tumult of life in motion that Heidegger was witnessing as a matter of course in postwar Germany and wished to make central in his own temporal ontology. No pain, no history. Instead of a steady state of seeing that is theoretical contemplation, Heidegger takes us squarely to its historical genesis in the aporetic shock that startles its interrogation and initiates the movement of search and research, the movement of human history.
Heidegger finds the same historical qualities in Aristotle’s book on rhetoric, where the genres of speeches explored involve cases of ordinary speech exponentialized by crisis down to their most incipient interrogative moments. Aristotle’s Rhetoric is for Heidegger accordingly a hermeneutics of everydayness in crisis, of being with one another in an everydayness that has been radically disturbed and thus exposed, in its structures, for ready ontological examination. Greek Dasein, understood as a public life of human speech, is being translated into the analytic of Da-sein, understood as a situated being in historical transit subject to abrupt transition, metabolē. To complete the circle of translating from Greek to German Da-sein, Heidegger at times reads his own hermeneutic emphasis and sense of Dasein back into the Dasein of the politician-rhetor and Greek audience confronting their particular situation of “that which also can be otherwise.” Greek rhetoric’s three modes of persuasion—pathos, ethos, and logos—that structure the speech situation thereby become close kin to the three modes of “being-in” and disclosedness of the human situation: disposedness, understanding, and discursivity. The exploration of this equiprimordial trio of the truth and trust in Heidegger’s rhetorical ontology of SS 1924 will conclude our necessarily brief summary of the rich lode of ontological insight incorporated in that lecture course.
If hearing belongs properly to the auditor, it is also a component of the rhetor first having to size up the critical speech situation in which all in common find themselves (104). The skilled rhetor is at once phronimos, a statesman whose keen responsiveness to the crisis situation generates prudent counsel appropriate to the common situation of action. The rhetor demonstrates his mettle by demonstrating phronēsis (practical wisdom, prudence) or resolute openness to the demands exacted by the situation of action, which in one formula in Being and Time is characterized as the capacity to listen to (heed, hear) the call of (communal) conscience. Being able to hear is the other side of speech, in a way of being possessed by speech. One allows something to be said to oneself by the authentic Other functioning as the conscience of the