of the state. Each man and woman must learn that their individual lives decides the destiny of the people and the state, supports or rejects it.”10
The emphasis on human decision as the core and wellspring of the political suggests that it is willpower that founds, sustains, and rules the state and carries out its tasks: first the will of a people, then, through their acknowledgment, the will of the leader (Führer) or leaders, and, by abstract extension, the will of the state enforcing itself by ruling, administering, and other organizational actions bent on maintaining and restoring order. Heidegger’s use of this central word of German idealism is conditioned by his understanding of it wholly in terms of Aristotle’s political virtue, phronēsis. Will is a striving that puts itself into action by engaging in pursuit of the goal dictated by the situation with a clear sense of the means needed to actualize that goal: “The will deliberatively grasps the situation in the fullness of its time, in it the kairos is at work, calling for resoluteness and action in the full sense.” Action is practically technical when it aims to actualize a thing, and practically moral when it aims to actualize the will of another or of an entire group, a community of will, a people’s will. It is a people’s will, which is not a mere sum of individual wills, that a leader has to contend with and carry out. There are two ways of carrying out such a will, either by persuasion or by coercion.
Persuasion can occur by speech or by deed. The Greeks in particular recognized the power of speech as a political power. Their political instinct made the persuasive power of the speech into a paradigm of politics, like the unforgettable speeches of Thucydides. If nowadays the speeches of the Führer give the impression of “drumming” their points across, in his inimitably forceful style of “propagandizing” (Trommelnder), such an impression is but an unconscious acknowledgement of the power of speech that the Greeks had already uncovered politically (in the pisteis of rhetorical politics: see above). But the active will persuades most forcefully through deeds. The doer of deeds and the man of action is at once acknowledged as the power in authority, the ruler, whose Dasein and will is determining through persuasion, that is, by acknowledgment of the superior governing will of the Führer. True rule manifests true knowledge of the goal—the wisdom of a statesman (phronimos) —along with engagement—the active leap toward its realization—and the perseverance, the staying power, to bring this commitment of action to its conclusion.
True effectuation of such a governing will does not come by the dictatorial coercion of commands and orders but by awakening the same willing in the other, that is, commitment to the same goal and its fulfillment. It in effect brings about the re-creation of the others to accord with the mood and temper of the ruling will. It comes about not by way of a momentary yes-saying but by way of a decision on the part of the individual. Important here is not the number of individuals but the qualitative
10. Citations are from the student protocols of Rektor Heidegger’s seminar of the Winter Semester 1933–34, “Vom Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte und Staat” (unpublished). The concept and essence of the state were treated from the 7th to the 10th and final hour of a seminar that was held once a week.