164
PARTISAN REVIEW
The classifying intent is totalitarian, aimed at the entire range
of ideas and existence. Nothing ornery, clumsy, crass should be allowed
to slip through the meshes of the postulated scheme. Yet the scheme
is theoretical and encyclopedic, rather than practical and utopian:
all Bense's sympathies go out to Leibniz, and his methodology as
well as his final vision of a
harmonia mundi
are, with slight qualifi–
cations, those of the master. The impetus of the logico-mathematical
method, viewed as a universal calculus and raised to the power of
obsession; the notion of cosmic composition, according to which the
persistence of warring elements is not only regretted but actually
disallowed; the profound optimism in the matter of
ends)
so naive
yet, at the same time, so magnificent in its several features-all these
concerns, cardinal in the Leibnizian system, are echoed and much
more than merely echoed by the younger man.
But history, sly as ever, has played its expected trick on the
philosopher who would see it in its continuities and cumulations only.
Though Bense was able, in a sense, to keep step with the vast increase
of knowledge since Leibniz's day and to assimilate it largely and
with acumen to his scheme, that knowledge, by its very nature which
is destructive, has introduced into the scheme the agencies of its un–
doing. Experience, today more than ever, is radically discontinuous;
and the wish to send through every phase of it a single current of
thought might well be declared hopeless. Not only the realms of na–
ture and artifact-of whose reconciliation, be it said, even Mr. Bense
despairs-but equally those of intellectual theory and
R ealpolitik)
of
moral norm and socio-economic contingence have shed the last trace
of uneasy association and can now be seen, by all those who have
eyes to see, in their utter apartness. While an Enlightenment thinker
like Leibniz may be pardoned for being unaware of such disjunctions,
or for failing to acknowledge them (in effect, he did acknowledge
them more than is commonly realized, witness his correspondence–
but that is a different story), intellectual innocence of this sort,
though presented
bona fide)
is scarcely tolerable in a contemporary
philosopher.
Yet Max Bense, for all his stupendous learning, his terrible up–
to-dateness, is at bottom an innocent; and his innocence exceeds that
of Leibniz to the degree, exactly, in which the history of the past two
and a half centuries has exposed old strains of guilt and accumulated
