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Philosophy and Rhetoric 38.4 (2005) 281-301



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Reading Logos as Speech:

Heidegger, Aristotle and Rhetorical Politics

Geography Department
Durham University
Thus aletheuein shows itself most immediately in legein. Legein, "to speak," is what basically constitutes human Dasein. In speaking, it expresses itself, in the way, by speaking about something, about the world. This legein was for the Greeks so preponderant and such an everyday affair that they acquired their definition of man in relation to, and on the basis of, this phenomenon and thereby determined it as zoon echon logon.
—Heidegger, Plato's Sophist.1

Between late 1921 and the composition of Being and Time, Heidegger devoted an enormous amount of time to Aristotle, in a number of lecture courses, supplementary seminars, and a manuscript that was to serve as an introduction to a book on him. As Heidegger notes in a 1924 lecture course, Aristotle deserves an honored place in the Greek and even the entire Western philosophical tradition (GA18, 5). That the book on Aristotle mutated into Being and Time demonstrates the importance of the project; that Aristotle was the subject of the projected Division III of the second part of that book shows Heidegger's continued interest in him. That said, it is not so much in the explicit material on Aristotle that the debt is felt in Being and Time, but that Being and Time, in the actually existing version, owes much of its terminology to Aristotle, and indeed its very structure is grounded in an Aristotelian distinction.

In a 1924–25 course devoted to Platonic dialogues, in which, however, only the Sophist was actually considered, Heidegger provides an extensive discussion of Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, as a prelude (until p. 188 of the German text). In it he makes a great deal of Aristotle's distinction between poeisis and praxis, making and doing, and the intellectual virtues that apply to them—techne and phronesis.2 The first part of Division I of Being and Time is concerned with the techne of poeisis; the second part and the entirety of Division II with the phronesis of praxis.3 It is [End Page 281] in relation to the second that Heidegger suggests that the basic constitution of human Dasein, human existence, in its comportment to other beings that share its way of being, is speaking. It is in speaking about something, about something in the world, that it expresses itself. Aletheuein, so easily translated as the empty "being-true," is the idea of an uncovering, an unconcealing, which plays a central role both in the Sophist course and also throughout Heidegger's career. The verb "to speak," sprechen, is Heidegger's translation of the Greek legein, that is the verbal form of the term logos, which we would commonly associate with logic, reason, rationality. Instead, for Heidegger, logos is speech. It is a peculiarly practical sense of speech though, that finds its ultimate outcome in what speech does, of which rhetoric is a privileged form. In outlining the basis of this argument I want to expose how, for Heidegger in the early 1920s, his determination of the political is fundamentally grounded upon this distinction. Heidegger notes how the zoon echon logon is the Greek determination of the human being: as that living thing which has logos. Zoon echon logon is equated, as we shall see, with the zoon politikon.

Heidegger's Aristotle

In order to trace this, it is necessary to reconstruct the path of Heidegger's work on Aristotle. This was a monumental project, quite probably the most sustained engagement with a thinker in his career, surpassing even the later work on Nietzsche. Heidegger notably attempts to do this without the support of any literature on Aristotle, seeking to strip off the layers of interpretation in a return to the texts themselves. This reading of Aristotle is therefore part of Heidegger's de-struction [Destruktion] of the tradition. Of this de-struction Heidegger writes:

Ruthlessness toward the tradition is reverence toward the past, and it is genuine only in an appropriation of...

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