Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

us if we try at the same time to think critically or
to revise: it makes us reject what we are engaged in
thinking before we’ve really worked it out at all –
or to cross out what we’ve written before we’ve
finished the sentence or paragraph and allowed
something to happen. (61, emphasis mine)
And bringing this need to “mov[e] back and forth” between firstorder
and second-order thinking and all that they entail –
including, as I would have it, Uncertainty and Certainty – to
the historical valorization of the latter and impugning of the
former, Elbow concludes:
[W]e end up with disciplined critical thinking and
uncensored creative thinking dug into opposed
trenches with their guns trained on each other. […]
But this is an unfortunate historical and
developmental accident. If we would see clearly how
it really is with thinking and writing, we would see
that the situation isn’t either/or, it’s both/and:
the more first-order thinking, the more second-order
thinking; the more generative uncensored writing, the
more critical revising; and vice versa. It’s a
matter of learning to work on opposites one at a time
in a generous spirit of mutual reinforcement rather
than in a spirit of restrictive combat. (62-3,
emphasis mine)
“Mutual deformation.” “Mutual reinforcement.” Again, this
“moving back and forth” that Elbow believes in, truly, is like
the changing of the seasons or the rising and falling of the
tides. It is ebb and flow. It is dialectical.
Throughout Embracing Contraries, Elbow brings his advice
regarding this “ebb and flow,” this dialectic, again and again
to thinking and to writing, whether for academic purposes or
not, but it is when he discusses how to realize it – or, at the
very least, how to try to realize it – through the teaching of
writing that I find his philosophy of “contraries” most
146