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Originally Posted by subVERSION
Punkworld, you should know by now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with mind and follows it; then he looks and rejoices and laughs; and then he sees and knows. He knows that his life will be over altogether too soon; he knows that he, as well as everybody else, is not going anywhere; he knows, because he sees, that nothing is more important than anything else.
In other words, a man of knowledge has no honour, no dignity, no family, no name, no country, but only life to be lived, and under these circumstances his only tie to reality is his controlled folly. Thus a man of knowledge endeavours, and sweats, and puffs, and if one looks at him he is just like any ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is under control. Nothing being more important than anything else, a man of knowledge chooses any act, and acts it out as if what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn't; so when he fulfills his acts he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn't, is in no way part of his concern.
A man of knowledge may choose, on the other hand, to remain totally impassive and never act, and behave as if to be impassive really matters to him; he will be rightfully true at that too, because that would also be his controlled folly.
We must know first that our acts are useless and yet we must proceed as if we didn't know it.
I go on living, though, because I have my will. Because I've tempered my will throughout my life until it's neat and wholesome and now it doesn't matter to me that nothing matters.
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You make some valid points, but also some that I will have to disagree with.
The main problem with what you are saying is that it assumes a gap between thinking and acting. This is indeed what Sartre's existentialism stated as well, that a man is nothing more than his actions (Mozart, after all, is the symphonies he actually made, not the ones he could have made), but that is an argument which, to me, seems invalid.
Intuitively, I would say that I am more than just my actions to myself, and what I am to myself is all that matters. But if I am more to myself than just actions, then I am in fact both actions and thought. Or, perhaps, the difference between actions and thoughts is one that can only made by an outsider about a subject, since a subject himself will always combine the two in his image of himself.
Either way, there is no reason to believe that the man of knowledge would choose to act instead of think. I, for one, would agree with Seneca, in that by scholarly pursuits one can get to know and communicate with the greatest minds in history and thus spend time in a more satisfying, fruitful way than would otherwise be the case. Obviously, studying the works of those minds requires both extensive time spent reading, as well as considerable time contemplating the thoughts put forth. I would argue that thinking, in this case, is also a form of acting, and quite likely one that the man of knowledge would prefer over a vast range of actions.
Which leads me to my next point, that it seems very doubtful to me that the man of knowledge, who realizes that objectively, nothing matters more than anything else, would choose to live his life just like any other man. The lack of an objective truth does not in any way lessen the value of subjective truth and judgement, in fact, it might even strengthen it. The man of knowledge, then, having realized that the bonds of social form and cultural expectation do not matter, would surely choose to follow his own subjective truth while ignoring traditional structures in any other consideration than purely practical ones. It would seem likely that precisely the man of knowledge would stand out from the crowd, because he alone would shape his life around what he considers important rather than what society considers important.