Advocacy ( Fürsprache ) between rhetoric and being‐with ( Mitsein ): On the relation between solicitude ( Fürsorge ), language, and affect in Heidegger

Abstract This contribution discusses advocacy with reference to Heidegger's Being and Time. A link between the rhetorical structure of speaking‐for and Being and Time can be established through Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy , lectures which Heidegger delivered a few years preceding Being and Time. Most relevant in Heidegger's discussion of rhetorics in this context is the theory of affects in Aristotle's Rhetoric and what Heidegger comes to term “mood.” With “mood” Heidegger addresses the states‐of‐mind in being with others in the public sphere, or in his words, the being‐with of the “They.” A meaningful understanding of speaking‐for is in Being and Times however only possible when we leave the sphere of the “They,” in terms of mood: of fear and comparable affects. Accessing the realm of individual subjectivity, we are confronted with Angst, the variant of fear without a determined object, that is, the affective state‐of‐mind where the individual meets his or her finitude. It is in the individual subject—and not in the public sphere—that the elements of a theory of speaking‐for resurface in Heidegger, with the “call” which we receive on the one hand, and the possibility of addressing the other as “the friend” on the other.