Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Kairos

In the literature and rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century America, the term "kairos" has little or no currency, but the idea of spiritual timing and due measure undergirds a broad range of texts. Works by authors such as Emerson, Hawthorne, Stowe, Fuller, and Irving reflect a need to generate an American literature within a culture that was demanding that America as a divinely rooted nation should claim a new literature as a moral right of its own. This feeling of the right time and moral entitlement for a new literature is the American kairos, and the purpose of this study is to demonstrate the fluency and the frequency with which Nineteenth-Century literary and rhetorical texts invoke the concept of kairos in making their claims for a new literature and a new American state. In particular, I use the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson as a central example of a broader cultural current that consistently relies on kairos, and I argue that his writings invoke a concept of kairos in order to enact social change.

Emerson is particularly well suited for an exploration of kairos because he bridges the traditional disciplinary gaps between literature, rhetoric, and theology; being a prominent preacher, writer and orator of his time, his theories shaped the course of American letters. His influence, I argue, can be understood as articulating the need for kairos, a moment of spiritual insight and propriety, in the rhetorical and literary arts. In terms of Emerson's cultural mission, kairos involves the invocation of the eternal during a specific moment in history in order to enact change. For Emerson, America itself was a kairos, a nation uniquely positioned in the history of the world to fulfill the destiny of God. When Emerson makes his claims for a spiritualized literature, rhetoric, or even education, therefore, he calls upon America's sense of kairos, its cultural mission to be the new spiritual leader of the world. Equally important, Emerson argues for a divinely-appointed rhetor or poet to lead the new American age, a representative man who embodies the kairos of America.

I use kairos throughout this study as an integration of two understandings of the term. The first, James L. Kinneavy's, defines the term broadly as "right timing and due measure" and stresses the rhetorical functioning of the term: how timing and propriety generate or impact a rhetorical act. Kinneavy argues for the ethical, epistemological, rhetorical, aesthetic, and civic educational dimensions of a dual notion of kairos as right timing and due measure ("Neglected Concept"), and he identifies the term primarily as situational context (237; "Aristotle" 134). According to Kinneavy, Plato and Aristotle "both distinguish the general rules of the art of rhetoric from their situational application" (134), and in Aristotle especially, kairos unites the civic virtues that govern a society.{1} Ultimately, kairos deals with "the appropriateness of the discourse to the particular circumstances of the time, place, speaker, and audience involved" ("Neglected" 224).

Kinneavy's stress on the situational context marks a significant divergence from another theoretical conceptualization of kairos, specifically, Paul Tillich's Judeo-Christian conception of the term. {2} Tillich argues for a spiritual interpretation of the term based on the Christ event and defines kairos defines as "the eternal breaking into the temporal" (MW 4: 337). Tillich stresses the transcendental nature of the term within a religious framework, describing it as "a turning point in the fact that something eternal breaks into time and history" (Ashbrook 115). The Christ event is for Tillich the Kairos, "the moment at which history, in terms of a concrete situation, had matured to the point of being able to receive the breakthrough of the central manifestation of the Kingdom of God. The New Testament has called this moment the 'fulfillment of time,' in Greek, kairos" (Sys. 3: 369). From the prime Kairos, the Christ event, any number of kairoi may follow, and these kairoi achieve their status as special moments in the history of humanity through their association with the Christ event:{3}

Kairos in its unique and universal sense is, for Christian faith, the appearing of Jesus as the Christ. Kairos in its general and special sense for the philosopher of history is every turning-point in history in which the eternal judges and transforms the temporal. Kairos is its special sense, as decisive for our present situation, is the coming of a new theonomy on the soil of a secularized and emptied autonomous culture. (MW 4: 338)

Tillich's special moments of divinity in history often center on significant crises that give rise to a "fulfillment of time" (Sys. 3: 370), a position remarkably similar to Emerson's, as will be discussed. These crises require a providential moment in which the Spirit enacts change in the world. The moment of spiritual change, then, is the center of Tillich's theory.

Both Tillich's and Kinneavy's theories derive from classical sources, and when synthesized, they offer a sensitive heuristic to explain how timing, propriety, and appeals to spiritual power become inextricably intermixed in Nineteenth-Century American literary culture. {4} Furthermore, they explain how those texts function rhetorically; that is, how they demand social action through their appeals to spiritual timing and propriety. For the early American orator or writer, to demand social action was to invoke a sense of providential timing. For example, in his Independence Day oration of 1815, Joshua Slack praises America because "her reign is the last, so shall it be the most illustrious of time! . . . . The foundation and the progress of our empire has been marked by circumstances, that authorize the most exalted anticipations" (190). Kairos, for Nineteenth-Century American rhetoric and literature, invokes a Tillichian frame for spiritual power: the flowing of the eternal into the temporal, the manifestation of Spirit in the world. Simultaneously, it focuses on a specific time and place, what Kinneavy has argued as a specific time event in which it is appropriate to make a claim or argument. In terms of American literature, kairos involves a sense of fulfillment of divine promise and the mission to enact that prophesied promise.

Sacvan Bercovitch has described this sense of American mission and divine right as the American "errand," and he has discussed at length the sense that the Puritans had of America and New England as "the apex of history" (Ends 179). Bercovitch's analysis of Puritan rhetoric rests essentially on a discussion of kairos, though he never uses the term. The phrase "the apex of history," however, recalls a Tillichian vision of kairos and, as Bercovitch points out, it invokes a sense of "end-time" and Providence inextricable from a transcendental view of kairos. The difference between kairos and the "errand," however, is the involvement of timing and the propriety implicit in kairos. The errand suggests the mission, but kairos suggests the timing and moral right to perform the errand. The errand might be said, then, to generate the cultural power of the kairos of Nineteenth-Century America; in other words, the sense of divine mission underlies the sense of timing and propriety that emerges in the literature of the time. Kairos, however, becomes the trope, the "ritual mode of our literary tradition" (189). Indeed, even the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence call upon this ritualistic kairotic tradition:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The power for change within the Declaration derives in part from its invocation of a divine kairos: the proper time and moral propriety of the act of separation is judged by its relation to "nature's God." It appeals for change within a transcendental framework, one in which God enjoins the time and rightness of the break for an American nation.

As part of a literary culture that views America as a providential nation, Emerson envisions literature as grounded in a transcendental kairos. Emerson's desire to move American literature from mechanical imitation of European models to the creation of a new, enlightened literature is what Lawrence Buell has described as a movement from "revolution to renaissance" in the birth of New England literary culture. In a meticulous study on the rise of the literary craft in American, Buell traces the "Puritan's habit of seeing history in typological terms as fulfillment of biblical prophecy" (201) throughout early American literature. The habit of typologically interpreting history translates in American literary culture to debates as to the timing and appropriateness of a distinctly American literature: what should it be and when is the time for it?

Washington Irving suggests in his Sketch Book (1820) that America as yet needs to keep European models because it has not matured in its literary endeavors (63-4), but Emerson begins his "American Scholar" (1837) with a declaration that America's time as imitators has come to an end and that a new spiritual literature needs to be born on American soil. He opens his lecture with a call for a new American literature based in kairos: "Perhaps the time is already come, when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill" (Essays 53). The kairos for American letters has arrived, Emerson asserts, and the world is waiting for America to lead the world with a new literature. His dismissal of the "sluggard intellect," the "iron lids," and the mere "mechanical skill" is powerful because it assumes America is the location and time for a new spiritual awakening. The time for a spiritually enlightened nation of writers has arrived: "Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?" (53). The "new age" announced by the symbolic "pole-star," by which time and direction is told and which recalls the star announcing Christ's birth, leads to a proclamation for a new spiritual literature. The proclamation is mirrored in the final paragraph of the oration, which makes a similar appeal to kairos. In it, Emerson laments the tragedy of American scholars not realizing the divine goal of a new nation and pleads "Not so, brothers and friends,--please God, ours shall not be so" (71). He invokes an American kairos, the sense that the time for America to seize upon its divine promise has come:

The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

(71)

Emerson calls the new American scholar to seize this special historical moment and to change the course of American literature, indeed of world literature. The scholar "must be able to take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future" (70). He is, in fact, himself a kairos, the leader in a new American age of spiritualized letters. As Emerson writes about the poet, "the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet" (Essays 450). He enacts change on a broad social scale by seizing upon the special divine moment that America embodies, and he uses it to advance the spirit within himself. The new American scholar is the harbinger, literally the first teller of news, of a new literature.

Emerson's invocation of kairos for a new American literature, to be founded by the American scholar, also appears in his call for a new type of education. Just as literature needed a spiritual purpose, so too education needed reform. Driving Emerson's argument for reformation of a spiritually bankrupt educational system in essays such as "Education" (1860), then, is an underlying belief in America's destiny to become a great nation: he praises New England "because it is the country in the world where is the freest expenditure for education. We have already taken, at the planting of the Colonies (for aught I know for the first time in the world), the initial step, which for its importance might have been resisted as the most radical of revolutions, thus deciding at the start the destiny of this country" (Works 10; 125). Here, Emerson explicitly grounds his argument in American kairos; he asks his readers to seize upon the moment of educational revolution, a revolution that extended beyond Emerson himself. Indeed, writers like William Tyler also appeal to America as the chosen nation for educational change: "The commencement of the new era of benevolence—the era of missionary and Bible and tract and education societies—was marked by the establishment of the unusual number, we might almost say, a new kind of colleges" (345). Both Tyler and Emerson insist that the opportunity, the right moment in history, has arrived for a spiritualized literacy and educational system.

Emerson's concern to fashion a new literature, and a new educational system to support and encourage it, underlies his desire for a new rhetoric as well. Indeed, rhetorical education was a significant part of early American educational systems, and as Nan Johnson and Warren Guthrie have discussed, rhetorics and rhetorical theories of the time were concerned with how to define themselves in relation to European models and how to distinguish themselves as appropriate to the democratic spirit. For the rhetorical culture, like the literary culture, a sense of America as a uniquely ordained nation drove the revision of the rhetorical crafts. The divine American mission inspires rhetorical theories grounded in a transcendental kairos, a sense of divine urgency and right.

Emerson's influence in rhetorical culture was no less significant than his work in literary circles, and like his vision of a new spiritually charged literature, his vision of a new rhetoric rested on kairos. Emerson describes his theory of rhetoric in several essays, but the most important are his two "Eloquence" essays. The first "Eloquence" essay (1847), dubbed by William Charvat as "perhaps the most popular of all Emerson's lectures" (24), argues for a rhetoric that is more than a political art unconnected to a sense of the divine. Though he argues that "every man is an orator" (Works 7: 61), he insists that a true eloquence is rare and requires a spiritually charged moment in order to be effective: "in transcendent eloquence, there was ever some crisis in affairs, such as could deeply engage the man to the cause he pleads, and draw all this wide power to a point" (92). This "crisis in affairs" is a hallmark of Emerson's rhetorical theory because he makes it prerequisite to true eloquence. He calls it "the new opportunity for painting in fire human thought" (63) and argues that "there is no calamity which right words will not begin to redress" (64). The true rhetor invokes the "new opportunity," is himself ultimately greater than the occasion because he wields the "right words" for change: "the occasion always yields to the eminence of the speaker; for a great man is the greatest of occasions" (84). The great orator possesses "the power of Nature running without impediment from the brain and will into the hands" (79), so that "it is not powers of speech that we primarily consider under this word eloquence, but the power that being present, gives them their perfection, and being absent, leaves them merely superficial value" (81). Emerson's rhetor gains his power from something greater than himself; not unlike Plato's and St. Augustine's view of the rhetor, the speaker's persuasive power here is divinely rooted.

The rhetor’s yielding to a greater power in a special moment when the spiritual charges the temporal is the foundation of Emerson's theory of rhetoric. Frequently in his writings, Emerson depicts a great man seizing and being possessed by a great moment. For example, in "The Divinity School Address" (1838) he distinguishes between a good and a bad preacher based on his transcendence of time (85) and in "Lecture on the Times" (1836) he argues that an eloquent man is perfectly at home in all times (155). The great orator surrenders his identity to the "Oversoul" in a special moment of spiritual insight. Roberta K. Ray recognizes that Emerson's conception of the orator includes a relinquishing of the will to divine power (221), and John Sloan similarly relates this surrender to the orator’s "'miraculous uplifting'" of an audience by focusing on truth (13). Emerson's conception of rhetoric as expression of divinity, then, is grounded in the rhetor’s ability to be momentarily possessed by truth, to lose himself in divinity. In short, he seizes upon an exigency when the Spirit brings timing and propriety into itself.

In discussing Emerson's central appeal to the "rhetorical exigency," James Berlin mistakenly identifies Emerson's appeal as primarily political, divorced from the spiritual sphere. Berlin argues that for Emerson rhetorical exigencies give rise to eloquence: "But the desire and willingness of a person to speak are not enough. What is required is inspiration, but not the inspiration that emanates from the absolute. Instead, the impulse to speak comes from the occasions that continually arise in a democracy" (53). Berlin misunderstands Emerson's view of time, history, and language, here, by suggesting a schism between the occasion to speak and inspiration from the "absolute." For Emerson, the occasion to speak, "the crisis in affairs," is at its root transcendental, a metaphorical representation in the material world of a spiritual crisis.

In the second essay on "Eloquence" (1867), therefore, Emerson continues to identify rhetoric as a spiritual act and as requiring a spiritual moment for expression. He argues that rhetoric ascends to the transcendent realm, and he appeals to the American kairos: "It [eloquence] is eminently the art which only flourishes in free countries" (112), and "if there ever was a country where eloquence was a power, it is the United States" (132). Furthermore, as in the first "Eloquence" essay, rhetoric's power derives from something greater than the orator himself. Emerson insists "that a greater spirit speaks from you than is spoken to in him" (131) and that a "great sentiment" (132) is necessary for true eloquence. This great sentiment generates the opportunity for eloquence; when it "makes itself deeply felt in any age or country, then great orators appear . . . . so the great ideas that suddenly expand at some moment the mind of mankind, indicate themselves by orators" (132). The moment of great ideas and sentiment is the kairos for eloquence.

Emerson's lecture on "The Emancipation Proclamation" (Works 11; 1862) exemplifies Emerson's view that rhetoric derives from a great spiritual sentiment. The lecture, delivered on October 12, 1862 in Boston, shortly after Lincoln issued the Proclamation on September 22, begins with an overt appeal to kairos: "In so many arid forms which States incrust themselves with, once in a century, if so often, a poetic act and record occur" (Works 11: 293). Lincoln's poetic acts are "jets of thought into affairs" that occur when "roused by danger or inspired by genius" and "break the else insurmountable routine of class and local legislation, and take a step forward in the directions of catholic and universal interests" (Works 11: 293). Lincoln's act embodies proper timing and propriety and moves the American state toward transcendental principles. Indeed, for Emerson, Lincoln's proclamation is a fulfillment of divine promise: "It [Liberty] comes, like religion, for short periods, and in rare conditions, as if awaiting a culture of the race which shall make it organic and permanent" (293). The vision of liberty here is Tillichian in its assumption of a divine kairos and is distinctly American in its implication that the Emancipation Proclamation has fulfilled a new "theonomy." As Alan Hodder argues about the rhetoric of Nature, Emerson's rhetoric in the lecture on the "Emancipation Proclamation" suggests that the time for apocalyptic change has arrived (133-135).

Just as Emerson couches the timing of the Proclamation in spiritual terms, he also attributes the propriety of Lincoln and his words to "Divine Providence" (295). He seemingly criticizes Lincoln early in the lecture, describing the President as moving with "extreme moderation" and being "so reticent that his decision has taken all parties by surprise" (294-5), but he goes on to link the President's words and action to spiritual power:

The firm tone in which he announces it, without inflation or surplusage,--all these have bespoken such favor to the act, that, great as the popularity of the President has been, we are beginning to think that we have underestimated the capacity and virtue which the Divine Providence has made an instrument of benefit so vast. He has been permitted to do more for America than any other American man. (295)

The power of Lincoln's words, actions, and judgment is ascribed to divine providence. The passive construction, "he has been permitted," reinforces Emerson's appeal to a kairos, propriety in particular, that is spiritually charged: Lincoln is a vessel for God's intervention. Indeed the "dazzling success" (295) of the Proclamation is its power to enact spiritual goodness in the American state through a great man's willing surrender to a providential moment.

Emerson writes that "we have pointed out the opportuneness of the Proclamation," but goes on to insists that "the President had no choice" (300). He has no choice because the opportunity is spiritually empowered: "The measure he has adopted was imperative," (300) not only because of the outbreak of the Civil War, but more broadly "the piratic feature in [Southern society] which makes it our enemy only as it is the enemy of the human race" (300; 302). America's manifestation of spirit contrasts America as a slave nation. Slavery, Emerson asserts, violates "moral sentiment" (297) and he compares America as a slave nation to a "more moral age" in which slavery is abandoned and the slaves can "defend their independence" (303). The opportunity for change, specifically the Civil War, highlights the South's break in moral law and propriety, but it potentially ushers in a new spiritually enlightened state for the entire nation.

Emerson couches Lincoln's Proclamation in a cultural tradition of the American kairos, the time and place for a new spiritual nation. Emerson's own lecture, therefore, draws upon the tradition that empowers the Declaration of Independence and that is unique because it constitutes a re-enactment of a broad cultural mission to, in Bercovitch's terms, make real the errand of God. Emerson desires to make America the spiritual nation that will live up to the expectations of a waiting God, and his literary and rhetorical theory centers upon the moment during which God's presence is made real in the individual. That moment could be enacted by the great man; he could call the Divine to himself. The American kairos is a moment not just when the eternal breaks into the temporal, then, but when the temporal individual invokes the eternal in order to transcend his/her realm.

The power of the individual to invoke spiritual power and the resulting moment of spiritual transformation that Emerson describes undergird a broad range of Nineteenth-Century literary texts. For example, like Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Margaret Fuller ground their arguments for social change within American kairos, and their literary works function rhetorically because they demand social action through invoking a moment of spiritual crises. Indeed, Stowe wrote her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin in a moment in which she felt America had severed itself from its spiritual foundations. Her novel, therefore, ends with several appeals to kairos: "This is an age of the world when nations are trembling and convulsed. A mighty influence is abroad, surging and heaving the world, as with an earthquake. And is America safe?"; "O, Church of Christ, read the signs of the times"; "But who may abide the day of his appearing?"; "A day of grace is yet held out to us" (629). Stowe's final words in the novel overtly appeal for America to fulfill its spiritual destiny. Emerson's "crisis in events" drives the action of Stowe's novel, and her final exhortations make explicit the implicit argument for nation-wide spiritual change.

Margaret Fuller similarly argues that "this country is as surely destined to elucidate a great moral law, as Europe was to promote the mental culture of man" (236). She relies on kairos as not simply a significant moment for change, but a significant moment for spiritual and spiritually guided change. Woman in the Nineteenth Century demands equality for women by suggesting that America as a spiritually guided nation has arrived at an appropriate moment in history to empower women. It asks that America's citizens be vessels of God's actions, but requires that the individual acts in his/her own right in order to make the temporal something worthy of the spiritual promise. Like Emerson, she desires that great individuals cede to divine intervention and begin a new era for America.

In a very real sense, then, Nineteenth-Century American rhetoric as a whole is grounded in kairos; that is to say that a cultural mission that involves the invocation of kairos dominates the Nineteenth-Century American writing. When Emerson asserts in "Power" (1860) that "In history, the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty . . . Everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition" (980), he calls upon a kairotic tradition that sees America on the cusp of a fulfillment of divine promise. The Nineteenth-Century for Emerson was a unique time of transition when God's divine plan might be realized. His writing, as well as a range of American texts, invoke the American kairos in order to actualize a new nation and a new sense of individual being and spirituality.

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