into his counter-esssence. Therefore we call the πόλις, wherein the Being of man in its relation to beings as a whole has gathered itself, the essential abode of historical man. Each πολιτικόν, everything "political," is always only an effect of the πόλις, i.e., of the πολιτεία. The essence of the πόλις, i.e., the πολιτεία, is not itself determined or determinable "politically." The πόλις is just as little something "political" as space itself is something spatial. The πόλις itself is only the pole of πέλειν, the way the Being of beings, in its disclosure and concealment, disposes for itself a "where" in which the history of a human race is gathered. Because the Greeks are the utterly unpolitical people, unpolitical by essence, because their humanity is primordially and exclusively determined from Being itself, i.e., from ἀλήθεια, therefore only the Greeks could, and precisely had to, found the πόλις, found abodes for the gathering and conserving of ἀλήθεια.
The thoughtless occupation of "historiographical research" mixes together essentially different epochs and civilizations of Western history, the Greek, Roman, medieval, modern, and contemporary in a single historiographical mash, and so it attains precisely the opposite of what it is supposed to. It intends to be a historical meditation on our own historical destiny. But meditation never arises from thoughtlessness. Historiographical research never discloses history, because such research is always attended by an opinion about history, an unthought one, a so-called obvious one, which it would like to confirm by this very research and in so doing only rigidifies the unthought obviousness.
Just as impossible as is an interpretation of the πόλις on the basis of the modern state or the Roman res publica, so is an interpretation of δίκη on the basis of the modern concept of justice and the Roman iustitia. Δίκη, understood as the order which ordains, i.e., assigns, to humanity its relations and comportment, takes its essence from a relation to ἀλήθεια, but δίκη is not determined by the πόλις or on the basis of a relation to the πόλις.
Every actual πόλις occurs historically on earth ἐνθάδε—here. Man's "course of life" runs through a circuit that is locally and temporally delimited and is a path within this circuit, a περίοδος, and indeed one that is θανατοφόρος, mortal, bearing death and therefore leading to death. Death brings the present course to a close, but it is not the end of the Being of a man. Death initiates a transition from the here, ἐνθάδε, to the there, ἐχεῖ. This transition is the beginning of a journey which itself again comes to a close in a transition to a new περίοδος θανατοφόρος. The question to raise is therefore, what would a person's surroundings be, what would remain for him, after he has brought to a close the present mortal course here on earth?
In Christian thought, this is the question of the "beyond." For many reasons, the danger of a conscious or even unconscious Christian interpretation