Kairos Meade

It was a fine feeling that made the spirit of the Greek language signify chronos, "formal time," with a different word from kairos, "the right time," the moment rich in content and significance. And it is no accident that this word found its most pregnant and most frequent usage when the Greek language became the vessel for the dynamic spirit of Judaism and primitive Christianity—in the New Testament. His "kairos" had not yet come, is said of Jesus; and then it had once at some time or other come, en kairo, in the moment of the fullness of time. Time is an empty form only for abstract, objective reflection, a form that can receive any kind of content; but to him who is conscious of an ongoing creative life it is laden with tensions, with possibilities and impossibilities, it is qualitative and full of significance. Not everything is possible at every time, not everything is true at every time, nor is everything demanded at every moment. Various "rulers," that is different cosmic powers, rule at different times, and the "ruler," conquering all the other angels and powers, reigns in the time that is full of destiny and tension between the Resurrection and the Second Coming, in the "present time," which in its essence is different from every other time of the past. In this tremendous, most profoundly stirred consciousness of history is rooted the idea of the kairos; and from this beginning it will he molded into a conception purposely adapted to a philosophy of history. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Kairos by Roger Thompson James L. Kinneavy's, defines the term broadly as "right timing and due measure" and stresses the rhetorical functioning of the term: how timing and propriety generate or impact a rhetorical act. Kinneavy argues for the ethical, epistemological, rhetorical, aesthetic, and civic educational dimensions of a dual notion of kairos as right timing and due measure ("Neglected Concept"), and he identifies the term primarily as situational context (237; "Aristotle" 134). According to Kinneavy, Plato and Aristotle "both distinguish the general rules of the art of rhetoric from their situational application" (134), and in Aristotle especially, kairos unites the civic virtues that govern a society. Ultimately, kairos deals with "the appropriateness of the discourse to the particular circumstances of the time, place, speaker, and audience involved" ("Neglected" 224). Kinneavy's stress on the situational context marks a significant divergence fro