Kairos and “Right Measure”

The Kinneavy article "Kairos in Classicaland Modern Rhetorical Theory" quotes Plato as saying, “Everything that is good is fair, and the fair is not without proportion; and the animal which is to be fair must have due proportion.” According to Kinneavy, Plato’s statement gets at the heart of what he calls “right measure,” which is an essential aspect of kairos, along with time and action.

To me, this quote means that everything should be done in moderation (even moderation? — I think Oscar Wilde said something like that). Back to Plato: he is asserting that the aesthetically pleasing is never extreme. It is tempered in the middle. We experience this phenomenon in our everyday lives with people, art, and performance. For example, if an actor shows too much emotion we say it is overly sentimental and he/she is over acting, but if there is too little feeling we say he/she is cold, unfeeling, and can’t act. What is beautiful in performance (and all art) is found in the middle way. Hmmm… This sounds a little like the Tao Te Ching.

Plato gets in trouble because what is accepted in a particular culture as the “middle” changes with time, as popular tastes vary. So then the art of creating something beautiful is always kairotic in the sense that the artist (actor or otherwise) must understand the “middle” that is culturally resonant to the milieu in which he or she is working. Then what about universality? Does it exist?

Another problem with the Platonic idea of “fair in due proportions” is that there is a moral implication to his conception of beauty. This seems flawed to our modern sensibilities, because the moral goodness of someone is not tied to the outside aesthetic but is a separate, internal quality. We would not say that John Merrick (the elephant man) was more evil than, say, Pol Pot, nor that Britney Spears is a better person than Mother Teresa. This brings up a final point: it seems that if ideas of beauty change over time, then ideas about what is morally good must be just as variable.