Doctor of Laws (honoris causa)

Professor Ronald Aronson

Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, Deputy Vice Chancellors, Honoured Guests, Families and Well Wishers and most especially Assembled Graduates of the University of Natal.

“Philosophy begins with love”. In the Republic Plato focuses on “the good” as philosophy's central principle, arguing in the first dialogue that “the good” - reason's motivation and ultimate destination - is also the real object of all love. “Love for the good”, then, is platonic philosophy's motivation, its guiding principle, and its final destination.

These words were written by our honorary graduate, Ronald Aronson, a scholar whose outstanding academic accomplishments alone would merit his honorary-status today. He wrote them as an introduction to a book published at the end of the 1980s. This book was written as a kind of love letter to and about our country at a time when South Africa was enmeshed in Apartheid. Although he has been awarded high academic honours before - for his 8 books of analyses of the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, for work on Albert Campus, on critical engagements with historical materialism, and on the “Dialectics of Disaster”, from the Holocaust to Stalin to Vietnam - we are honouring Ronald Aronson today for both this impressive and substantial scholarship and for his life as an activist or, what he calls, “a practicing” philosopher.

In fact we are honouring a lover: a lover of our country and its possibilities; a lover of dignity and potential of all world citizens; a lover of public debate and knowledge dissemination; a lover of teaching and of the energy and passion of dedicated learners; a lover whose writings and engagements on a range of contemporary issues has taken his work outside of University libraries and lecture halls and into the pages of world circulated newspapers; a lover of our potential to love, to “search for the good”, and to engage in reasoning, the essence of our humanity.

Ronald Aronson’s own tie with South Africa started not with love, but with hostility toward the social system that spilled over to all things South African. Like so many others outside of South Africa during the Apartheid era he could originally relate to this country only by keeping himself distant. Already a distinguished professor at Wayne State University in Detroit Michigan, USA in the late 1980s, Ronald Aronson’s life seemed remote from this society’s. Once he had made the decision to come here, to lecture on key issues of philosophical and political debate - particularly in his own areas of world recognized scholarship - once he had met with and engaged with a vast range of South Africans from ordinary students in his classes, to the student political activists of the day, to economists, teachers, musicians, and of course his academic colleagues, his emotional, intellectual and political love relationship with South Africa began.

Since his fist visit here his relationship with this University has grown and been sustained by his considerable energy and intellectual effort. Over the last 15 years he has made a selfless and significant contribution to student exchanges between the

USA and the University of Natal: to the development of new teaching, curricula and publication initiatives at this University and to the forging of links with adult learning initiatives in KwaZulu-Natal by linking these to similar institutions in the USA. Within North America he has arranged a series of courses on South Africa as well as brought together many local scholars in the human sciences with their American counterparts. He has served as an examiner for doctoral theses of students here and served on the advisory panel of the University journal THEORIA, helping to ensure its world wide dissemination and readership.

We are not the first to honour you with an award, Professor Aronson, but perhaps we are the first University to use the word “love” in our oration. Your presence here today signifies our loving response to your affair with us. It also signifies our commitment to “the good” - to the use of our minds and energies towards reasoning and engaged practices. By honouring you we are honouring those who link University communities and graduates of these communities (such as the women and men whose graduation we celebrate here tonight), to the world beyond the University space, an engagement exemplified in your own life.

Chancellor, I have the honour to present for the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa, at our University, Ronald Aronson.