Talk:Cosmopolis (novel)

to know and not to act is not to know
"to know and not to act is not to know" is not original to DeLillo. I first read it in Yukio Mishima's Runaway Horses, but it is presented a maxim that the character remembers and attributes to the Neo-Confucian Wang Yang-Ming school.

Plato's Socrates says the idea often, 19 centuries before Wang Yang-Ming lived, but in different words.

Mishima, although Japanese and an extremist in his nationalism, read a lot of Western philosophy and other literature.

18:54, 4 January 2014 (UTC) Michael Christian