community. In practical life, one first listens not so much to learn as to receive some directive for concrete practical concern, to heed it. This is the most rudimentary type of understanding, found on the level of orexis, the life of desire, care, and concern.
And care is deeply ensconced in the life of pathos, mood. The cultivation of the appropriate mood of the auditor by the skilled speaker, so that the attentive listener will then speak with the speaker by speaking after him or her (Nachreden) in contagious attunement, suggests that speech finds its deepest roots in mood (177). Discourse is not only rational, but impassioned, or better, passional in its rationality. We need only add the third mode of persuasion to complete the speech situation at its roots. As Heidegger puts it, “ethos and pathos are constitutive of
This also entails an interchangeability of the roles of speaker and auditor: the speaker is first auditor to oneself (one’s “conscience”), while the auditor already speaks simply by auditing. As Heidegger puts it in Being and Time, attuned silence may well be the most authentic form of speaking. The not-yet-speech of hearing, the receptive tension of listening to speech becomes the receptivity of the discoverer to the never-beforesaid about the world, a self-receptivity of listening to oneself speak and being-spoken-to, or in more Christian terms, of listening to the silent call of one’s own conscience. After all, Aristotle himself suggested this direction into the not-yet-logos of ignorance and silence in his analysis of the practical speech situation as an appeal to the passions and the call to future action, to the unspoken dimensions of the human psyche, the alogon of orexis (desire, care) which in its responsiveness to the logos is itself a kind of speech (105). This relation becomes important in translating the counseling dianoetic virtues into the actional ethical virtues that the speaker, armed only with the power of words, must incite.
What then does the speaker as speaker bring to the speech situation? To ethos is the general bearing of the person, how one presents oneself, the figure one cuts. In the Aristotelian context, it is usually translated as the “character” of the speaker, judged to be appropriate or not in this speech situation of judgment and action, persuasive or not by and for the audience. One listens as much to the ethos as to the words of the speaker. This bearing and demeanor, comportment and attitude, this behaving, this manner of holding oneself in the world with and toward others is to ethos (68, 165). As a demeanor, it might be described as being or at least appearing to be “savvy, solid, and politic,” where the speaker is seen to display “good sense, goodness, and good will.”8 As a way of comporting oneself to the world it bears on the question of where one stands
8. Both citations are translations of Aristotle’s trio, phronēsis kai arete kai eunoia; Rhetoric 2.1, 1378a10. The trio will recur in Arendt’s account of the cosmopolitan ethos of the statesman making judgments on the basis of Kantian “common sense.”