition stands as something which is untranslatable and indissoluble, and the modern is helpless against tradition, whose power destroys it when provoked.

20. The strong Bulgarian belief in the coming of a "Savior" has been always expressed in the form of waiting for an external power: salvation is never expected to come from within. During the period of Ottoman domination, even the home-grown saviors had first to become emigrants in order to enter the country from abroad, or at the very least to come down from "above," i.e., from their refuge in the Balkan Mountains. Whether it be Grandfather Ivan (Russia) or the Red Army, the foreign king or the Hero of Leipzig, all are incarnations of one and the same image, namely, an alien force who liberates but never brings freedom.

21. Such a state of affairs is not inconceivable from a sociolo-gical perspective. This attitude could be compared to that of a schoolboy towards the process of education as he counts the years left until his maturity, or to the attitude of the prisoner who does not hope for amnesty and simply waits for his sentence to end. A state of waiting for the future to begin that negates the present is also well known to sailors’ wives as they wait for the ship to return to the harbor. Since the future can come for them only from where the past has disappeared, the most important thing is to keep memories of past time alive in the present, which itself is only chronological in character.

22. A contradiction often seen in The Will to Power is manifest in his treatment of the feeling of guilt, which, contrary to possible expectations, becomes the dominant theme of discussion instead of shame. This is perhaps because guilt comes to attract his attention in relation to Christianity, making shame, a major theme of discussion in his earlier writings, almost disappear as a topic of concern. Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s shift of interests from the Birth of Tragedy to the Birth of Christianity apparently caused him to concentrate upon guilt and abandon the analysis of shame.

23. We owe the discovery of this hidden knowledge and source of power to the work of Thomas Scheff. In his renowned study, Hitler’s Mein Kampf is seen to have "shame and rage bristling from every page," and it thus becomes exemplary in respect to the study of shame as a source of anger, which is "pointed outwards, at objects in the external world" (Scheff 1990, 171).

24. It is obvious that Nazi philosophers and practitioners read Nietzsche "as the devil reads the Bible." The whole dreadful experience of Nazism seems to have been very closely related with a deep knowledge of Nietzsche’s very powerful discovery that the most easily manipulated people are the people who are ashamed, and that the ability to make people ashamed is power. As long as one is ashamed, one is not only not free, but perhaps does not even know the reason of his enslavement. Could this be the essence of the secret weapon which the Nazis discovered, surprisingly not in the natural sciences, and used to paralyze resistance forces everywhere, both in society as well as behind the walls of the concentration camps?

25. Dealing with the question whether virtue is a passion, a faculty or a state of character, Aristotle decides that the latter is the essence of virtue. "Shame should not be described as a virtue; for it is more like passion than a state of character" (Aristotle 1986, 1128 b9, 10).

26. The amount of attention given to these concepts has grown steadily since the 1950s. Examples of significant efforts in this direction include the work of G. Piers and M. Singer on guilt shame (1953), H. Lynd’s work on shame and identity (1958), H. Lewis’s work on shame and guilt (1971), the work of L. Wurmser on shame (1981), the empirical work of Suzanne Retzinger on shame and emotions (1991 and 1995), and J. Braithwaite’s work on shame and social integration (1989). A special place must be reserved here for the works of E. Goffman on embarrassment, face and stigma, as well as for the body of Thomas Scheff’s work. These latter works are especially concerned with a broad range of human emotions that not only affect the behavior of particular individuals, but which may also serve to provide the means for setting up a new type of explanatory framework for social history.

Shame and guilt have recently come to be viewed as important for understanding such "modern" social phenomena as totalitaria-nism, Communism, and fascism. Agnes Heller, for example, in a joint effort to understand the nature of "real socialism" that was undertaken by scholars able to observe it from both inside and outside, introduced the quite promising notion of "shame-culture." She relates this phenomenon to patterns of behavior standardized in accordance with the morality of a single ruling party, deviations from which are punished with shame (Fehér, Heller, and Ërkus 1983, 208-213). I consider that further discussion of such phenomenon as "internalized shame," whose roots Heller saw in a world that is prior to enlightenment, leads to an important crossroads where a great variety of social theories and sciences meet, all of whose contributions and collaboration are needed for the full development of a theory of the social self.

27. A clear distinction between the concepts of shame and guilt is of great significance for the present study, but confusion between these terms even in common language can still be found in authoritative dictionaries. For example, guilt is straightforwardly defined in Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary as "the fact of having committed a breach of conduct esp. violating law and involving a penalty; . . . the state of one who has committed an offense esp. consciously." Shame is defined, however, as "a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety, . . . something that brings strong regret, censure, or reproach." This definition obviously does not serve the purpose if the point under discussion is the fine, but very important, difference between shame and guilt.

28. These issues, which refer to persons who wear "masks" and apply for social roles, not human beings in general, merit a thorough analysis in the light of systems theory. This would involve examining the relationships between the three different systems levels (interaction, organization, society) and the tension that their different criteria for the formation of boundaries obviously imposes. One and the same person within one and the same time frame may be considered as being either present or absent according to three different criteria. He may be present in all cases, or he may find himself excluded from all systems depending on the type of selection criteria utilized. It must also be noted that to become an object of discussion in an interaction system when actually present clearly means a violation of democratic interaction norms in the terms of systems theory.

29. "When one feels guilt one’s self feels intact. In feeling shame, one experiences what must be the most vertiginous of all feelings, namely, the disintegration of the self or its potential disinte-gration. It is for this reason that guilt is infinitely more prestigious than shame. . . Shame is probably the most intensely painful of all feelings. Each person has spent what feels like an eternity of time and effort in constructing a competent, valuable self. The threat of losing that self may be more painful than the threat of losing one’s life. In all cultures and historical eras, personal disgrace usually leads to extreme measures, even suicide" (Scheff 1990, 169).

30. Marcuse writes in Eros and Civilization that, "Freud attributed to the sense of guilt a decisive role in the development of civilization; moreover, he establishes a correlation between progress and an increasing guilt feeling. He states his intention `to represent the sense of guilt as the most important problem in the evolution of culture, and to convey that the price of progress in civilization is paid in forfeiting happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.’ Recurrently Freud emphasizes that, as civilization progresses, the guilt feeling is `further reinforced,’ `intensified,’ is `ever-increasing.’" (Marcuse 1955, 71).

31. Nietzsche wrote in the Genealogy of Morals that, "What really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering: but neither for the Christian, who has interpreted a whole mysterious machinery of salvation into suffering, nor for the naive man of more ancient times, who under-stood all suffering in relation to the spectator of it or the cause of it, was there any such thing as senseless suffering" (Nietzsche 1968a, 504).

Another aspect of "senseless suffering" is revealed by studies of pain, the most private of all feelings that no external observer can ever understand. Such studies emphasize the fact that heroes injured in the heat of the battle, whose serious wounds are recognized as sources of pride, do not suffer the same level of pain that ordinary patients in hospital suffer from much more minor injuries. The difference lies in the meaning of the suffering of the wounded soldier (source of pride) and the meaningless suffering of the common patient (misfortune). In other words, a comparable level of suffering with meaning is not as painful as one without meaning.

32. This statement is supported by an analysis of Bulgarian folklore. One of the main themes in the songs performed at Christmas time concerns God as he demands ever new sacrifices from his people in order for His monasteries to be built and His work to continue. Other Christmas songs are about the samodiva (a mountain nymph who imposes "wildness" or "craziness" upon herself), who builds her town from human bodies. She transforms her victims into a kind of building material, but they are neither completely dead because they still have physiological needs, nor are they fully alive because they are made into the walls and windows of the building. Nothing is said about the physical sufferings imposed on this pile of bodies, who are paralyzed and cannot act. In other similar songs, the victims perform relatively enjoyable albeit sense-less labor, i.e., labor that has no results. For example, one song concerns a child taken to this town who picks herbs, but he is unable to collect them in his shirt and they constantly fall to the ground.

It must also be mentioned that the victims chosen as building material are chosen because of their good human qualities (the best, the strongest, the bravest and the most beautiful people of all ages). It is obvious that the concept of guilt in no ways fits with the fact that they are the ones who have been so chosen. At the same time, the people whom God asks to cooperate with him are only of two kinds: rich men and sterile women. These two social "groups" represent the impotent, non-creative social forces from whom God did ask personal sacrifices.

Furthermore, these towns, monasteries, etc., built by different mighty forces (God, nymphs) are located neither on Earth, nor in heaven, but "inside a dark cloud." That these songs symbolically represent suffering is expressed by the strong hope that one day these buildings will be destroyed by a brave man who will liberate the people. These examples are taken from the songs collected by the Miladinovi brothers (Miladinov 1981).

33. One aspect in which the role of the Eastern Church can be seen is its activity as an interaction partner for Western Christendom, especially during periods of transition and radical change. The otherwise inexplicable interest and lengthy correspondence during the period 1573-1581 that was initiated by German Lutheran scholars in Tübingen could perhaps be viewed in this light. This correspondence is often put forward as an example of a basic lack of understanding between these two spiritual traditions that obviously proceeded from their completely different perspectives of the social world.

34. It would be difficult in a few lines to discuss the difference between Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, but it must nevertheless be emphasized that the Orthodox Christian is neither afraid of the apocalypse, nor is he permeated with a sense of guilt. He does not see Salvation in the light of a revenging justice, but rather in relation to forgiveness and the Divine overcoming of human morality and weakness. His visible passivity in the world is related to the fact that Orthodox Christianity does not focus on the First Person of the Trinity, the Father, but is rather a Christology, i.e., a doctrine of the Christ "who suffers in the flesh." It is as if the Orthodox Christian were crucified together with Christ Himself, and he waits for the Holy Spirit to come and ensure divine life in the union of believers instead of being an acting or doing Christian. The "call" that may awake him comes not from God but from the people for whom he suffers. In other words, the Orthodox Christian believer is a person of mission, not of profession.

35. As Weber pointed out, every historical instance of Communism "has either a traditional, that means, patriarchal basis or the extraordinary foundation of charismatic belief" (Weber 1978, 1119). In this sense, the ideas of Communism did not interfere with the exceptionally strong emphasis in Orthodox Christianity on tradition and charisma.

36. From many points of view, the tradition we are discussing presents social life as shifting sands upon which nothing can be built. Another powerful metaphor could be also used, that of the Greek walnut tree, a sturdy tree that typically dies suddenly at several hundred years of age for no obvious reason. The strangest thing about this tree is expressed by the saying that "Nothing grows under the Greek walnut." And in the very place where it stood a huge diversity of plants appears, whose seeds no one suspected were there. It is supposed that this sturdy tree gives off some kind of paralyzing substance that prevents these seeds from growing, although it does not kill them.

37. Typical examples of this are flocks of domestic animals or bees, whose natures were not changed when man transformed them into collective beings for his own convenience.

38. In this context, artistic activity and aesthetic perception are arguably in contradiction with the underlying ideas of both European civilization and Protestantism. It cannot be denied that art, regardless of whatever appreciation has been shown to it by the modern world, is considered to be inferior to science and reason, the idea of which originated in, and was developed through, successful attempts to overthrow the power of art.

39. Nature always shares suffering with human beings in the Bulgarian literary and oral traditions. It is also usual for the tragic to be related to the beautiful. One such example is provided by the following line from the Bulgarian poetic arsenal: "You are beautiful, my forest, and you smell of youth, but you impose only pity and sorrow on our hearts."

40. Concerning the "primitive application" of the basic assumptions of pragmatism to modern education, Hannah Arendt writes, "The basic assumption is that you can know and understand only what you have done yourself, and its application to education is as primitive as it is obvious: to substitute, insofar as possible, doing for learning." Arendt sees this practice as ironically resulting in the "transformation of institutes for learning into vocational institutions which have been successful in teaching how to drive a car or how to use a typewriter. . . ." (Arendt 1968, 182-83).

Such a dramatic transformation can easily be seen as representing the democratic spirit of modernity. In this respect, it is legitimate to ask whether the system of education as we have known it for centuries is itself rather contradictory to democratic ideals, and whether the "teacher-student" relationship is basically the same old "father-son" relationship with which European civilization began. From this point of view, I do not think that the problem is as Arendt sees it, namely, that students are kept on the level of play and prevented from growing up, but rather that students are promoted into "fathers" and no one is left to play the roles of sons.

41. To ask such questions means to challenge the tradition, which has insisted since the time of Democritus that the "dark" knowledge provided by the senses is useless for attaining the truth.

42. In this respect, "psychohistory" offers a promising new method for historical analysis by applying the psychoanalytical approach to historical research. This initiates an examination of the "backstage" of history, i.e., the place where people have stepped out of their historical roles as actors and are presented to us as human beings with their own emotions and powerful feelings.

43. While Arendt considered principles to be something that operate from without and inspire action, there may well be certain principles that restrict and discourage action from without, even though they remain unnoticed. Perhaps the latter remain unnoticed because principles in general are observable only through action, being "manifested in the world as long as the action lasts, but no longer." Arendt also states that "men are free — as distinguished from their possessing the gift for freedom — as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same" (Arendt 1968, 152-53).

44. From this point of view, Goffman’s concept of total institutions should perhaps be revised. If a total institution is something that deprives a person of freedom, then should there not also be a place within the concept for those cases of "totalitarian institutions" that deprive a person of action? The term "total institution" refers to a number of different kinds of establishments that in fact cannot be compared. The application to this particular case of the much criticized but nevertheless much used Weberian method of "ideal types" seems unable to provide the criteria necessary for distinguishing between them. Thus, according to Goffman, there are total institutions that are established "to care for persons felt to be both incapable and harmless," as well as total institutions for those who are "incapable and a threat to the community." There are also total institutions that are voluntary "retreats from the world," as well as establishments that serve a training purpose or provide a better persuasion for some "work-like task," such as army barracks, ships and boarding schools. In these latter cases we should talk about freedom being deprived in order to assure a better concentration upon one particular kind of action, but not about the deprivation of action as such. In the first case, the inmates are incapable of taking care of themselves and performing actions. However, there are also institutions of a significantly different kind, even though Goffman includes them as the "third type of total institutions" among the five he lists as the basis for the "denotative definition of the initial definition of total institutions" (Goffman 1961, 4-5). It is for this third type, such as "jails, penitentiaries, P.O.W. camps and concentration camps" (ibid.), that I reserve the term "totalitarian institution," which designates the deprivation of action as such. It is in this quality that such institutions are related to a kind of suffering that in itself does not rely on mechanisms of physical incarceration, a kind of suffering that enables these institutions to be understood as places of painful experience where virtually "non-being" human beings can do nothing but wait.

45. The ways in which words may become such an unimportant matter in the process of interaction was best understood during the period of totalitarian regimes. From many points of view, these societies were transformed into "para-linguistic cultures" where words as such, and concepts in particular, lost their meaning and importance in interaction processes. Social linguistics preserves the term "societies with restricted codes" for such cases, in which "how things are said, when they are said, rather than what is said" is most important. These arise, according to B. Bernstein, "in prisons, combat units of the armed forces, in the peer group of children and adolescents, etc." (Bernstein 1972, 36-37). The external observer of such interaction processes, as well as of totalitarian societies, should not trust verbal explicitness since all that he would then be able to predict remains at the syntactic level. The same holds true for the Chorus, whose words were the most obscure and enigmatic part of all Greek tragedies and comedies.

46. Paradoxically enough, and quite contrary to the materialistic understanding of the use of slaves, perhaps the most important reason for the disappearance of the slavery has less to do with a change in the mode of production than with the fact that slavery itself entered a stage of development where it actually lost its most important function, namely, that of the observer of social life. This is the role of the non-participant who loses his function when he acquires his freedom and begins to act. It can thus be claimed that neither the disappearance of the Orchestra in the Roman theater nor the appearance of today’s modern type of Chorus took place by mere chance.

47. A good example of this is provided by the internal dialogue in which we at times engage with ourselves, remembering an interaction in which we did not say or do the right thing. This unbalance in social communication creates the opportunity for undischarged social interaction to be accumulated in the form of feelings. What is important for the construction of this particular new type of self is not what we did but what we did not do, having been deprived of action or expression for one reason or another. This obviously has something to do with what the ancient Greeks understood by moderation or sophrosyne.

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