Word: reasons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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...
...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...
However, it seems clear to me that it's not reason that has failed, but rather our commitment...
...better way to distill student opinion into a single assembly would be to give individual, College-recognized student groups a seat on the council. It would still be an imperfect way to garner student opinion, but almost certainly more accurate than the current council structure. There is no logical reason why council representation should be assigned geographically...