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own operation” (71). Because of this, “Plato’s text can be
complete only if we agree to forego writing, thus making
ourselves permanently inadequate, for completion exists only
outside the writing process” (71). However, despite Plato’s
purpose for his Phaedrus, Neel asserts that, very well because
of how the work has been read - or misread - another definition
of rhetoric, a perspective of writing that does indeed attempt
to put forward a “final revelation of truth,” has become Plato’s
real inheritance by Western culture. Of this, he explains what
such an inheritance “could have been”:
Writing could have been introduced to the West as a
celebration of endless possibility. It could have
opened the ultimate mode of democracy because it
allows everyone the time and the place to discover
the rhetoricity of whatever text presents itself as
the closure of truth. The first thing the writer
learns is the impossibility of writing to close
itself down in truth. The only real possibility for
a philosopher-king to rule is in an oral society
where there are no writers to reveal the king's
essentially rhetorical nature, where there are no
writers to reveal that the king, who presents himself
as possessing the knowledge of philosophy, was made
up in writing and could have been made up in an
infinite number of other ways. (73, emphasis mine)
For Neel, however, what the West did indeed inherit from Plato
and the Phaedrus was a rhetoric that was the quintessential tool
of he (or she) who would pose as the “philosopher-king,” bearer
of the “Truth,” a “truth” that is “fixed and immutable,” “fixed
and stable, the possession of a master who passes it on to
students.” This notion of the “philosopher-king” is crucial to
my understanding of that question I posed before: how do you
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