Daring

Towards the end of "What Matter Mind: A Theory About the Practice of Women's Studies (1973)", Catharine Stimpson comments on the open-endedness of self creation. She observes that loneliness and insecurity

[...] are transformed into humility, a recognition that the self cannot be an exemplum, only an experiment.

She goes on to link humility, tolerance and faith in reason.

Humility is a quality of the tolerance that is a consequence of reason. But then, I have faith in reason and in the benefits of rational activity. My faith reaffirms, in the teeth of an irrational educational system, the mind matters.

I am moved to ponder if a smidgen of pride is not also important for the recipe to succeed. Indeed does not the curiosity and the impetus to know stem from a feeling of one's assurance in one's right to know? A little boldness assists the gendered being in inhabiting an intellectual universe where one is sometimes cut off. It is worth experimenting with the thought (and reading Stimpson's full essay collected in Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces).

And so for day 683
26.10.2008