relation is valid for the πόλις in the first instance because it is the site in which all beings and all relational comportment toward beings is gathered. It is the "pole" among all beings and for all beings in their being. Yet being for the Greeks means πέλειν. If this is the case. then Plato is saying nothing other than the fact that everything must be determined in terms of the "political," and that the "political" has unconditional priority. Plato's thinking is thus not so "removed from life" at all, but entirely modern.
Yet to think this would merely be the flipside of the said misinterpretation of Plato, and a further error. The doctrine of the unconditional priority of the political on the one hand, and on the other hand the conception of the πόλις as the ground that is worthy of question and as the site of beings, are separated from one another by an abyss. One therefore does no service either to contemporary political thought or to the Greeks if one mixes together, in the overenthusiasm of the "scientific approach," everything that stands by itself in its own essence and in its specific historical uniqueness. One does no service whatsoever to our knowledge and evaluation of the historical singularity of National Socialism if one now interprets the Greek world in such a way as to say that the Greeks were all already "National Socialists. " We. in the present instance. are not concerned with the "political." but with the essence of the πόλις and. more precisely, the essential realm in terms of which it is determined. that is. from out of which and in accordance with which it must remain what is worthy of question for the Greeks. The very fact that the poet Sophocles speaks of the relationship of human beings to the πόλις, and does so in the context of this telling of the δεινόν, already points to the decisiveness with which the πόλις experienced as the site and midst of beings.
§15. Continued explication of the essence of the πόλις
According to the word of this poetizing. the πόλις itself conceals within it the possibility of a counterturning abode therein ὑψίπολις, towering high above the site; ἄπολις, forfeiting the site. The πόλις is here not some indifferent space that in turn admits of the empty possibilities of "towering high" and of downfall; rather, it is the essence of the πόλις to thrust one into excess and to tear one into downfall, and in such a way that the human being is destined and fitted into both these counterturning possibilities and thus must be these two possibilities themselves. Human beings do not "have" these possibilities in addition and extrinsic to themselves, rather their essence consists in being those who, in ascending within the site of their essence, are at the same time without site. To be in such a way, however, means to be determined in essence by the unhomely, to be counterturning.