| Heidegger’s Three Concepts of Polis and the Political | |||
| Period | Basic Text | Basic Concepts | |
| Phenomenological | 1923–25 | Aristotle, Rhetoric | pathos, ethos, logos of doxic speech situation |
| Metontological | 1933–35 | Plato, The Republic | leader of people, guardians of state, 3-level service |
| Archaic-Poietic | 1935–43 | Sophocles, Antigone | pole-mos of thinker, poet, and statesman as prepolitical |
The present context calls for only a quick tracing of the fate of rhetoric across these remaining concepts of the polis and the political.9
The two basic existentials of this concept of the political, a people and its state, are connected as beings to their political being by the crucial political act of historical decision (phronēsis) of the human beings who as a people decide for the state appropriate to its unique tradition (ethos) and freely unite to support and maintain it. The model of national socialism as the basis of organization for that state finds its immediate precedent in the “front community” of World War I, when Germans from all European regions and dialects spontaneously united to defend themselves on the battlefront and at the home front. University Rector Heidegger sees his role in the educational service within this worker state of three services (labor, defense, knowledge), based on the Führer principle according to the German tradition of the two Reichs preceding the Third Reich, to be that of political educator of the “guardians” (Hüter) who, as future leaders of the nation in whatever profession they had chosen at the university, would be called upon to assist the Führer and share in the responsibility for the state. Such a political education would impart a knowledge of the people and the state destined by its tradition that would aid all individuals to come to meaningful terms with their particular self-responsibility for the people and their state: “The state now rests on our watchfulness and readiness and on our life. Our way of be-ing [our ethos] marks the being of the state. [Accordingly] our task in this historically decisive moment (kairos) includes the cultivation of, and reeducation in, the thought
9. For a more detailed account of the remaining two concepts of the political, see Theodore Kisiel, “In the Middle of Heidegger’s Three Concepts of the Political,” in Heidegger and Practical Philosophy ed. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).