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urge to “write with Uncertainty,” that still as yet unrealized
ideality? Uncertainty, the “perplexity” of Dewey’s, the
“question to be answered, […] ambiguity to be resolved” (How We
Think 11) that is the impetus for reflective inquiry, and
Certainty, the “Commitment” of Perry’s in the face of “all the
plurality of the relative world – truths, relationships,
purposes, activities, cares […] requir[ing] the courage of
responsibility, and presuppose[ing] an acceptance of human
limits, including the limits of reason” (135), even if it is not
some unchanging finality but rather, again, “an ongoing,
unfolding activity” that “must be made and remade in time and at
deeper levels” (38): how do you exist within the tension that
exists between these two gravitational poles so that neither
reigns over thinking and writing and teaching as the veritable
“Word” or the “True”?
I found the suggestion of a possibility towards the end of
Neel’s Plato, Derrida, and Writing with his advice to “[w]riters
who remain rhetoricians” for how to work amidst the similar
tension exerted by the almost contradictory influences of Plato
and Derrida. I won’t return to Neel’s estimation of the
significance of each of them to Western rhetoric or his
critiques of their seminal theories or to what Neel saw as the
significance of that estimation and critique. It is enough to
say that, in many ways, while it is impossible to nail down, so
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