Katharsis Defining Kairos: Moment of Persuasion, Purgation, and Textuality

I propose that kairos is better defined by the audience who is offered an argument and is purged by its resolution, that the audience then internalizes the claims of the speaker and thus cannot escape their own interpretation of it.

Kairos means ‘occasion’as illustrated by Aristotle in his Poetics and in his Politics. The modern use of the Greek word 'kairos' is used as 'weather' in the everyday forcast. Occasion is subject to the 'weathering' of the reader; their background is what shades their interpretation and thus, when they begin to comment on it, the textuality of the text. The audience's interpretation can then stand as their definition within the rhetorical triangle and kairos exists within the audience who is reacting from their belief system, their experience, which shapes their interpretation and thus provides whether the text will be relative for them. The audience will ideally assert their commentary on the speaker with equal measure as they would themselves, but nonetheless their discussion of what the speaker presents is tainted with reactions formed with their own opinions and derived from their experiences and belief system.

The notion of 'proper measure and right time' sound to me a heuristic process not a definition for kairos as Corbett illustrates in his article on the composition process "The Topoi Revisited". For Enos in "Recovering the Lost Art of Researching the History of Rhetoric", reading the primary text is a way to move away from the discussion surrounding it as the discourse is diluted with interpretations, yet the interpretations of the audience are what give a text its meaning. In looking at the long list of recent scholars using kairos as an integral piece of rhetoric, Kinneavy states, "all stress the importance of the unique background of the interpreter to the business of interpreting anything". Instead of a rhetorical triangle, Kenneth Burke in his Grammar of Motives builds a rhetorical pentad using a who, what, where, when, and how model to better explain the relationship between speaker and audience, but he falls short of placing interpretation’s value when trying to explain the intrinsic and extrinsic motives of the speaker.

The speaker hopes to evoke in his audience a reaction which will concrete their relationship with his message, perhaps a sort of emotion. As the audience understands and internalizes the speaker’s message, the tension within the argument is purged. This is a type of catharsis. If kairos, as the moment of persuasion, is the moment where the audience is convinced of the speaker’s claim then catharsis can as the moment of persuasion, as kairos. Borrowing then from dramatism, the speaker is protagonist and in his humanity is flawed as none of us is perfect. Alan Paskow in What is Aesthtic Catharis?, reevaluates Aristotle’s use of Catharsis by looking between his use of it in Poetics and Politics. Paskow states, “the spectator is invited to project himself imaginatively and emotionally (as well as intellectually) into the protagonist as one confronting difficult, existential questions” (63). The speaker then is the flawed protagonist hoping to gain common identity with his audience.