How kairos informs rhetoric

Richard Enos in his essay, "Recovering the Lost Art of Researching the History of Rhetoric" makes a compelling case when he states "works are best understood when viewed not as isolated and autonomous events but as intertextual, that even discrete texts are part of a diachronic chain of being" (14). In other words, the historical development of a physics text deserves equal respect with the development of a canon of literature. What are the roots of influence? Not surprisingly, there will be significant overlapping of social and political forces that shaped the language of those respective works. Enos stresses that in studying the historical development of any text, primary sources will provide the more reliable evidence. So what does this have to do with rhetoric? According to Enos, historical development of a body of written works is through understanding the development of the culture that produced those works-in any genre. To understand that culture is to understand their cognative processes. He further argues, "cognative processes affect society because they are the operations by which people make judgments" (17). My reading of this is that the more accurate the historocity of the culture, the more accurate the historocity of the texts that culture produces.
James Kinneavy's essay "Kairos: A Neglected Concept" takes a different approach as he attempts "to show the relevance of some important concepts of classical rhetoric to modern composition" (79). Kinneavy carefully traces the historocity of the Greek word "kairos" which is defined as the "Ciceronian notion of propriety" or "the appropriateness of the discourse to the particular circumstances of the time, place, speaker, and audience involved" (82-4).
This takes us back to Enos's argument that the cognative forces of a culture affect that culture's judgments. Why do we think the way we think? What is the geneology of any given culture's thought process? Kinneavy advocates it is the responsibility of higher education to include kairos in its student writing program and "that the student write some papers about the ethical concerns of his or her personal interests and career choices" and that "The student should be asked to inquire into the aspects of his or her discipline that will morally affect the student's decisions in the present and in the foreseeable future" (98). What is appropriate action? What are the ethics behind that action? Questions rhetoric asks; answers kairos informs.