MAX BENSE
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found in modern existence and those which vex recent science, the
jumps in the one corresponding to those in the other? The challenge
accepted, one might start with an analysis of the jumps; to be fol–
lowed, in due course, by a patient search for the missing links. Work–
ing from the individual consciousness-raw experience-the inquirer
would be led to the descriptions of that consciousness by Heidegger
and Jaspers; from there to Husserl, Brentano, Bolzano and, finally,
Descartes-or, working downward, in terms of rigor, to the French
Existentialists, Kafka, Benn, and the rest. Starting from the opposite
end-high abstraction-he might begin with the great mathema–
ticians and physicists of today, pass through Wittgenstein, Whitehead,
Russell, Mach, tack about toward Peirce and Boole, and finally come
to rest once more on Descartes. A theoretical mid-point would be
furnished by Leibniz: the hub from which all the relevant spokes can
be seen to radiate; the man to whose gaze, constant and comprehen–
sive, existence disclosed its ossature and philosophical method its less
tangible secrets.
Though unsupported by fact, this is a plausible reconstruction
of the young philosopher's motives and strategies. The program, gigan–
tic in scope, was bound to call forth Mr. Bense's best powers: but
perhaps he would have fared better, after all, had his literary sensi–
bilities been less highly developed and his gifts as a writer meaner.
Fared better, that is to say, as a theorist of the technological age;
for as a fundamental critic of literature-its genres and methods, its
resources and limits-Bense has no equal today. Nor would those
analyses
be
what they are without the delicious distortions wrought
by the doctrine, whose presence, if for that reason alone, it would
be absurd to deplore.
But the doctrine, in its turn, receives no aid from Mr. Bense's
forays into literature, only discredit. The uniform light, so cool and
precise, which here illuminates page after page, and tract after tract,
though not meant to deceive is deceptive: by equalizing all values
within its scope it would make us forget the necessary bounds that
define every field of projection.
An
illusion of all-inclusiveness, of in–
finitude arises but cannot last. Bense belongs with those authors–
Gide is another-the very sweep of whose floodlight directs our atten–
tion to the shadows beyond. Since his unrelieved luminosity disallows
