Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

THE FINAL YEARS 183

contains crimes that are now beyond the reach of our best endeavours . . . these crimes fade out of our life the moment we feel that no temptation, no power on earth, could ever induce us to commit the like again.”® This possibility and need to redeem and change the past by re-living and reappropriating it, Mitrinovic called “Eukronia.’ As an example of this he often quoted Rudolf Eucken, who, when he dealt with the major problems of philosophy, always started by giving the history of the problem up to date, and then the re-assessment which he considered necessary to bring the problem forward into the future.

Mitrinovié believed, as he wrote in New Britain, that “It is the very goal and meaning of human evolution that our race should become an individuated Collective, a functionally articulated organism, of interiorised, individuated, illuminated, self-shining persons.”® This meant that all possible relationships should be conceived and worked out, not only in active life but also in the realm of thought and art. Amongst his notions was the idea of expressing one work of art in a different art form, like painting a piece of music, writing a portrait. As early as 1913, in Bosanska Vila, he had written, “We require only a philosophy that sings its own system, a plasticity that is a symphony, a portrait that is a novel; we need great music that is a performed religion, a poetry that is metaphysics, a dancing that is a philosophical thesis and acting that is a social revolution.”!° Another of his ideas was the writing of a new kind of encyclopaedia in which the essay under each topic would be written from many different points of view. Thus, a tree might be described from the point of view of a botanist, a woodworker, a painter, a poet, and so on. The tree would thus be described in all its possible relationships to human beings and to the rest of nature. There was a need to discover new relationships between aspects of life previously considered separate and incompatible. It was on the basis of such efforts that new values, new meaning and purpose for life would emerge. It was to this work of discovering and creating new relationships between, for example, religion, philosophy, science and the arts, and the attempt to apply the resulting insights to enrich human life that Mitrinovi¢ gave the name ‘Creative Critique.’

This work was not by any means meant as a leisure occupation for an élite or for gifted or clever persons only. He believed that it was necessary for all those engaged in philosophy, the sciences and the arts to convey to ordinary persons their own subjective and imaginative experience of their work and the pleasure and excitement which they derived from it, so that the human inheritance could be appreciated by all, and that everyone could