Creative critique and anthropo-philosophy

bent on gathering knowledge for future practical services, his idea was a great one.

“When civilisation is in danger and society in transition, might there not be a House recruited from the best intellects in the country with functions similar (mutatis mutandis) to those of Bacon’s fancy?

“A House devoid of politics, concerned rather with synthesising existing knowledge, with a sustained appraisement of the progress of knowledge, and continuous concern with its bearing upon social readjustments. It is not to be pictured as composed of scientific authorities alone. It would rather be an intellectual exchange where thought would go ahead of immediate problems.

‘I believe I might convince you that the functions of such a House, in days such as ours, might well be real.’

And real they might well be if such a House contained representatives of all the main aspects of culture—priests and clergy, scientists, artists from every branch of art, doctors, psychologists, teachers and professors—who might together give guidance on those profound problems of human life and society which are not simply within the competence of the ordinary citizen as such to judge upon, unless helped by those with a background of study and practice of the whole human inheritance of wisdom, knowledge and artistic genius.

The third reference of the name New Atlantis is to the modern Atlantic World, which Dimitrije Mitrinovié described as ‘the specific modern scientific world of the European and American West, the world of modern technological civilisation and also the culture background of the West with the ancestral or genesic background of the individualist psychology and therefore of Christian axiology or of Christianity as the essence of our culture’. And he considered both Russia and India as woven into the Western web of thought.

The distinctive characteristic of this world is our modern critical cognisance which turns its scorching light upon all things and experiences, and even, as Kant did in the Critique of Pure Reason, upon the possibility of reason. “The transcendental philosopher’, he writes, ‘in no way pretends to explain the possibility of things, but is content to set upon a firm basis that knowledge by which the possibility of the possibility of experience is conceived.’

After such critical examination, not only of the objects of knowledge but even of the working of reason itself, it is no longer

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