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In this issue
Topic of the issue: Ideology and false reality
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Author:
- Section: Тема на броя
- Issue: Ideology and false reality
Table of contents Issue 73 (2026)
Generative AI and fake reality
- Author: Serghey Stoilov Gherdjikov, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, sergeygherdjikov@gmail.com
- Section: Тема на броя
- Issue: Ideology and false reality
Text and image generators create trivial, often erroneous and false texts, and illusory or physically impossible images – "hallucinations". They could generate also very good imitations of real speech, image, video, and documents, including scientific protocols (deep fake). They do not distinguish between lie and truth in correspondent meaning and virtual from real, and this creates a deceptive, false reality. The explanation of these symptoms is in the statistical analysis by levels and in the lack of access to the real world. Speculations about solving the tests of intelligency and the technological singularity is unrealistic because it takes natural intelligency and natural language imitation for authenticity, and a special type of AI for general (AGI). Virtual simulations do not replicate or replace real-world forms of natural intelligence. Real brains and bodies have mental states and find rational solutions to a wide range of problems, which are basically a resynthesis of the organism and the image of the world. Therefore, the real dangers of AI are not threats from a conscious artificial superintelligence, but from the false "reality" that invades in modern civilization through virtual machines.
Keywords: artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI, natural intelligence, text and image generators, rational procedure, mental forms, hallucinations, fake reality
The Concepts of “Polymorphous Sexuality” and “Surplus Repression” in Herbert Marcuse’s Ideology of Liberation
- Author: Gergana Popova, South-West University “Neofit Rilski” gerp@abv.bg
- Section: Тема на броя
- Issue: Ideology and false reality
This article examines Herbert Marcuse’s theory of sexual liberation, with particular emphasis on the concepts of “polymorphous sexuality” and “surplus repression,” as well as on his understanding of the family as a historically specific form of surplus repression that is to be overcome. The first part of the study situates the concept of “polymorphous sexuality” within the context of Sigmund Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality and libido. It further examines Freud’s account of the origins and nature of civilization, focusing in particular on his thesis concerning the fundamental unhappiness of the human subject within the framework of civilization. The second part analyzes Marcuse’s historicization of Freud’s conception and his elaboration of polymorphous sexuality as the foundation of a non-repressive civilization in which freedom and happiness become mutually constitutive. Within this theoretical framework, particular attention is devoted to the concepts of “libidinal rationality” and the “self-sublimation of the libido,” through which Marcuse formulates his argument concerning the dissolution of the family as a repressive institution and the potential emergence of new libidinal relations among individuals. The article concludes by addressing the question of the contemporary relevance and influence of Marcuse’s theory of sexual liberation.
Keywords: polymorphous sexuality, surplus repression, non-repressive civilization, libidinal rationality
Digital Influence and Public Trust: Psychological Risks Associated with Virtual Influencers
- Author: Borislav Hristov Zashev, South-West University "Neofit Rilski", bobi_z@mail.bg, Iva Ivanova Dimitrova, South-West University "Neofit Rilski", idimitrova@swu.b
- Section: Тема на броя
- Issue: Ideology and false reality
The development of generative technologies and artificial intelligence has created the conditions for the emergence of virtual influencers—digitally constructed identities that function as social actors with visual credibility, consistent communicative behavior, and a tangible psychological impact on audiences. Their influence is grounded in mechanisms such as parasocial relationships, emotional engagement, suggestibility, and trust in simulated authenticity, which foster perceptions of closeness and reliability among users despite the absence of a real human individual behind the digital persona.
Although virtual influencers are often presented as a cultural and marketing phenomenon, they also pose significant risks to information security and public trust. Their centralized management, capacity for algorithmic amplification of influence, and lack of personal moral and legal accountability create conditions conducive to manipulative communication, disinformation, and the normalization of a simulated social reality.
This article examines virtual influencers as psychosocial constructs within the digital environment. It explores processes of trust formation, mechanisms of identification, and vulnerabilities associated with cognitive heuristics and social engineering, as well as their implications for societal resilience and information ethics. An interdisciplinary conceptual model is proposed, integrating perspectives from media psychology, security psychology, communication studies, and ethics.
Keywords: security psychology; virtual influencers; digital identity; public trust; parasocial relationships; suggestibility; algorithmic influence; disinformation; social engineering; media psychology.
Identity as a process: systems thinking and Moreno's role ontology
- Author: Radostina Minina, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, BAS, radostina.minina@ips.bas.bg
- Section: Тема на броя
- Issue: Ideology and false reality
This article examines the problem of identity through the lens of systems thinking and complexity theory. Beginning with the cybernetics of Wiener and Beer, it traces how various twentieth-century theories, despite their disciplinary differences, converge on a common structural thesis: identity is processual, relational, and dynamically maintained, rather than fixed and given in advance.
Von Foerster demonstrates that observation itself is embedded in the observed system, making identity reflexively constituted. Maturana and Varela describe it as an organizational boundary that the living system produces and maintains through its own operations. Prigogine adds the thermodynamic dimension — identity is better understood as an event that occurs in the process of maintenance, not as a fact that precedes it. Kauffman conceives of it as a balance between stability and plasticity, characteristic of systems operating near the edge of chaos. Deleuze and Guattari reveal its social and political dimension: identity is produced by collective forces and, precisely because it is produced, can be contested and transformed.
Moreno's psychodrama emerges as a practical response to the same question. His thesis, that roles precede the Self, not the other way around, is structurally parallel to what the examined theories reach by entirely different routes. The role repertoire, comprising psychosomatic, psychodramatic, and social roles, allows identity to be conceived simultaneously as dynamic and as lived, as relational and as personal, as produced and as capable of transformation.
The article argues that this convergence between systems thinking and psychodrama is mutually productive. Systems thinking provides a conceptual framework within which psychodrama can be understood beyond its therapeutic context as a practice that works with identity precisely because identity is processual, relational, and dynamically maintained. Psychodrama, in turn, offers systems thinking what it lacks: a practical field in which identity is not merely described but worked with — where the abstract understanding of the processual Self takes on concrete, embodied, lived form.
Podium
Voices and Algorithms. Narrative Medicine in the Digital Age
- Author: Veselin Bosakov, vesobos@abv.bg
- Section: Подиум
- Issue: Ideology and false reality
This article examines the philosophy, theoretical evolution, and clinical application of narrative medicine as a critical humanistic counterbalance to the dominant technocratic biomedical model in the contemporary digital age. The fundamental contributions of the pioneers Dr. Rita Sharon and Prof. Arthur Kleinman are analyzed, with a detailed examination of Sharon’s three-component model (attention, cognitive processing, inclusion) and Kleinman’s ethnographic questionnaire for eliciting personal models of illness. Through the ethical and existential lens of Anatol Broyart’s essays, the thesis is advanced that there is an urgent need for intersubjectivity and shared presence in the clinical encounter. Special attention is given to the current crisis of trust, conceptualized by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han as a “crisis of storytelling,” caused by information overload, big data analysis, and algorithmization, which risk dehumanizing the care of the sick. Through an analysis of practical tools (the “Parallel Card” method) and digital forms of therapeutic writing, this article demonstrates that the symbiosis between technological progress and narrative competence is the only sustainable path to overcoming professional burnout among physicians and dehumanization in healthcare.
“The Affinity of All beauty to Death” as the Persistence of the Being of Beauty in the World: The paradox in Adorno’s Aesthetics
- Author: Sylvia Emilova Borissova, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, sylvia.borissova@ip
- Section: Подиум
- Issue: Ideology and false reality
: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory treats the beautiful with a double gesture, on the one hand categorically dethroning and demythologizing it as an axial category of philosophical aesthetics, but on the other hand, in a peculiar way reactualizing it in its marginalized qualities in the development of aesthetics. At the same time, in the process of panaestheticization of the sociocultural world, beauty exists precisely as a “convulsivity” (A. Breton) and impossibility.
The main goal of this study is to demonstrate one of the ways of preserving the beautiful as a value and cultural reality in modern times through a deeper look into the genealogy and development of the unspoken, marginalized or tabooed in the centuries-old aesthetic discourse negative-dialectical aspects of the beautiful. As well as to defend the thesis that contemporary art, culture and technocracy actually manage to “save beauty”: however, in its capacity as an impossibility or paradox.
Keywords: the beautiful, paradox, the sublime, classical and non-classical aesthetics, negative dialectics, Adorno
Tanabe between Heidegger and Nishida: The Reception of Phenomenology and the Birth of a Japanese Logic of Place
- Author: Alex Kostova, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, a.kostova@phls.uni-sofia.bg
- Section: Подиум
- Issue: Ideology and false reality
The study reconstructs the relation between Heidegger, Tanabe Hajime and Nishida Kitarō as a conceptual constellation in which the early Japanese reception of phenomenology becomes a dispute over place, the absolute and historical mediation. It traces how Tanabe introduced the early Heidegger into the Kyoto context through the themes of factical life, pre-theoretical disclosure of the world and historicity. Against this background, the paper examines Nishida’s transition from pure experience to self-awareness, the logic of place and absolute nothingness. Its central claim is that the logic of place is not a theory of immediate unity, but an attempt to think determinacy without a substantial bearer and the absolute without transforming it into a highest being. Tanabe’s critique is interpreted as a pressure placed upon Nishida’s project to account for the historical actuality of absolute nothingness through mediation, negation, the logic of species and philosophy as metanoetics. The comparison is therefore located not in a generic theme of nothingness, but in the transformation of the phenomenological problem of worldhood.
Text-Desire: Radosvet Kolarov with François Laruelle
- Author: Stanimir Panayotov, Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv, panayotov@uni-plovdiv.bg
- Section: Подиум
- Issue: Ideology and false reality
The article is focused on comparing two views on the generative relation between desire and text in the work of Radosvet Kolarov and François Laruelle, as developed in Kolarov’s book Creation and Repetition (2009), examining the question of how desire is related to generativity and autotextuality. A foundational claim in Kolarov’s thinking is that autotextuality constitutes a form of internal generativity in the author’s oeuvre, grounded in the so-called “discursive desire.” In two instances in his book, Kolarov refers to Laruelle’s Textual Machines (1976), a work in which Laruelle attacks Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction as a form of philosophical formalism, while at the same time formalizing his own project of “non-philosophy.” In this book, Laruelle offers an extensive elaboration of the notion of “libido-of-writing” and defines the concept of the “machinic,” in order to in part articulate his critique of the deconstructive method. In the article, I show that there is a spontaneous connection between the generative and the machinic, a connection that has different implications for deconstruction, yet also shares a common root of thinking with Kolarov. I further argue that Kolarov uses Laruelle heuristically in ways that are neither directly related to the attack on deconstruction nor directly connect “discursive desire” with “libido-of-writing.” In the conclusion, I attempt to explain a possible connection between Kolarov’s and Laruelle’s understandings of text, libido, and desire, proposing a solution on how the latter’s theoretical framework may contribute to the former’s theoretical foundation with regard to the problematic of autotextuality.
Keywords: autotextuallity, generativity, desire, libido, Radosvet Kolarov, François Laruelle
Care under Conditions of Segregation: Boundaries of Institutional Responsibility in Roma Ghettoized Urban Structures
- Author: Kamelia Petkova, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, kamelia.petkova@ips.bas.bg
- Section: Подиум
- Issue: Ideology and false reality
This article examines Roma ghettoized urban structures as spaces in which care functions not as a universally guaranteed public resource, but as a fragmented and unevenly distributed practice. The study is grounded in the ethics of care framework, which places at the center interdependence, vulnerability, and the distribution of responsibilities among individuals, communities, and institutions. From a theoretical perspective, the article explores the tension between individual and institutional responsibility through the concept of “moral crumple zones,” in which responsibility for structural deficits is shifted onto social actors with limited resources. In this context, Roma ghettoized neighborhoods are interpreted as spaces where institutional care is partially or entirely absent, while the everyday reproduction of the living environment is assumed by the residents themselves. The empirical analysis is based on data from a nationally representative quantitative survey conducted among respondents living in Roma neighborhoods in Bulgaria. Through the analysis of indicators related to access to infrastructure, health and educational services, economic activity, and social interactions, the study reveals structural deficits of care and an uneven distribution of responsibility. The findings demonstrate that the lack of basic infrastructure, limited access to services, and high levels of economic dependency create conditions in which care is reduced to individual and community survival strategies. The article argues that segregation can be understood as a form of institutional withdrawal from care, leading to the persistent reproduction of social exclusion. In this sense, rethinking care as a public and collective responsibility emerges as a key condition for overcoming structural inequalities in the contemporary city.
Keywords: ethics of care; social segregation; institutional responsibility; Roma ghettoized urban structures; social exclusion.
Minima moralia
Zarathustra-NIietzsche: a romanticization through philosophical poiesis as regards the heroic epic
- Author: Ivaylo Iliev Lazarov, Varna Free University “Tchernorizets Hrabar”, filosofivo@abv.bg
- Section: Minima moralia
- Issue: Ideology and false reality
This paper reveals a brief author’s perspective into the philosophical prophetism of Zarathustra-Nietzsche. Is it possible that Nietzsche’s romanticized image of the prophet is more authentic than the one presented by tradition? In the case of a book that presents a confession before becoming a sermon – yes, because it is not a living prophet who remains understood and loved by the crowd. Thus, not so much realistically and historically, as romantically and like a poiesis, i.e. simultaneously lyrically and epically, by Nietzsche, with the means of aphoristic philosophical confession, we are given the chance to see the world through the inner sense and contemplation of Zarathustra himself, and not by means of what chroniclers have superficially and externally thrown up as information about him over the centuries, in order to prove useful to people. In general, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” is a book of a different modality: for Zarathustra-Nietzsche and sages like him, the question of how the tradition is possible is always more important, rather than what it represents in its concrete-empirical content. That is why “Zarathustra’s self-overcoming as a model of humanity’s self-overcoming in general – in favor of the superman” – this is what truly interests the author and his hero, reinventing himself in the face of his hero. The fully conscious authentic story of Zarathustra’s devotion to truth in a fallen world conquered by Ahriman was told by Nietzsche not in his timely manner, that means as a book addressed not to that people there and then, but from here-and-now, in the most intimate revelation for each one oneself – not for anyone, but as “a book for everyone and no one”. Ahriman is against us, in order to overthrow the old man through the superman, and not to renew him with continuity. For this we need a prophet, but one who is noted as a philosopher, a free seeker of God, not as a dogmatic preacher: “The worst (in the world – I.L.) is necessary for the best of the superman”. Therefore, already from the hierarchy of his beyond-timely spiritual nobility, Zarathustra-Nietzsche proclaims: “The wise must be hard and harsh towards himself and towards others”.
Announcement
The Macedonian Question until World War I
- Author: Mira Koeva, student, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, mirakoeva05@gmail.com
- Section: Анонс
- Issue: Ideology and false reality
The present article examines the Macedonian Question as a key aspect of Bulgarian national policy from the Liberation of Bulgaria to the First World War. It traces the development of Bulgaria’s relations with its neighboring states, with particular emphasis on Serbia and Greece, whose political and territorial interests intersected in Macedonia. The article analyzes the armed struggles for the liberation of Macedonia, including the Kresna–Razlog Uprising and the Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising, as well as the diplomatic efforts that led to the establishment of the Balkan League and the factors that determined its formation. Particular attention is paid to Bulgaria’s foreign policy with regard to the Macedonian Question and its Balkan neighbors, as well as to the long-term consequences of the state policy pursued for the development of the issue.
Keywords: Macedonia, Macedonian Question, Kresna–Razlog Uprising, Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising