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

THE YOUNG BOSNIAN 19

by an idealist faith in the power of intuition and imagination and the need for the individual to strive to achieve a spiritual purity in the face of the smug materjalism of the elder generation.

Written in a polemical style, “Aesthetic Contemplations,” despite the many digressions and repetitions that can confuse the reader, impresses by its force and the strength of feeling revealed. Of civilization Mitrinovic wrote:?°

Mankind in civilization is fallen. We are insulted, battered, soiled and deformed by the soullessly soulless and bestially inhuman living that shakes the earth, by the tumult and shrieking, the roar and clamour which deafens us, and we are beaten black and blue with their ‘dread-noughts’ and their stock exchanges. We desire Humanity, we who cry to God that we are sick with the lawlessness of the powerful and battered by the misfortune that we live in this shameless today.

The vehemence of his opposition to bourgeois decadence and philistinism rivals that of Sorel and Nietzsche.

Monsters have seized power on earth and one must live with disgust. And we hate and despise the truths and beauties that are powerless and without will to overthrow the dread rule of inhumanity that destroys man’s honour and profanes his ideal. People suffer from the lawlessness of state power, of ecclesiastical power, and the evil multitude of forces that have arisen against man and who tirelessly plunge the earth into disaster.

His revulsion against bourgeois society was an essentially moral one. Whilst recognising the existence of material deprivation and poverty and the abuses of power and privilege, it was the moral and cultural degradation of humanity that hurt most deeply. “We are accursed and cast into the dread depths of senselessness and ineffectuality.”

The sense of impotence to which so many give way was made worse by the realisation that there was no simple answer to the plight of humanity, no single truth which one could follow:

Nothing on earth, is clear to its utmost profundity. To the more refined intelligence things are ever more obscure ... There is no single truth. There are as many truths as there are consciousnesses certain that they possess the truth within them.

Even so, it was imperative to commit oneself to change and the transcendence of the bankrupt order of the present. There was a need to search for a new way of living and relating, to “dedicate ourselves to a new star with