and what one stands for, the conviction of a person with regard to polity and policy. In the deliberative speech, the speaker projects a deliberate choice, or better, prechoice, prohairesis, a fundamental option in polity and policy that constitutes the very purpose of the speech. In Heidegger’s ontological framework, ethos in its display of conviction translates into the particular resolve (Entschlossensein) manifested by the speaker in speech, and the way the speaker attempts to bring others to the same resolution regarding the current situation of action, the kairos, this moment of decision in polity and policy (171). And resoluteness is the receptive response to the call of conscience in the Heideggerian framework. To follow up in this framework, then, the politician projects him or herself as the authentic conscience for the other, through prescient insight leaping ahead in order to liberate the particular other. More inauthentically, at the other extreme of how one is for the other, the politician leaps in and dominates the other (SZ 122, 298). Heidegger’s choice of words for these options suggests a peculiar combination of politics and pedagogy. The domination and control that comes from “leaping in” for the other comes from taking over the other’s proper responsibility to provide for his or her own cares, making the other dependent on such “welfare” (Fürsorge), say, in a welfare state.
And what is rhetoric itself, in this framework of resolute response to the call of conscience? It is first of all not an art but a power, dynamis. Not immediately the power of persuasion, as the sophists would have it, but rather the cultivated power of situational insight, phronēsis, of being able to see, hear, and feel, in a temporally particular situation of action, what speaks for the matter at issue, “je nach dem” (114). Ethos translated as personal character thus finds deeper roots in the interpersonally shared situation of action to which it must be receptive. Only the later Heidegger will perform the middle-voiced turn on this mode of persuasion, from having to being-had by the situation, that he had earlier performed on logos and pathos. It is the later Heidegger’s turn from human being to the situation of being itself. Here, Heidegger can appeal to the older Heraclitean sense of ethos as (1) haunt, abode, and accustomed place, therefore as (2) custom, usage (Brauch), the habit of a habitat, the tradition which articulates, restrains, sustains, and guides the character of a speaker as well as the behaving of a people (“German Da-sein”) and nourishes its resolve. Accordingly, ethos is (3) the history and destiny of a people in its shared actional topoi, which prefigure and prescribe patterns of behavior, its ways of having and holding and taking possession of itself. If the human being is distinguished from the animal by being the shaper and cultivator of worlds for dwelling, this cultivation is achieved by being responsive to the aura of usage, the ways and mores that belong to a particular place and come to us in the logoi of fables and myths developed over time and history. This is not as archconservative as it sounds, when