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

102 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

phenomenon as a natural consequence of Mitrinovié’s group as an “esoteric school’:

turning the attention of pupils to some public work is an absolute necessity if the group is not to sink into obscure self-regarding imactivities. But at the same time, when the public undertaking has been brought to some success it must be dropped; otherwise it becomes a society for some special study or work which is not what it was formed for. And then the teacher himself would lose his central importance and his initiative.?

The implication in this analysis is that Mitrinovi¢ withdrew his support from public initiatives and redirected the energies of his associates from fear of losing his pre-eminent place as their teacher and guide. It is in fact true that he never allowed those who worked closely with him to become too deeply involved in any one public initiative. However, amongst those who suffered and were frustrated by his apparent whims and changes, there were some who on reflection came to the view that this mirrored his concern to stop them becoming blinkered and bogged down, overly committed to one single project or aspect of his holistic philosophy and programme and thereby losing sight of the wider perspective. He had a great fear of things becoming institutionalised and ‘fossilised.’ Initiatives must be ever-changing, in a continuous approach towards the truth. An endless process which he expressed in the notion of ‘Infinale.’ Moreover, as he had written in “Aesthetic Contemplations” so many years before, he considered the truth to be many sided. Consequently his personal method consisted in “embracing the whole horizon of truths, no matter how disparate and paradoxical, and thus, through casting furthest and encompassing most, coming closest to the truth and aiming closest to the centre.” This personal method was reflected in his approach to communicating with disparate audiences beyond his own circle of friends and co-workers. Each public venture expressed a partial truth and insight but not the whole. Therefore a variety of schemes and enterprises were called for, each embodying a dimension of the whole. Moreover, if truth was many sided, then different potential audiences and constituencies required different messages and different channels for the communication of such messages.

All this helps to explain what still remains something of a puzzle—the way in which Mitrinovic would launch new public ventures, only to apparently abandon them for some other enterprise when it seemed that they were about to ‘take off.’ Further light is cast on the question, however, when one considers the fact that throughout the 1930s his sense of urgency about the crisis facing the international system and his fear of an impending world