A Spiritual Unity of Europe and the Yugoslav Politics of Knowledge in the Interwar Period: A Philosophical Enhancement of the ‘Slavic Spirit’

Abstract

In 1863, Jovan Andrejević Joles, a physician and anatomist, published a series of 20 articles under the common title Aesthetic excerpts in the journal Danica, based in Novi Sad, which was at that time a part of the Habsburg Monarchy. Andrejević’s choice of translated excerpts from writings on aesthetics was quite unusual, especially considering the publication standards of journals at the time. The temporal scope of these texts was particularly broad. The parts concerning historical beginnings are rooted in Aristotle’s Poetics, while the final articles comprise the most important aesthetics projects of Andrejević’s contemporaries, such as Friedrich Theodor Vischer. Andrejević explained the special importance of this compendium in practical terms. He compiled the Aesthetic excerpts guided by the idea that Serbian culture needed appropriate philosophical foundations upon which its future development could be based. Furthermore, Andrejević explicitly emphasized that, in the case of Serbian as well as other Slavic peoples, loss of state sovereignty in the early modern period resulted in a lack of creativity in those cultural forms which precede philosophical thinking. Given that these cultures could not rely on inherited national poetics or on any significant critical reception of previous cultural achievements, Andrejević was convinced that appropriate theoretical support could be found precisely in those aesthetic theories with a strongly general, and therefore international, character. These theories are considered to have no direct connection to any particular, clearly defined culture.