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THEODORE KISIEL
The year 1923 was a particularly bad one, an annus terribilis, for postwar Germany, in which the full punitive effects of the Versailles Treaty came to catastrophic fruition in the Weimar Republic. Heidegger’s rhetorical-phenomenological concept of the political takes shape against the historical backdrop of a viciously internescine party politics turned more rabid in its rhetoric by the increasingly rampant inflation brought on by the Weimar parliamentary government’s fiscal policies to fund the general strike in the Ruhr industrial region after its occupation by French army units. It is out of this political and economic turmoil that the Munich-based Nazi party, led by its chief rhetorician Adolf Hitler, first came to national prominence, as it decided to translate its talk into action by way of a putsch. The ensuing trial for treason served only to place Hitler indelibly in the national spotlight, and beyond.
Far from coincidentally, Heidegger at this time was busy developing his hermeneutical and protopractical ontology of Dasein by way of a wholesale confrontation of the phenomenological and practical Aristotle. Aristotle’s several definitions of man are being interpreted in close conjunction with his practical works, including his Rhetoric and Politics. The three Aristotelian definitions of the living being called “human” are in fact understood as equally primordial: a living being that has and is had by speech (logon echein understood as middle voiced); a political life (zōon politikon) that expresses itself by speaking in and for community in concert with others; and a practical being-in-the-world whose action is pervaded by speech. The human being both occupies the world and is occupied
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