Your Magnificence Rector of St. Kliment Ohridski University, my learned colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, I am overwhelmed by your generosity. I accept your distinction with joy and gratitude, proud to be associated with one of the most venerable and distinguished temples of sciences and humanities in Europe – indeed, in the civilized world.
I suppose that the honour has been bestowed not on me but on the issue to which I tried hard to dedicate my thought and work – the chances of morality in our world, a confused world, desperately seeking solutions to its growing troubles and unsure where to find and how to handle them.
For many centuries philosophers tried to resolve the worrisome conflict between the interests of self-preservation and the ethical command to love your neighbour. That conflict, first opened by Cain’s angry demand to explain why, if at all, he should be his brother’s keeper (the question from which, as Emmanuel Levinas suggests, all immorality began), seemed to have no satisfactory solution: the pursuit of self-interest and taking the responsibility for integrity, dignity, and the welfare of other humans seemed to be at odds, and the very fact that ever new texts of the ultimate peace treaty between them were being composed by successive generations of philosophers bore an oblique testimony to the hopelessness of the search for their reconciliation.