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

20 | LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIĆ

a new and redeemed salutary ideal, to take wing and again fly off into the unattainable.” But one could not look to anyone else to break the fetters of the existing order, to take one to the new realm:

No one can lead anyone there to that place, none guide. One reaches it only on one’s own. Only he can attain this all-healing spring who finds the path within himself, for whom the gentle star has desired that he be saved.

And yet there were people, minute in number and perhaps insignificant in the eyes of the world, who were aware that “all truths are tangled in the most contradictory mutual suppositions,’ who could appreciate and embrace all the different views of the world, of right and wrong, and who possessed a sense of an alternative order based on a new way of seeing and being—the realisation that “truths are not right or wrong, but good or evil.”

The truth of these of the smallest minority lies not in whether anything is or is not, but in whether it should be or should not be. The truth of truth consists in its perfection of our moral beauty, in its good action, in its value for good will. Truth is goodness, the beauty of the soul. What is truthful is what makes the soul better and more beautiful, the truth is what we wish... The truth or untruth of a thing depends on our will . . . The will is the endlessly powerful creator of ideas. The ideal is the highest truth . . .

It was the responsibility of this small minority of individuals to create a new philosophy for living, as a necessary preparation for the construction of a new age, an age of ‘all-human humanity’.

We need to create a revision of values according to the criterion demanded by the soul and to build a synthesis of the whole of knowledge, creating a new philosophy, better than yesterday’s and superior to any former philosophy, which will give justice to the soul.

But it was not sufficient merely to create a new philosophy, a new scheme of values. If “the truth or untruth of a thing depends on our will” it was necessary to live out one’s ideals in public and private life. The transcendence of the old and the creation of the new must be “brought to life in one’s feelings and actions.” People did not need new theories of knowledge, “but the power to bring to life the Ideal and cast down oppression . . . We desire a philosophy of practice, a wisdom of living.”

In calling upon all those of tomorrow who live in today to join in this task, Mitrinovic allotted a special role to the creative artist. He demanded the democratization of art: the breaking down of divisions between disciplines