One way of exposing the essential historicity of the political life even in Aristotle, of capturing the historical characters of that model life in medias rei publicae, is by contrasting it in its distinction from the life of pleasure on its one side and the theoretical life on its “higher” side: bios apolaustikos, bios politikos, bios theoretikos. These three options of model lives all offer their unique reward (good or telos) to the individuals who lead them. (But a focus on the personal goals of the statesman or politician should always keep in mind, in counterbalance, the communal goals of a polis, that of a being-with-one-another in the world set upon fulfilling communal cares and practical concerns that range from economic distribution of functions and of wealth to social peace within the commonweal, all of which tend telically toward the closure of communal self-sufficiency. The public discussion, in its orientation toward communal goals, seeks therefore to discriminate the useful from the inexpedient, the fitting from the improper, the just from the unjust. The propriety of these distinguishing judgments vis-à-vis an ever-fluid historical situation is the measure of the prudent statesman and public speaker.)
The goal of the individual political life, in contrast to the narrow self-satisfaction of the life of pleasure, is timē, honor, or endoxon, a good reputation, a recognition amplified in and by the doxa of shining in the splendor and glory of public esteem, like Schlageter through his death and Heidegger through his commitment to the Nazi cause. Dependent as it is on the public opinion of the many, it is just as temporal and temporary as the temporally particular situations (kairos) that our politicianrhetor must address and judge in the crisis of krinein, discriminating judgment. Of the three life-styles that Aristotle examines, only the political life manifests the full temporality of the unique human situation in its momentous decision that is the ultimate focus of Heidegger’s own protopractical ontology of historical being, of that being “which can also be otherwise.” The constancy of presence achieved by the life of theoretical contemplation is matched in its constancy at the other extreme by the constant state of well-being that comes from just being alive that Aristotle identifies as the very background as well as telos of the life of pleasure, and calls a natural and normal settled state of catastasis. That is why pleasure as a ground stasis of well-being is ultimately not a pathos, like the ek-stasis of fear that charges the speech situation of deliberations over war and peace. For emotions move and thus make for history; pathos by Aristotle’s lexical definition is intrinsically upsetting and peace disturbing, even revolutionary in its historical impact. Only the political life in Aristotle’s scheme takes a look, in its measured Greek way, at the full