Hannah Arendt first came to Marburg to study in the winter semester of 1924–25. Her first exposure to Heidegger was accordingly his lecture course on Plato’s Sophist, which began with a detailed summary of his previous work on Aristotle’s practical philosophy. The remainder of the semester was then spent on a detailed exegesis of Plato’s Greek texts focusing on the distinction between the philosopher, the rhetorician, and the pseudophilosophical sophist. It is not clear whether Arendt in her Marburg years (1924–26) ever had access to any of the circulated student transcripts of the summer semester 1924 course on Aristotle’s ground concepts, from which she could have gleaned, as we have done, Heidegger’s phenomenological conception of the protopolitics of the speech situation. But her own work on what can only be called the protopolitics of the human condition is clearly marked by the uniquely phenomenological approach to the Greek polis to which she had already been exposed during her tenure in Marburg. And Aristotle’s Rhetoric is one of the Greek political writings from which she sometimes draws to make her own protopolitical points, notably in her repeated distinction between the solitary singular in which philosophy has traditionally done its thinking and the political plural between which public communication takes place and generates its political arena of action. Traditional philosophy tends to speak of “man” in the singular, as if there were such a thing as a single human nature. This impression is conveyed by the genus-species structure of Aristotle’s famous definitions of man, even as the early Heidegger interprets them, despite his growing sense of the “temporal particularity” (Jeweiligkeit) of Da-sein, which is “in each instantiation mine.” Politics, however, does not arise in man as political animal but between humans, as its very space. Arendt thus interprets the equiprimordiality of definitions of man with this plurality of individuals and public space of interchange in mind: “that man is zōon politikon and logon echon, that insofar as he is political he has the faculty of speech, the power to understand, to make himself understood, and to persuade.”15 To understand by listening to the speech, to persuade by speech, these are the powers of “the highest, the truly political art . . . rhetoric”16 cultivated by free men in the Greek polis, whose institutionalized speeches are recorded and formally analyzed by Aristotle in his Rhetoric. But Arendt’s phenomenology of the speech situation is even more protopolitical, reaching back to the “grass-roots politics” of associations that precede institutionalized assemblies and rudimentary judicial systems, thus to spontaneous communications less structured than an authority addressing an auditorium, whose evanescent occurrences are preserved and memorialized in more informal stories than the epideictic speech.
15. Hannah Arendt, “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought” (1954), in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, 1994), 428–447, esp. 442, with my emphases.
16. Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics” (1954), Social Research 57 (1990): 73–103, esp. 74, 79.