a Greek loquacity that places a primacy on the political, what is being situated ontologically is in fact a rhetorical politics and political rhetoric of an everydayness in its moments of crisis. For the early Heidegger, the more ontological Greek Urtext of political philosophy is Aristotle’s Rhetoric and not Plato’s Republic, which will play a different role on a later, more fateful occasion of his development of a more metontological concept of the political. At this early stage of Heidegger’s political development, the ethos of Greek civic discourse is held up as a paradigm in counterpoint to the violence-prone, propaganda-ridden speech community of the party politics practiced in the Weimar Republic, and each will serve as a phenomenological example contributing to the formal ontological structure of the historical “interpretedness” of the “everydayness of being-with-one-another.” This interpretedness or “spokenness,” the present perfect apriori (SZ 85: that is, “already having been interpreted” by a particular tradition of “usage”) of the discursive space called the everyday world of publicity, determines the temporally particular ethos of the middle-voiced milieu from which the rhetorical politics of a time takes its cues.
The text of this “Ruhr-Rede” was initially drafted at the end of 1923, still near the peak of the Ruhr crisis, and is still marked by the militant and territorial rhetoric of this dramatic year.3 But it was not delivered in its final form until the end of 1924 in several cities of the Rhine-Ruhr valley, most notably in Cologne with Max Scheler as host. In its structure and movement, the text resembles the well-known later talk marking the turn to the later Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth” (1930–43). The uniqueness of the 1924 talk is however its quick dispatch of judgment in the usual sense of a declarative (apophantic) statement, traditionally the locus of truth as correspondence through the scientific demonstration that “lets something be seen” as it is, in order to get to the more practical and crucial kinds of judgment (krinein) at issue or in abeyance in everyday speech situations. And the everyday speech situation quickly takes us to the public space of the polis, which will soon be identified with the veritable “clearing of be-ing” that is disclosive of a linguistically developed people, of Greek Da-sein, of German Da-sein (so already in SS 1924).
The everyday speech situation generates practical judgments that are far more varied and richer than the incipient theoretical judgment of declarative sentences. Its prejudicative possibilities, not always reducible to mere preludes to judgment, include requests, wishes, questions, imperatives, exclamatories, pregnant pauses, and other such punctuations,
3. Here I have followed, but with numerous modifications, the more detailed elaboration of Heidegger’s rhetorical-phenomenological concept of the political found in Theodore Kisiel, “Situating Rhetorical Politics in Heidegger’s Protopractical Ontology (1923–1925: The French Occupy the Ruhr),” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8 (2000): 185–208. Another version under the same title is to be found in Existentia 9 (1999): 11–30.