It is not accidental that, in their natural self-interpretation, the Greeks defined the being-there of human beings as ζῷον λóγον ἔχον (zoon logon echon).
We do not have a corresponding definition. At best, an approximately corresponding definition would be: the human being is a living thing that reads the newspaper. At first, that may sound strange to you, but it is what corresponds to the Greek definition. When the Greeks say that the human being is a living thing that speaks, they do not mean, in a physiological sense, that he utters definite sounds. Rather, the human being is a living thing that has its genuine being-there in conversation and in discourse. The Greeks existed in discourse. The orator is the one who has genuine power over being-there: Ῥητορικὴ πειθοῦς δημιουργóς (Rhetorike peithous demiourgos; Cf. Plato, Gorgias 453 a 2), the ability-to-discourse is that possibility in which I have genuine dominion over the persuasion of human beings in the way that they are with one another. In this basic Greek claim, the ground for the definition of the human being is to be sought. In addition, when the Greek reads, he also hears, and it is no accident that all of the texts that we have from Aristotle are lectures, the spoken word. (GA18:108; GA18MT:74)
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