G. Thompson
Scaffolding or layering effect: to get some of the ramifications of kairos for literary study (or more generally), we'll go over some of the same ideas several times, first broadly and then with more granularity.
Sipiora, "Introduction"
Talk about Greeks and names . . . we would have to do a lot more reading and study to get comfortable with these, beyond (probably) Plato and Aristotle. But there should be a rough roadmap.
Homer they should know as the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, the two epics of ancient Greece. He lived earlier than the others named here, sometime around the 8th or early 7th c. B.C.E. If he lived, that is--no biographical information, and we're not even sure that Troy was sacked, much less that there was a Trojan horse.
Hesiod was biographical, the author of Works and Days (life on the farm . . . ). He lived some time between 750 and 650 B.C.E.
Pre-Socratic philosophers--6th c. B.C.E.--works survive mostly in fragments, not in complete works. In many cases their works don't survive at all, and we know about them from others who wrote about them. Names you might recognize include Pythagoras (the world is knowable through number--he of the Pythagorean theorem); Heraclitus (all things exist in a state of flux; you don't step twice in the same river); Zeno (familiar because of the famous paradox--you can't get anywhere, because you would first have to pass the halfway point, and then halfway to the remainder, etc., and thus through an infinity of points); Empedocles (four elements, an idea which persists in altered form into Shakespeare's time: earth, air, water, fire); Democritus (theory that matter consists of irreducible atoms).
Some philosophers were labeled Sophists, in some cases a term of approbation which survives in our word sophistry. We'll read more about them, but the unifying idea is that of subjectivity--the negative associations come from the suspicion that ethical principles, too, are subjective and open to interest. (Groucho Marx: "Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others.") Several of the Sophists were well-paid teachers of rhetoric--if you wanted to thrive in Greek society, you had to be able to speak well, and these Sophists / rhetoricians taught their pupils how to speak in court (Greeks didn't have lawyers--you had to defend yourself if charged). But taking money for sharing your wisdom didn't seem right. Mentioned in our readings are Protagoras ("Man is the measure of all things," which Plato denounces as a denial of absolute truth; also, can virtue be taught? Protagoras taught eristics or the study of how to win at debate); Gorgias (known from having written a piece on non-existence and from a rhetorical defense of Helen of Troy; he sees kairos as foundational to existence: Untersteiner says he sees kairos as the sense of the right action at the right moment, and the basis for becoming reconciled to "the conflict between order and chaos the rhythm of which traverses the essence of the universe" [Untersteiner 176].). For Gorgias, arete--translated as excellence and as virtue--the two are the same thing!--doesn't exist independently of context.
Isocrates (436-338 B.C.E.--note very long life)--student of Gorgias; known for Against the Sophists, a polemic objecting to teaching eristics or techniques for winning arguments rather than philosophy (the polemic is against bad or superficial rhetoric). Sipiora says that he articulates "the critical importance of kairos in rhetorical theory and practice." (7) Emphasis is on pragmatism, not on dialectics in pursuit of divine truth and reality. (Isocrates is a contemporary of Socrates and Plato.)
The Sophists collectively are denounced by Plato as relativists. If virtue is entirely a matter of relativism rather than an absolute, then it's subjective, a matter of perception, and you can make a case that black is white if enough people believe it to be so. Others see Plato's argument against the Sophists as reductive: Gorgias argues that for any idea there are two contrasting positions (dissoi logoi), and to pretend otherwise is to deny reality. Opposing arguments were used to teach rhetoric in ancient Greece, and are a mainstay of teaching rhetoric up to the present, as well as a foundational principle of jurisdiction.
"In essence, dissoi logoi posits that one side (logos) of an argument defines the existence of the other, creating a rhetorical situation in which at least two logoi struggle for dominance. In contrast, Western culture's implicit assumption that argument is about truth or falsity urges one to assume that one side of the argument is true or more accurate and that other accounts are false or less accurate. Quite differently, Sophists acknowledge that one side of the argument might in a particular context represent the 'stronger' logos and others the 'weaker,' but this does not preclude a weaker logos from becoming the stronger in a different or future context. Sophism assumes that the stronger logos, no matter how strong, will never completely overcome competing logoi and earn the title of absolute truth. Rather--and this is the heart of dissoi logoi--at least one other perspective is always available to serve as an other to the stronger argument."
(Richard D. Johnson-Sheehan, "Sophistic Rhetoric." Theorizing Composition: A Critical Sourcebook of Theory And Scholarship in Contemporary Composition Studies, ed. by Mary Lynch Kennedy. Greenwood, 1998)
Socrates -- 5th-4th c. B.C.E. (about 470-399 B.C.E.)--portrayed as the speaker in Plato's dialogues, through which we know him (not from his own writings). These dialogues portray Socrates as pursuing answers to fundamental questions through posing as someone who doesn't know answers, and leading his disputants into traps by demonstrating that they don't know the answers either. This is not out of a sense of superiority, but rather a methods known as dialectics or an attempt to reach the truth through reasoned arguments. (You can see how the idea that any truth is actually composed of two opposing truths which may apply in different contexts would be a threat to this dialectical pursuit.)
In Plato's works, Socrates is eventually condemned for impiety and for corrupting public discourse (he was rather a gadfly), and compelled to drink hemlock (a poison). Less idealistic accounts are present from Xenophon and Aristophanes (playwright).
Plato (428/427 or 424/423 - 348/347 B.C.E.) is primarily how we know Socrates' works. He's the starting point for Western philosophy, for written works, for the principle of dialectics, for pursuit of truth and knowledge as absolutes. Most relevant to us here is his opposition to Sophists and relativism, since kairos is very much about relativism and context. To act in the moment means sensitivity to change; if you have two opposing truths, you no longer have Truth. The idea that our physical reality is imitations or shadows of ideal forms is in conflict with the idea that we have only somewhat better or worse things, depending on context.
Postmodernists are taken as opponents of these Platonic ideas of absolutes, and revived interest in Sophists coincides with wider acceptance of deconstruction.
Aristotle was Plato's pupil (384-322 B.C.E.)--more focused upon particulars and practical method than Plato: our methods of analysis ultimately derive from Aristotle's treatment of logic as a formal science. Aristotle also speaks to kairos: "Know the critical situation in your life, know that it demands a decision, and what decision, train yourself to recognize as such the decisive point in your life, and to act accordingly." (Sipiora 18)
1 List of possible meanings for kairos.
What do we see as the meaning and importance of these?
propriety--examples of either propriety or impropriety in college life, for example? E.g., loud celebratory shouts and screams at graduation. NFL--Colin Kaepernick's kneeling during national anthem
decorum--Pres. Trump's comment on the size of the crowd when he went to Texas a few days after Hurricane Harvey
A violation of taste might be a good instance of kakakairos (caca?!) With national disasters and tragedies sometimes it's better to recognize akairos--it's not the moment for a campaign-style rally.
Several mentions in this introduction of Isocrates, kairos as connected with ethics: basis of a modus vivendi or way of living.
Is there something calculated about considering kairos as a means of living? Always watching for the right moment, always hyper-concerned about rhetoric and how you are being perceived? Look further at this section as it talks about Isocrates in particular.
Homer, kairos as a point of vulnerability precedes the notion of opportunity or timeliness / proportion. Cf. Richard II--a little pin-prick lets out all the life . . .
2 Hesiod: "Observe due measure, and proportion is best in all things"--live a carefully monitored life. Avoid over-indulgence (food, drink, over-exertion . . . ) This can be a matter of ethics.
Examples of a right time / wrong time to intervene? Hamlet seeing Claudius at prayer: "Now might I do it pat." He doesn't, because he believes that doing so, killing Claudius in a penitent moment, would send his soul to Heaven, and Hamlet would like him to be damned. Ironically, Claudius is not fully repentant, as he reveals in his soliloquy--he's not prepared to give up the kingdom and queen.
3 First words of Christ, in book of Mark, proclaim that "the time is fulfilled"
Byrds, not Birds.
4 Gorgias--mutability of discourse is required because you cannot foresee the context in which your speech will be received. We may want to reject this in favor of absolutes--and that's where the contest is. Gorgias and some other pre-Socratics see ultimate knowledge as unavailable to human beings ("Man is the measure of all things"), so we have no alternative but to consider opposing perspectives.
This of course takes different form, both tragic and comic, in literary portrayals. Cf. Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice--it's proper in early 19th-c. England to hold forth as he does, but not at a dance. Violations of kairos are the basis of much of Austen's comedy in this novel. [Look for examples]
Failure to recognize appropriateness is for Austen a moral fault: Collins is not only speaking out of place at the dance and at other times, but he is doing so to assert himself egotistically, not out of any true concern for others. We have a social responsibility (5) to consider others.
In aesthetics kairos applies to the desirable sense of proportion in an art work. "Platonic aesthetics, according to [Doro] Levi, is based upon principles of harmony, symmetry, and measure, while his ethics is based upon aesthetics, justice, and truth. Justice requires that citizens establish, within themselves, a harmony mirroring (and supporting) just relations within the state; thus, individuals must connect together the many conflicting elements of which they are made into a state of health or inner harmony. . . . Kairos is thus the fusion of ethical and aesthetic elements." (5)
Kairos and justice--it's not that dissoi logoi is the eristic method used in trials, but that justice emerges through dialectical pursuit of truth.
8 Linkage of phronesis (practical wisdom) and "pragmatic ethics" in context of time and place.
Quote on 8 is something that we might want to consider: ". . . for the opinion of the community, which is the sole criterion of truth and goodness, is also the finest recognition for one who had proved worthy of it." In our time and place, "the opinion of the community" is suspect because so malleable to bad rhetoric. Sipiora speaks here of "social justice."
Paideia--Isocrates' school, and principle of education--be flexible and diagnose the situation.
13 "nothing of this kind is in itself either good or bad, but rather it is the use we make of circumstances and opportunities [kairois] which in either case must determine the result."
Contingent universe
re pragmatism, see note on 18: Tillich sees kairos as "a qualitative, dynamic state of time . . . it is kairos that brings general theory, law, or custom into an individuated praxis." Here, Sipiora notes, is where these discussions connect with contemporary writing theory and composition.
One concern in this is the frequent accusation that if someone's verbal representations appear to shift over time, s/he is being inconsistent and self-contradictory. That is sometimes the case, but different contexts call out different phrasings and purposes.
We can think about kairos in purely instrumental terms, and thereby produce subjects who are either entirely amoral or moral only at their convenience. That's the cost of leaving ethics out.
"For the Pythagoreans, kairos represents an 'overall sense of rightness--a critical point in time and space . . . the conflict and resolution of form and matter that initiated the creation of the universe and all that is therein' (Carter 102)." [from Untersteiner]
John E. Smith, "Time and Qualitative Time," in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002, 46-57.
Kairos is an important concept largely overlooked until relatively recently; Smith wants to address this gap.
Quote from Ecclesiastes (47)--unpack this because of its familiarity.
Chronos is time in measurable units, quantitative time. It flows. We should think of kairos as qualitative time--"what happens or might happen at 'that time' and its significance are wholly dependent on an ordinal place in the sequences and intersections of events." Contingency. (47)
Historical events--do they happen because the clock was ticking? Or because of some crisis not due to just passing time, but to contingent events?
Coordinate meaning, right measure--just enough.
Relevant to both human action and "ontological"--fate.
Smith uses the analogy of grapes ripening for wine. There's a right time to harvest the grapes so as to make the best wine, but that time isn't a specific date: it depends on climate, weather, and other factors--in other words, an ability to judge opportunity while taking account of context. So one way that kairos impacts critical thinking is a cultivated ability to read the situation--not only for purposes of persuasion, but right action. (51)
Kairos "belongs to the ontological structure of the order of happening. . . . [note the need for] special attention to the metaphysical and historical dimensions of reality and our experience of the world and ourselves" (48). [Attention to opportunity--kairos--is fundamentally opposed to treating CT as a narrow, step-by-step procedure. Of course in such moments of importance there should be attention to the status of facts, to analysis, to coherence and consistency, but does it help to treat these as items on a checklist?]
Hesiod: "Observe due measure, and proportion (kairos) is best in all things ." (47) In addition to "right measure or proportion," there's also an ontological aspect: Greeks paid attention both to action and to "historical events, natural processes, and developments" independent of human action (48). It's not just practical advice directed toward advantage in persuasion, but more with the ethical assessment of the right moment and right balance.
"[K]airos is not to be understood solely in the practical terms that are uppermost when the primary concern is rhetorical and the problem is to find the most appropriate discourse for the circumstances of time, place, the speaker, and the audience." (48)
So to anticipate Bitzer and Vatz--is the judgment of the right when a matter of context and circumstance and chance, or can we make kairos happen?
Elements of chronos: change, measure, and asymmetrical serial order (49). Perhaps chronos provides the backdrop for kairos? I think this has something to do with catastrophe, the notion that things build slowly and beneath observation until a tipping point is reached, and then all of a sudden there's a change--Renaissance or revolution. But without that initial process, no catastrophe. So, to take a recent example, global warming has been building since the burning of fossil fuels in the later 19th-c., and was going on beneath our notice until the 1990s or so. By now, we are above 400 ppm, the seas are already becoming warmer, and we have the effect of much more intense and destructive storms, droughts leading to wildfires, and other climatic--and climactic--effects. Hurricane Harvey is a kairos prepared by the chronos of increased carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
"One of the legacies of the nineteenth century was the conception of history as a dynamic continuum of events marked by novelty and creativity" (50)
Kairos is dependent upon crisis--supposedly the seventh day of an illness, at which the patient either becomes evidently better and is on the way to recovery, or falls off and slips away to death.
Discussion of Plato's dialogue Phaedrus: passage on 52-53. Note that it's about application in context--"here is the man and here the nature that was discussed theoretically at school" (53)
Smith mentions William James--James says that he has an encyclopedia in his office. "Here is all knowledge and truth, he said, but the question is when do I utter these truths? No one goes about uttering true propositions stretching from 'Aardvark' to 'Zygote'; on the contrary, we cite this information only when it is needed or relevant." (53)
Plato: "Chance [tyche] and occasion [kairos] cooperate with God in the control of all human affairs" (54) For Plato, "the time of kairos is seen as an ontological element in the basic structure of things . . . the occasion itself is not of human devising." (54)
Judeo-Christian ontology--time as linear, not circular, "punctuated by turning points and crises that concern the destinies of men and nations" (55). For this tradition, these are "the critical times of religious history, when the mundane temporal order intersected with the sacred order in the form of a disclosure of the divine will" (55). Burning bush, theophanies.
Cf. Karl Marx, revolutionary events.
Read 56--not just about rhetoric. Justice--what is due an individual; application of knowledge to events; art, proper proportion for esthetic value. (56)
Kinneavy: this pertains more directly to rhetoric.
Connect kairos to epiphany--an epiphany is a personal realization, happening subjectively. Kairos is the moment of transformation, which might happen internally, but which is at heart a call to action. When there is an announcement in the New Testament that Now is the time, the person addressed is being asked to act. Failure to do so means the moment is lost, forever.
kairos as plot shift--take the blue pill or the red pill . . . Alice follows the rabbit down the hole into Wonderland . . .
Decision-points, nodes, forks in the road--all are branches in possible time-lines. Follow the white rabbit down the hole? Move through the yielding mirror surface into looking-glass world? Take the red or blue pill? In these and many other instances a protagonist is faced with a choice between returning to conventional reality or adventuring, and because it's imaginative literature and we live our conventional lives enough already, she or he chooses the unknown, and enters a quest for enlightenment. Sometimes the quest is rewarded; more often it's not and Dorothy returns to Kansas, relieved to be home and not materially changed (but further on her progress toward adulthood--what did Dorothy learn? The importance of conventional values about courage, empathy, and applied intelligence . . . values which are part of the kairos).
Re epiphany (later)--from Stephen Hero:
"Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn't make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany." This concern for proportions is very close to an important aspect of kairos.
In the context of debate, kairos might seem to be amoral, a matter not only of opportunity but of opportunism. However, the Sophists [Gorgias at least] took care to ground the concept of kairos in concerns about justice. The ethical argument relies on an insistence that kairos has long been based upon justice, in awareness of how one's personal advantage must be sought in conjunction with how it affects others. [Untersteiner notes in his account of Gorgias' Funeral Oration the connection to justice, enacted at the moment of self-sacrifice: "the act of cognition capable of being transformed into action cannot come from a rigorously logical law but from the persuasive force of logos which is released in the instant of the decision [kairos] which has as its object . . . 'the right thing at the right moment'." (177)] Phillip Sipiora and William H. Race both speak to ways in which kairos links justice and aesthetics; the sense is that kairotic action is not only right ethically, but satisfying aesthetically.
Onians -- in terms of content, provides support to points made by Kinneavy and Sipiora and Smith. Probably because they read his work. Here's the source for the two terms which appear to merge, the one from the vulnerable place in the armor / a mark for archers, the other the opening made for the woof-thread in weaving.
These would be trivial points for philologists of classical Greek, were it not for the later evolution of kairos into a concept for rhetoricians and others.
How does Bitzer fit into this discussion? Kairos in the rhetorical dimension is about suitability to context--even the best dirty joke is out of place at a funeral. Bitzer focuses here so much upon context that he seems to argue that the context calls forth the speech or writing. "The Declaration of Independence, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Churchill's Address on Dunkirk, John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address--each is a clear instance of rhetoric and each indicates the presence of a situation." (300)
"Rhetorical discourse . . . does obtain its character-as-rhetorical from the situation which generates it." (302) Further discussion on 302, highlighted passage. "Rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action." (302)
Key term exigence or exigency--something can happen. It's "an imperfection marked by urgency"--something needs to be done. Cf. below--the Ghost appears to Hamlet and charges him with revenge. That creates the exigence for Hamlet to act, but when will he have the opportunity? Exigence "specifies the audience to be addressed and the change to be effected" (305).
The situation can be said to create the rhetorical utterance, says Bitzer, in the sense that a question can be said to create the answer (303); it counts as rhetoric only because of the situation or context--spoken in a void, it's not rhetorical, because it doesn't (potentially at least) alter reality. Not all rhetorical situations result in rhetoric (304).
List of constraints upon the situation--what limits the possibilities? For Hamlet, he's searching for the right moment to kill Claudius.
"If it makes sense to say that situation invites a 'fitting' response, then situation must somehow prescribe the response that fits." (307) Context delimits the terms of kairos. The implication here is that we have to be in harmony with the moment, the context, etc., in order to act.
Bitzer notes that fictional representations of situations are fictional, "not grounded in history," representations of rhetoric rather than rhetoric.
"Situations grow and come to maturity; they evolve to just the time when a rhetorical discourse would be most fitting." (309) In Bitzer's formulation, you cannot force kairos, you have to wait for the time when the moment is right.
Exigence would not be present in a perfect world. But in our world, "the world really invites change--change conceived and effected by human agents who quite properly address a mediating audience. The practical justification of rhetoric is analogous to that of scientific inquiry: the world presents objects to be known, puzzles to be resolved, complexities to be understood. . . . similarly, the world presents imperfections to be modified by means of discourse." (310)
We will see Vatz's response to this next week.
Hamlet--
How can we apply any of this discussion about kairos to Hamlet? Should we approach this through group discussion? They might need prompts to do so.
The ghost's appearances in the play are an apparition. Shakespeare provides an artful buildup of suspense in the sentries' opening lines: "'Tis bitter cold, / And I am sick at heart." Note that the wrong sentry challenges--"Who's there?" The ghost is acknowledged in the middle of Barnardo's speech, breaking in to create for the characters, and empathetically for the audience, what would later be called the unheimlich, the uncanny. The German says literally that it's un-homelike. Home is all those things which are normal, familiar, comfortable--the normal course of events, in other words. Chronos. Earthly time.
And then there's the incursion of another order into the familiar. This is analogous I think, in a more limited, possibly perverse way, to what Tillich says about kairos as the arrival of the transcendent into the here and now. The Christian interpretation he constructs is that of the divine becoming immanent, God among us; the Ghost is obviously not that, but a damned soul, since he was killed by Claudius with all his sins still on his head (no last confession, no divine unction, etc.). However, his existence and his story bring another level of existence into this world, and that experience will raise the hair on the back of your head, even in the pretense of literature.
Horatio's exposition links the appearance of this Ghost--an omen--to disorder in Denmark, with the threat of war, and another such moment in the past, before Julius Caesar's assassination: zombies appeared in Rome, there were eclipses, etc.; disturbances in the heavens have been seen there as well (1.1.112-25).
The dawn arrives and Horatio's description (1.1.167-68) paints for us the scene of normalcy returning after the uncanny evening, and anticipates telling Hamlet about the sighting of the Ghost.
Second instance: Claudius' first speech in 1.2, which I think is a violation of kairos in terms of rhetoric. Look at what he says about his late brother's death--it's wrapped in rhetorically flowery speech. The king's death gets seven lines, and then that's done with. (I don't know if it would have been received this way when the play was first performed, but the image of the entire kingdom "contracted in one brow of woe" seems bizarre and out of touch to me--it's pro forma grieving. It might be said that there's no time for personal sorrow with Fortinbras' armies threatening invasion, and that's the spirit in which we might take Claudius' dispatch of the items on his list--but there's that stone in the shoe, young Hamlet (who's probably about 30 in this version of the Hamlet story), standing to one side, all in mourning clothes.
Lines 8-16 acknowledge his marriage to "our sometime sister, now our queen"--which Hamlet refers to as incest, though we wouldn't consider it as such [this is confirmed by the Ghost, 1.5.83] --and thanks everyone for going along with it. (Could Gertrude have been the monarch?) Then there's exposition from Claudius' point of view of the threat from Fortinbras and the dispatch of messengers to his uncle to rein him in--"So much for him." Here's a failure of kairos of another sort--send a messenger to his uncle to counter the threat of invasion? Really? Is that all it takes? But back to the marriage--Claudius seems to say that it took place in the context of mourning, and again there are bizarre images:
. . . as 'twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,
Taken to wife.
But it's not so much the words as the fact here--when the old king has died, is it really the time for a big wedding and celebration? And there's the further issue of kairos in that Hamlet is obviously of age and should have been king after his father's death. It's not proper for Claudius to be king at all. (In the source tales, the prince is underage and so there's a prince regent to rule in his stead until he is older, only the regent has no intention of allowing him to live so long . . . but in Shakespeare's version, and likely in the ur-Hamlet which preceded it but is not extant, Hamlet is not a child.) Hamlet cynically refers to the speed of their marriage in talking with Horatio--they wanted to save money by serving the leftovers from the funeral at their wedding celebration.
Claudius' consolation to Hamlet about his father's death, again, seems inappropriate, even apart from the fact that Claudius caused his death (we don't know that at this point in the play). Come on, kid--everybody dies, get over it. You're carrying this mourning bit too far--he's been dead two months already! Claudius, in turn, sees Hamlet's mourning as over the top; and when Hamlet grudgingly says that he'll obey his mother, Claudius' response is "I'll drink to that!"
Hamlet sees a disproportion, expressed in his soliloquy, in his mother's marrying Claudius, after having been his father Hamlet's wife--"Hyperion to a satyr." I'm not sure we should take this at face value, but Hamlet at least sees it as inexplicable except through excessive desire (again, poor kairos--though some of the accusations of lust come out later in the play.
The "too too sullied flesh" soliloquy in 1.2 seems to me a description of akairos, a situation in which there's nothing to be done. His mother's kairos is to be faulted: "O, most wicked speed, to post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!" (1.2. 156-57) Horatio's story of the Ghost gives him something to do.
Polonius' advice to Laertes in 1.3. Here's the situation: Laertes has gotten permission to leave for France, has just said goodbye to Ophelia (and given us some exposition that she and Hamlet are a thing, but she shouldn't sleep with him because, as heir apparent, he may have to marry for reasons of state). Polonius brings the news that the wind is favorable and the ship waiting on him, and he should hurry, and then pauses to offer some advice.
Polonius' advice was excerpted from the play and offered for 19th-c. schoolchildren to memorize as a compilation of wise maxims--all very well, taken one by one, but as an accumulation they play as comedy. "Hurry up, Laertes, the ship is ready to sail--but just remember these few things . . ." How do we think of Polonius? We should be hesitant to see him as Hamlet does later on, as a tedious old fool--he has been King Hamlet's counselor, and is kept in that role for Claudius. But he does think too highly of himself in this role, and takes rather too active a part in surveillance over the Prince.
Kairos applies here in the sense of proportion. A little advice might be fine, but he piles it on. Also the timing later is unfortunate, as he overhears what Laertes has been saying to Ophelia, and disrupts what we assume to be an honorable courtship (thereby giving Hamlet cover for his mad act).
Polonius also misreads the situation between Ophelia and Hamlet, assuming without evidence that he just wants to sleep with her and ordering her not to have any contact with him.
1.4 Hamlet and Horatio talk about the custom of the king's drinking:
This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations.
They clepe us drunkards and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition . . .
He goes on to draw a more general conclusion that one fault in men's nature, not theirs, ruins their entire reputation among people.
Misapplication of lust may be a matter of kairos, as in the Ghost's account of Gertrude's desire for Claudius. (It's not explicit in the play whether this was while he was alive or not, but I think it makes more sense to see her as sleeping with Claudius before King Hamlet's murder.)
So lust, though to a radiant angel linked,
Will sate itself in a celestial bed
And prey on garbage.