Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

and not the other. To not “cook” was to have the same old thing
– perceptions, thoughts, words – all over again. As he wrote:
Good learning is not a matter of finding a happy
medium where both parties are transformed as little
as possible. Rather both parties must be maximally
transformed – in a sense deformed. There is violence
in learning. We cannot learn something without
eating it, yet we cannot really learn it either
without being chewed up. (148)
And when Elbow’s “cooking” is brought to the “contraries” of
“uncertainty” and “certainty,” what exists is not an “either/or”
situation but a deep and extreme “both/and”:
My claim […] is that methodological doubt is only
half of what we need. Yes, we need the systematic,
disciplined, and conscious attempt to criticize
everything no matter how compelling it might seem –
to find flaws or contradictions we might otherwise
miss. But thinking is not trustworthy unless it also
includes methodological belief: the equally
systematic, disciplined, and conscious attempt to
believe everything no matter how unlikely or
repellent it might seem – to find virtues or
strengths we might otherwise miss. (257)
For Elbow, what it came down to was a matter of the “systematic,
disciplined, and conscious” engendering of a dialectic, contrary
and contradictory ways of seeing and thinking – and writing.
All of this said, however, before I explore that dialectic
further, I want to examine those zealous “either/or”
privilegings of Certainty and Uncertainty to which it would
exist as a release – a remedy. I will begin with the former for
the simple reason of chronology. The worship of Certainty, as a
veritable god, extends back to not simply the beginnings of
human civilization but, according to John Dewey, the very
30