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

THE YOUNG BOSNIAN 23

acknowledged the many differences that existed between the races, classes and nationalities of the world. It recognised the idea that he had explored in “Aesthetic Contemplations” that there was no single truth, that there were as many truths as there were consciousnesses certain that they possessed the truth. It was his answer to what he described in “Aesthetic Contemplations” as “the yearning of the spirit for that very real awareness, for that allcomprehending thought, for that all-embracing theory.”

In “Aesthetic Contemplations” he argued strongly for the uniting of theory and action, and a major concern of his life was with the translation of his vision into the realm of practice, at least on a small experimental scale. Thus, in the 1930s especially, he worked intensively with groups of individuals of different ideas and persuasions, seeking to create a functional order in microcosm in which the differences between people were not suppressed at the cost of individual freedom but were recognised and acknowledged, and also transcended within the context of the functional ordering of the group life as a whole.

A major component of the group life with which Mitrinovi¢ was involved in the 1930s was the training of the members for a new integrating social function which he called “senate.” In essence senators were to act as the intervening link between the individual and humanity as a whole, between the single cell and the whole organism. Senators were those who possessed the ability to view human problems and concerns in the context of the needs of the whole of humanity. Their function was to represent the interests of humanity to those with whom they came into contact. The germ of this idea was expressed in “Aesthetic Contemplations” in his description of that minority “whose gaze embraces the circles of all points of view and unites them all,” those for whom “all-embracingness is their passion, the harmonisation and distillation of chaos, the formation of the formless, the putting together of the sundered, the organisation of the disorganised, the concentration of the dispersed,” those who “cast furthest and encompass most, come closest to truth and aim closest to the centre.”

In later years Mitrinovi¢ depicted the stance that he adopted towards the world by the maxim “mentally scepticism, spiritually affirmation.” This is an apt description of the impression conveyed by “Aesthetic Contemplations.” On the one hand it is pervaded by a sense of idealistic optimism, especially in passages such as: