What is kairos?

Gorgias, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Gorgias answers

Kairos is the opportune moment — the instant when the right speech, in the right form, lands on the right soul and does its work. I do not define it abstractly because it cannot be held still long enough for a definition; it is grasped in the act, or it passes. Consider what I demonstrate in the Encomium. Helen's case turns entirely on the question of timing and cause.

When Paris spoke to her, speech was the force that moved her — and the power of speech is such that it can stop fear, banish grief, create joy, nurture pity.1 That catalogue is not ornament. Each effect corresponds to a particular moment in the audience's condition, a particular opening through which logos enters. Kairos is the recognition of which opening is present and which speech belongs to it.

The reason kairos matters so urgently is that most men, on most subjects, lack the direct knowledge that would make timing irrelevant. If all men on all subjects had memory of things past, awareness of things present, and foreknowledge of the future, speech would not carry its present force.2 But they do not. Opinion is their counselor, and opinion is slippery and insecure.3

Into that instability the skilled speaker steps — at the moment of maximum openness, with the form of speech fitted to that moment. To prepon, the fitting, is kairos applied to style; kairos is to prepon applied to time. And persuasion, when it arrives at the right moment, has the form of necessity without the same power — it constrains the soul, but through speech rather than through force.4 The teacher of logos teaches the student to see when that constraining force is available. That seeing is kairos.

Sources

  1. Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity.
    Gorgias chapter, pp. 23–24
  2. For if all men on all subjects had (both) memory of things past and (awareness) of things present and foreknowledge of the future, speech would not be similarly similar.
    Gorgias chapter, pp. 23–24
  3. since opinion is slippery and insecure it casts those employing it into slippery and insecure successes.
    Gorgias chapter, pp. 23–24
  4. persuasion has the form of necessity, but it does not have the same power. For speech constrained the soul, persuading
    Gorgias chapter, pp. 23–24