In the Cold Light of Reason

Reading Gnter Grass's recent Nobel Lecture I was struck by two things: it's rather disjointed--like it was written in a hurry--and it's wrong in a predictable way. The triteness of it took me by surprise. I haven't read any of Grass's books, not even The Tin Drum (heck, I haven't even seen the movie), but it was my understanding that he was one of the best living writers and that his Nobel Prize for literature was long overdue. Maybe so, but his Nobel Lecture strikes me as the sort of thing that wouldn't command much attention if delivered from any other venue.

In his lecture, Grass seems to be going through the usual motions: anecdotes from the history of literature, references to his youth, material from his own novels, an armchair liberal's criticism of the dehumanizing influence of modern science and the free market, insinuations that the Nobel Prize is really not such a big deal and a conclusion that portrays literature as a heroic struggle for the future of the human race. None of this is very original, and in this case it does not gel together very well. Past Nobel Lectures like Saramago's, Garcia Marquez's and Faulkner's have done many of these things better and more coherently. But originality and style are minor points. It's the message that bothers me, commonplace as it is.

According to Grass, "literature has an explosive quality at its root, though the explosions literature releases have a delayed-action effect...How long did it take the European Enlightenment from Montaigne to Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Lessing and Lichtenberg to introduce a flicker of reason into the dark corners of scholasticism?...But when the light finally did brighten things up, it turned out to be the light of cold reason, limited to the technically doable, to economic and social progress, a reason that claimed to be enlightened but that merely drummed a reason-based jargon (which amounted to instructions for progress at all costs)."

To begin with, it's a gross misconception to claim that the Enlightenment was the work of writers. Writers might have advertised and propagated it, but the Enlightenment, like every single major transformation in history, was the work of scientists. It was the work of Descartes and Galileo and Newton and Leibniz and various French mathematicians whose last names begin with "L" (Laplace and Lagrange come to mind). It was they who showed that the "cold reason" of a science anchored in mathematics was capable of describing and predicting the workings of the universe with a precision previously undreamed-of. It was their success that made the wooly scholarship of the Scholastics and their intractable debates about the concrete existence of general categories seem ridiculous and pointless. The Enlightenment was, above all, the triumph of reasoning over scholarship.

Literature alone does not change the world, because it does not produce new knowledge. Human beings and their passions have not changed since the time of the Sumerians. Literature may apply and interpret the new knowledge but only science can produce it. Men of letters like Kant and Voltaire were commentators on a radical change in the way the West thought about humans and their world. Their influence was significant but the credit for initiating change does not lie with them.

Yet what I find most questionable in Grass's interpretation of history is the very old and very false notion that our current problems are the legacy of the Enlightenment, that they are the fault of "cold reason," and that somehow the program of the Enlightenment has proven a failure. We've heard this before, from Romantics like Goethe and Blake and even from contemporaries of the Enlightenment like Rousseau. We've heard it from the extreme right (from Goebbels, for instance, and from Heidegger, who championed Nazism) and from the left (from Sartre and neo-Marxists like Adorno and Habermas). We've heard it from the post-structuralists and indeed from all sorts of intellectuals whose vanity has convinced them that because their beliefs did not square with reason then reason was at fault.

However, it seems clear to me that it's not reason that has failed, but rather our commitment to it.

It was not reason that led to Hitler's Romantic philosophy of "blood and fatherland." It's not reason that feeds myriad contending nationalisms. It's not reason that justifies the visceral greed of the world's exploiters. It's not reason that leads a people to idolize and deify dictators.

It's not reason that would have us make a little more money rather than preserve the world from environmental disaster. It's not reason that prevents compromise between political opponents or that fuels religious wars in Ireland or Sudan. It's not reason that denies access to birth control to the world's poorest women on religious grounds or that aggravates the problem of overpopulation with each day that passes.

And it's not reason that allows the famed to think themselves champions of the poor because they give speeches before audiences in Stockholm.

Alejandro Jenkins '01 is a physics and math concentrator in Currier House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.