I don't remember ever being struck so utterly speechless as when over a year ago, Christian Wiese, then Dean, wrote to ask if I'd agree to be considered by his colleagues for an honorary degree in religious philosophy at the Faculty of Protestant Theology of the Goethe University. It wasn't shock, as when receiving exceptionally good or bad news, and it was more than being overwhelmingly moved, which, of course, I was. It was a more meaningful loss for words that had less to do with the intensity of what I felt than with the mixture of contrasting feelings I was experiencing.
Philosophers are not accustomed to being rendered speechless. It took me several months to better articulate my loss for words. I mention this not to speak of pride or humility as such, but of how they joltingly combined to rob me of words. For my speechlessness struck me as more philosophically significant than the mixture of specific feelings to which it owed.
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