Sunday, April 28, 2024

Kairos

In looking up logos, ethos, and pathos, Aristotle's modes of persuasion for use in a possible post*, in order to get them quite right, I found there is also kairos. Huh.  Never heard of it before.  I rather like it. It means the "right time", "season" or "opportunity".[4] Kairos is an appeal to the timeliness or context in which a presentation is publicized. (Wikipedia entry) The example given is an advertisement that relies on the same logic, appeal, and emotions it did forty years ago but has a different effect now.  I have thought that this was the one most powerful advantage of Martin Luther King, Jr.  All the logos, ethos, and pathos arguments had been made before, sometimes years before. But he sensed it was time, and leveraged the situation on that basis. Evangelists do the same, often realising it only in theory that a certain portion of their listeners will have been primed by the Holy Spirit to hear the Word this night, not on the basis of their preaching but because of how their whole lives have unfolded leading up to this moment. 

As a practical matter, we may use this far more often than we notice, only telling ourselves that we are operating from logos. We always think we are being super-logical, yet as near as we can test such things in our thinking and behavior, it seems we are usually just employing post hoc rationalisation.  Some psychologists would claim it's never any better than post hoc reasoning. I would allow that much is, perhaps even 99%.  However, why would we develop such a skill for rationalisation if it did not occasionally actually work and be recognised as superior? Why bother?

*I didn't use it directly in the previous post about inference, but it's in there, in the emanations from the penumbra.

3 comments:

james said...

There's so much delight in sensing the mood and getting that "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver" just right, that it sticks with you.

On the other side, there seems to be an anti-kairos, where you said what seemed logical but was exactly the wrong thing and the world exploded on you. That also tends to stick with you.

Sensing the house seems to be important.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Yeah, that seems to be the part I get wrong.

Grim said...

Christians are usually familiar with the fact that Ancient Greek has several different words for 'love,' and it's really important to know which one is being translated if an English Bible uses the word "love." This is also true for "knowledge" and its variants; but also, here, for "time."

Ancient Greek has two words for this. The one whose relationship is more obvious to English speakers is chronos, which means "time" in a sense much closer to our English word. It's clock time, or the quantitative time.

Kairos needs to be translated poetically to get the sense of it. It means something like "the right time," or "the moment" (not 'a moment'). I understand in modern Greek it's used for the weather, so it gives you the sense of 'what things are like right now,' but that isn't true of the ancient word, just of how it's evolved in Greece.