simply being-with-one-another and the protopractical politics to which its rhetoric gives rise.
This is important to keep in mind as we take our orientation for such an ontology, as Heidegger himself has done since 1922, from the five excellent habits of being-true according to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, book 6, now rehearsed for his Ruhr audience. Two of these ontological habits are theoretical, two practical, and a fifth, nous, governs and guides these four, which accordingly are called the dia-noetic virtues. As a virtue, each is a habit (hexis) of excellence (aretē), something that is had by us, or better, like language, a habit that has us, echein, determining how we have and hold ourselves, behave, “be-have.” Only the supreme habit of nous, direct contemplative seeing of being, is regarded by Aristotle as beyond language. This will change with Heidegger, who will replace eternal nous by a temporal clearing comprehending being by way of the ecstatic unity of Da-sein’s contextualized, and thus finite, temporality. In the terms of Greek ontology, it is a shift in focus from the being that always is (aei on) to that which can also be otherwise (endechomenon allos echein), the being that manifests itself in the vicissitudes of history and thus displays an ever-changing context, je nach dem.
The excellent habits of being-true oriented to “beings that can be otherwise” are pretheoretical practical excellences, the technē of poiēsis, knowing how to get around in one’s occupation with producing things, and the phronēsis of praxis, circumspective insight into human actions, the ethicopolitical virtue. Such circumspective insight at its most authentic always begins with one’s own self-referential actions in the resolute response to the call of conscience, the demands of the practical situation, and then accommodates one’s own self-referential action to the actions of others by becoming the conscience for others, being for the other by “leaping ahead and liberating” that significant other (SZ 122, 298). Such a liberation movement is the seed of an authentic politics in Heidegger, which of course can only be sustained by an authentic rhetoric, by a language that transcends the everyday in the direction of the lifetime considerations of fate and destiny, once again the language of politics at its best—and religion. Since these two pretheoretical and therefore protopractical dispositions of being-true constitute the respective ontological paradigms of the two published divisions of Being and Time, and the more theoretical habits of trueing are now to be derived from these two ways of coping with historically varying contexts, “je nach dem,” it is clear that the science (epistēmē) that Heidegger is after no longer has as its objects merely the traditionally static ones of constant presence, but in particular the ec-static ones of past self-finding and future projection. Aristotle himself once identified such sciences of the past and the future, calling them “mantic” divining and prophesying, the stuff of religion—