Prof. Alexander Nikolaev Fol, Doctor of History, works in the field of history of the Old World and history of South Eastern Europe in antiquity indoeuropeistics and thracology, history of the ancient Greek and Thracian culture. He is Professor of Ancient History and Thracology at New Bulgarian University.

Prof. Fol, is the world we are living in a good one?
This is an old question about this “best among the worlds”, as a philosophically consensual reassurance goes, always flattering for all rulers. The world is what we name it because there are no worlds beyond the words – here is a less known historiographic norm. It is respected by those authors who do not rummage the desolated memories, archive folders, files and graves, but are always puzzled by the negative answer to the question whether Man has become better than the men before him.

Spirituality is developing – the positivists, the bio-evolutionists and historical materialists claim – from worse to better (from simpler to more complicated), from uglier to prettier. In this history of the spirit its inventors are accused by the history itself for standing the spirit, so backward, for millennia. Since Man is deprived of the right to fight against objective phenomena that oblige him to sit with his arms folded and wait to see what they will do to him, he takes revenge on the postulated moral progress by writing his own metahistory, created by his spirit in privacy.

This may seem complicated but it is not. The very good political leaders operate with it excellently. With words they build the world they live in, sometimes at the expense of other people’s worlds. The consolation for those others is that you only see what you know. And because even the very good political leaders do not know enough to see the visible and the invisible, the human and the divine, the mortal and the immortal things, most will not be seen and therefore will not be named. This way, words will remain unused with which others will be able to create their own world. Those others are very few, even fewer than the very good political leaders, and their intellect feeds on itself, which keeps it chronically undernourished.

But please, do not call them intellectuals! The intellectuals are a class created by the mass media. It exists in the so-called media space, which is virtual.

Are you undernourished?
I live on continuous efforts to stop making definitions, because when you stop defining someone or something you start understanding it. Such efforts are a daily care – the dilettantes are enthusiastic about their discoveries in their knee-deep sea and the professionals enjoy their workaday activities. The workaday activities are especially important in Anthropology which territory, unlike the one of structural anthropology and semiotics, is populated by figures that live and act in the living historical reality and not just in the theoretical terminology. While in the natural sciences the subject and the object of study are distinct and separable from each other, the hypothesis that man the subject and man the object are two different people has caused the greatest damages to Anthropology.

Man is the object of investigation. He is both the subject and the object. But while the man-object consists of objects that stand in changeable correlation – like the soul to the body! – the subject remains integral or at least cold-bloodedly strives not to split in two. He has good reason to be afraid, because the examiner is always pushed to the corner of the living historical reality by the examined.

Is this your concept of history?
To speak about history in the newspapers or in the cafes is not the same as to speak about history in the police. To speak about history in the police is not the same as to speak about history in parliament. This problematic situation raises the question where and how is history made, provided it is made somewhere by someone.

A comprehensive answer would be that Clio is an experiment that consists in letting the experimented go through the experiment of the experimenting. A more hopeful answer accepts that the only way to see where and how history runs is to catch the moment when nothing more can be done in order to do something – no matter what.

According to an old and still provocative sentence, the historian is not educated but born. This statement – dangerous for the university education and the history lecturers – seems more an advice of humble joy than a declaration of uniqueness. The quality of always being new born is a gift to see with wide-open eyes what is continuously done under the directions of Clio.

“Many carry a thyrsos, few are the initiated” (in the Dionysus faith in Death and Rebirth). This is a periphrasis of a Plato’s statement on the popularity and the pose among the insincere and the unprepared. It is suitable for the initiated in history who do not wait for the so-called distance to become greater in order to call the ideas, the events and people by their real names. This waiting for the distance to become greater puts an end to the work of the waiting ones following a sadly known scheme of author degradation – the historical pursuit bravely starts with the proper names, but is kept alive by the common nouns and ends with throwing of interjections.

My concept of history? It is in everything I said above. In Clio, who is a muse and is a muse because she is a drama and is a drama because she is an effort for self-knowledge and the self-knowledge is an action-duty, Man personifies ideas and images he feeds the conflict with. In this conflict the man is bearer of his own culture which is also his behaviour, conditioned by his value system.

Anthropology, an essential part of which is history, is crisis and ethos. The crisis is discerning the things and differentiating them. The ethos is the morality expressed in calling the discerned and differentiated things by their real names, as I already said. The things may even not be shown because what has not been shown, said, done in Anthropology is more important than what’s shown, said and done.

Does this mean that scientific research is above all a moral obligation?
Yes, above all, if not completely – at least in Anthropology. This is the reason why the old meaning of objectivity/objective and subjectivity/subjective which was valid between the 14th and the 19th centuries should not be forgotten. In that period objectivity/objective referred to the things presented in the consciousness and subjectivity/subjective referred to the things outside the consciousness. During the last 200 years the former started meaning an external object existing regardless of the consciousness, and the latter – the internal estimation of the external object.

But if we do not leave behind the meaning known till the beginning of the 19th c. hard times will come for the historians – objectivity will only exist to the extent it is realised. But is it advisable for objectivity to be realised?
And another thing I want to add to this and the above answers. History, which is drama, is not a performance. It is an action-duty, which Mnemosyne, the goddess Memory-Cognition, imposes upon her daughters, the muses, among whom is Clio, and they in turn impose on those who listen to their voices. The Memory-Cognition however is not memorising trained by mere grinding. It is a reminder inflamed by Mnemosyne. Reminding does not set in motion the historic memory-cognition through memorised words but through ideas and images that are strictly individualised. The supporters of the theory of the so-called collective memory vainly hope that it deprives the “members of the collective body” of their own memory and throws them in the irresponsibility of group remembering.

The ideas and the images that put the historical memory-cognition in motion take place in contemplation and obsession. The contemplation is a movement toward the light side, Apollo’s side of the memory-cognition, and the obsession – toward the dark, the Dionysus’ side. Both movements are possible through the theophanic thinking that forms the time of the Faith. In this type of time, which is substantially different from the linear, the mythological, the cyclic and the agonal or competitive, Man trusts in the immortality of his intellectual energy, which makes him a mediator of the divine might. Then Man feels a personage in an episode of the creation of the Cosmos.

Can these words be used as a definition of faith despite your refusal to make definitions?
Yes, if we assume that the only evidence for the existence of the divine is the human, of the immortal – the mortal, of the imperishable – the perishable.

You have been awarded Stara Planina Order 1st Class in 2003. What does this mean to you?
Those awarded with this highest Bulgarian distinction are proud since they think that their merits have been judged properly. That is, it was right for them to be awarded. The sign of the state, handed by the president after being signed by the prime minister shows another thing to the historian. It is that statehood continuously revives in the actions of its bearers. My hope is that I am one of these bearers. How many are the bearers of statehood in one state?

Does everything you said refer to the arete philosophy?
It does. Arete is the ancient Greek notion of the combination of virtues of the citizen – head of a family, a host and a warrior, but it was not used only in Europe’s antiquity. It is still valid as long as we think of it as of a value system which motivates the behaviour of its defender, i.e. as a “cultivated spirituality”, which is the meaning of the Latin word cultura. Culture is not going to concerts, exhibitions and book premieres, now called promotions or presentations. Presentation is the last thing culture is. Culture is a civic active behaviour.

From this point of view, the arete philosophy consists in a well-founded effort of scientists, public and culture figures organised around Arete Foundation, the qualities of the free individual and his right to choose his behaviour, to form the matter of a pedagogy, which would turn into ethics.

Exclusively for Bulgarian Diplomatic Review

During the visit of Dalai Lama in Sofia, 1991