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to speak, either Plato or Derrida as a bastion of either
Uncertainty or Certainty because, at least according to Neel’s
readings, the attribution changes with a turn from a stated
intention to a deep reading, a privileging of one without the
other is no less detrimental than the privileging of Certainty
at the expense of Uncertainty, or vice-versa. Without the two,
rhetoric is unwhole. To that end, Neel contends:
Writers who give in to Plato in effect cease to be
writers and become philosophers on a quest that will
never produce any inscription at all, a quest that
requires writers constantly to admit abashedly that
they do not know the truth. Writers who give in to
Derrida become philosophers who never finish
unworking all those discourses that conceal or remain
ignorant of their own written rhetoricity […].
Writers who remain rhetoricians, in contrast, keep
both Plato and Derrida at work at all times during
the composing process, but forever subordinate them
to that process so that neither the Platonic search
for truth nor the Derridean strategy of
deconstruction overwhelms the process. (203)
For Neel, those “gravitational poles” of Plato and Derrida must
always be present in the thinking and writing of “writers who
remain rhetoricians.” With this, I hear him suggesting a
balance: not too much of a allegiance to Plato or Derrida lest
one “overwhelms the process.” But if we continue that analogy I
had tried to establish between Perry and Dewey and Certainty and
Uncertainty, does this mean that the answer to my earlier
questions is that this pairing must also be “at work at all
times” as well - with teaching and with writing and with
thinking? Must a balance be struck between them as well? I
would turn to Peter Elbow for an answer. In the introduction to
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