none of which are immediately subject to the hyperjudgment: true or false. Or better, they point to a much more original, comprehensive, and tacit sense of what it means to be true. On the ordinary everyday level, logos does not mean judgment, concept, or even reason, but simply speech, which includes every form of discursivity and articulation, even the nonverbal kinds, in actions that “speak louder than words” (for example, passive versus active resistance, or a general strike). The basic aim of everyday natural discourse, speaking to and with one another, accordingly listening to one another, is not knowledge but understanding, hermeneia, simply put: getting along together, living in accord, the understanding (Verständigung) of concord. The investigation of this spectrum of phenomena of speaking to one another belongs to rhetoric, which, as the study of logos in its very first fundaments, could also be called the very first logic. The speech in question is public, not private; its judgments are not scientific but practical; its discursivity is not just linguistic but extends to the nonverbal articulations of action and of passion; its truth does not reside in the clear and distinct logic of statements, but in the chiaroscuro logos of doxa, the partial truth of prejudgments and opinions.
Understood as the hermeneutics of everyday life of the Greek polis, classical rhetoric has classified three peak moments of discourse, which have generated three genres of civic speech making. Heidegger’s matterof- fact summary of the three clearly bore immediate relevance to the German polis of 1923-24. For his Ruhr audience had repeatedly been, and continued to be, addressed by all three forms of public discourse over the course of the previous two years of crisis:
1. The properly political speech seeks to persuade or dissuade a popular assembly or deliberative body toward a certain decision or resolution of a crisis, say, in matters of war and peace. The speaker does not seek to educate his audience about a state of affairs, but wishes rather to talk his audience into a certain mood which will bring it in tune with the speaker’s own opinions and convictions on the present condition of the state (Lage des Staates) and counsel on its future course of action. (Germany at this time continued to be inundated by propaganda from factions both right and left about the “November betrayal” of the 1918 armistice and the call to overthrow the “November criminals” of a Weimar Republic inept in its handling of a continuing series of state crises brought on by the generally hated Versailles Treaty.)
2. The judicial speech before a court of law in prosecution or defense is addressed to the audience of a judge or jury. (On trial for treason for his instigation of the Munich putsch, Adolf Hitler had in the past year successfully made the entire nation the audience and jury of the speech in his own defence. Having dictated the rhetorically charged Mein Kampf during the brief incarceration following sentencing, he was about to be released back into German public life before Christmas of 1924.)