as much as Horst Wessel’s would be from 1930. In his speech, “On the Origin of the Artwork,” in 1936, Heidegger will identify “essential sacrifice” as one way in which truth happens, along with the artwork and the “state-founding deed.” By way of further exemplification in this context, an earlier unpublished version identifies the “people-saving death” as still another form that the “happening of truth” assumes in historical context.
From his concrete rehearsal of the three speech situations, all broadly regarded as political speaking-with-one-another, Heidegger now summarizes the elements of Aristotelian civic rhetoric that would become important for his own protopractical ontology in the making, to begin with, for his ontology of everydayness:
1. Deliberation over a future course of action, judgment of a past action, reliving the presence of a praiseworthy action: the simple temporality of the three genres of speeches of the Greek polis spell out, punctuate, and define the rhythms of its public life, of political everydayness in crisis.
2. These speeches have as their telos not the communication of expertise on the everyday matters at issue, but rather the auditors themselves, aiming to win the audience over to a view of things by way of forming a receptive disposition or mood, which sometimes involves transforming another prevalent mood, typically apathy. The pathos of the listener is therefore the most basic of the three classical means of persuasion and opinion formation, the three pisteis, the trusts that inspire confidence in the credibility of the speaker and his speech. In addition to the pathos in which the hearer is placed (or “thrown,” as Heidegger will soon put it), the confidences include the ethos of the speaker and the deiknynai of the speech itself (logos).
3. Over the ethos of the speaker, Heidegger will have precious little to say in this Greek talk on truth, since he is more concerned with the concealment of truth that comes from rhetoric and its more malicious cousin, sophistry. We must wait for SS 1924 for a bit more precision. Let me at least summarize what he does say on this ethical dimension of the speech situation, since it does suggest that ethos is not just character, let alone moral character, but is to include both where the speaker is coming from and in particular how he projects himself out of this thrownness: “His entire existence speaks along with what he speaks for,” demonstrating whether he is trustworthy as a person, familiar with his subject matter, well-disposed toward his audience. The speaker, in short, must throw himself into his speech with the full expanse and meaning of his existence. Heidegger’s language recalls his later depiction of what it means for authentic Da-sein to be truly “there” in its situation, as an already thrown project that is equiprimordially discursive in both its throw and projection. In fact, Heidegger will soon translate ethos, in the language of Being