Deconstructing Rhetoric

I fully believe that all rhetoric and all rhetoricians have the ability to successfully persuade an audience. The key to this successful persuasion lies not only in the speaker’s argument and the eloquence with which the speech is delivered, but also, and more importantly, in the rhetorician’s ability to recognize kairos and act on the situation. Kairos, to paraphrase Aristotle, is knowing the correct moment to use a proof for the maximum effect. This tradition can be traced through the Sophistic movement in general and seen in Gorgias’ “Encomium to Helen,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter to Birmingham Jail” and is written about in works as modern as Wayne Booth’s 2004 Rhetoric of Rhetoric.

The Sophistic movement emphasized the concept of kairos in the entire educational system. Students of rhetoric were taught to memorize specific speeches that they could deliver in response to another speaker’s argument at any time. Essentially, Sophistic students were being taught to look specifically for the kairos in a situation and be prepared to answer with their prepared response. Protagoras specifically advised Sophistic teachers and students that the value of difference depends on the social and historical context of a situation. This itself can be a reminder to wait for the kairotic moment; what may be kairos with one argument will make another audience become defensive.

Protagoras’ point is explicitly emphasized in Gorgias’ “Encomium to Helen.” Gorgias’ goal in the encomium appears, on a surface reading, to focus on demonstrating the evils of rhetoric. However, looking at this text through the lens of kairos, Gorgias demonstrates specifically how an argument can change based upon the kairos of a situation. Gorgias presents three arguments in Helen’s defense in the encomium: predetermination of the gods, kidnapping by barbarians, and the persuasion through rhetoric. The point Gorgias makes through each of these arguments is that the kairotic situation is greatly influenced by the audience. Gorgias choosing to argue that Helen was innocent because of the predetermination of the gods would certainly draw sympathy from the general public, but not from an audience of warriors. If he plans to use kairos to find the correct proof for maximum effect, his best choice with the warriors would obviously be to defend her through proving that she was kidnapped by barbarians. In this situation, the barbarians would be riled and ready to wage war, an effect not garned through the other two arguments.In short, Gorgias sees how and when arguments should be used to move a specific audience–he understands that kairos and the choice of proof work together to bring the audience to the desired action.

Plato’s Phaedrus focuses on kairos in a similar way. The entire dialogue is cloaked in metaphor and, therefore, we must interpret what Plato says about kairos just as we interpret what he says about the rhetorician. Plato describes three rhetoricians in the text: the base rhetorician, the false rhetorician, and the true rhetorician. Each of these rhetoricians has a distinctly different purpose and Plato is clear about this in the text. The base rhetorician is the orator who cannot move an audience, the false rhetorician is the orator who moves his audience not to a good purpose, but to a purpose that only benefits the speaker. It is only the true rhetorician who is capable of inspiring an audience to a just cause. Plato speaks about the rhetor specifically, but these three forms of rhetoricians can also connect to a discussion of kairos. The base rhetorician can be unable to move his audience for a number of reasons, but I would argue that the base rhetorician’s fault is an inability to recognize kairos. A brilliant speaker can have a masterful work before him, but if he does not wait for the kairotic moment to deliver that speech, he will not  move his audience. This is most obvious if we think about political cartoons. A great political cartoon of Bill Clinton answering charges on his relationship with Monica Lewinski is no longer funny; the kairos of the situation is gone and the audience will not be moved. This is the problem with the base rhetorician–he is unable to recognize the kairos of a situation and when that moment has passed. The evil rhetorician creates his own kairos. He waits until he has the audience in a position where he can make them believe the moment is kairotic. The base rhetorician is Plato (and many other rhetoricians) vision of evil rhetoric. To many people in today’s world, George W. Bush is an evil rhetorician. He created kairos after 9/11 by making the people believe that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Bush did not use proof of the weapons as the kairotic moment to declare war on Iraq. Instead, he manufactured the kairotic moment through the media and made the audience believe that he had a reason to invade Iraq. Finally, the noble rhetorician would be the one is can not only present the best speech and argue for the best solution to a noble cause, but also recognize the kairos that lends itself to the appropriate moving of the audience.

Plato’s noble rhetorician, in my opinion, appears in Martin Luther King, Jr. His “Letter to Birmingham Jail” demonstrates not only the noble rhetorician’s devotion to a noble cause, but also the sheer importance of kairos to the noble rhetorician. King was jailed in 1963 for leading a civil rights protest in Birmingham, Alabama. While in prison, King was given a copy of a Birmingham newspaper containing a letter written by seven clergymen who found King’s protest a bad decision. The clergymen argued that King should have remained in his own neighborhood and that the African-American population of Birmingham should have waited for the legislature to make a decision. King seized on the kairos of the situation and wrote a lengthy reply to the clergymen’s letter. King’s letter itself is a demonstration of his reaction to the kairos of the situation; he did not wait until he was out of jail to compose a neatly prepared and well thought out letter. Instead, he wrote in the margins of the newspaper immediately after reading the letter. King’s letter itself is an example of his ability to respond to the kairos of the situation, but in the letter, King also speaks of the kairos of his protest. At the time of the protest, Birmingham was one of the most controversial civil rights cities in the country; more problems were occurring in Birmingham than any other city. King knew that leading a demonstration in Birmingham would bring more light to the subject than a demonstration in any other city. King used the kairos of not only time, but also location when he chose Birmingham and he demonstrates this in his letter.

In his autobiography, King cites Henry David Thoreau as one of his inspirations. He writes that Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedience” was one of the motivating factors to his own decision to work with the civil rights movement. I would argue that King was also influenced by Thoreau when he chose Birmingham as the city for his march for civil rights. Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” argues for morality in government by arguing that the individual citizen should refuse to pay taxes to fund causes he believed were immoral. Without using the word, Thoreau is arguing for individuals to seize the kairos of tax collection to get their point across to the government. When the government initiates a new tax, for example to fund a war, Thoreau argues that the individual who is morally opposed to the tax should not pay the tax. Instead, he should allow himself to be imprisoned for however long the government sees fit. Thoreau argues that the individual citizen should seize the kairos of the moment to make a statement about the immoral actions of the government. This is exactly what King did with both the march in Birmingham and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Another author who writes about kairos without using the term specifically is Wayne Booth. In his Rhetoric of Rhetoric, Booth identifies two specific types of rhetoric that focus on kairos in different ways. Booth’s “Win-Rhetoric” focuses on the various ways people use rhetoric to win in a certain situation and each of these is highly influenced by kairos. For example, Booth discusses the win rhetoric used by politicians during an election. He writes specifically about the politician who speaks of his own farming roots when campaigning in a farming community. This is a perfect example of situational kairos; the politician knows that he cannot uses the farming speech at a $500 a plate fundraiser in Manhattan, so here he is engaging in the kairos of the Sophists. He has memorized specific speaking points and found the perfect situation to use these points.  To make another connection, this politician also fits with Plato’s noble lover as he has recognized the situation and chosen the proof most likely to sway the audience. In the “Win-Rhetoric” category, Booth also discusses two other types of rhetoric that also rely on kairos. His second form of rhetoric involves a speaker who sees the kairos in a situation and will use any form of persuasion necessary to get the audience to act on this kairos. Here, the kairos is present and the speaker chooses any means necessary to get the audience to recognize the situation and act on the kairos.  The final form of “Win-Rhetoric” occurs when a speaker has a predetermined goal in mind and will do anything to persuade the audience. This is best illustrated by the example above of George W. Bush manufacturing his kairos in the weeks preceding the Iraq war. If President Bush made up his mind beforehand that he was going to war with Iraq, this is exactly where this form of rhetoric would categorize.

Booth also talks about “Listening-Rhetoric” in The Rhetoric of Rhetoric. This form of rhetoric, he argues is used for both moral and immoral purposes. In each of these situations, we see that kairos largely effects the concept of Listening-Rhetoric. In the moral side of listening rhetoric, we see Booth inferring that kairos can change the outcome of a dispute. Booth’s first type of rhetoric in this category involves both speakers in a debate listening to the other speaker to find a moment where they can engage their opponent in a genuine dialogue. Essentially, the speaker is looking for the kairos that will allow him to shift the opponent from an argument into a dialogue; from thoughts of war to thoughts of a treaty. Booth identifies the kairos that the speaker is looking for as common ground. The speaker who listens to his opponent to find common ground is also listening to the opponent to find the kairos of the moment. However, Booth also demonstrates the immoral side of seeking kairos in such a situation. In the immoral “Listening-Rhetoric” the speaker is not listening to the opponent to find a moment for a dialogue, but rather for the appropriate moment to attack the opponent. Here, we see the speaker still using kairos to find the appropriate moment, even though that moment is less moral than the other form of kairos found in Listening-Rhetoric.”

Kairos first emerged as part of the rhetorical tradition with the Sophists and though it was only a concept later to be defined by Plato and Aristotle, kairos was still important to the foundations of rhetoric. Rhetoricians have been fixated with kairos since the beginning, though it was not given a firm definition until Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Even today, scholars write about kairos even if they do not use the term. This is evident in Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Rhetoric. But more than anything, kairos in action plays a large role in the history of the world; if Thoreau had not seized the kairos of tax collection, we may not have had a Martin Luther King Jr. in our rhetorical tradition. We may have continued without a “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies survives today not because it is brilliantly written, but because it came at a kairotic point. The same could be said for all of the surviving documents we have from antiquity and our preceding periods. The documents of our day that will survive another hundred or thousand years are those that are created in response to kairos and those whose kairos is still evident a hundred or a thousand years from now. (In other words, this post will not be one of them.)