Knowledge and Action

As I was doing the readings for Tuesday, the concept of knowledge and action was striking but familiar at the same time. The question of whether a sacred text expects the reader to simply understand and know the information or to take a certain action was the main idea of the reading. This concept reminded me of the Bible verse that says that faith without works is nothing. In this Bible verse, the faith would be the knowledge of what to believe in and the works that it is referring to would be the actions. I don't think this Christian viewpoint would fit into either of the two views we talked about becomes it holds action and knowledge as both important.

The two views we learned about were Mimamsa, which holds that action is more important than knowledge, and Vedanta, which holds knowledge as being more important than actions. However, we went over the fact in class that it's more complicated than that. I understand the idea that how one understands what one's doing changes the nature of the action. For example, if you're doing something but you don't know why you are doing it or what it means it is useless and meaningless. You need to understand and have the knowledge of what you are doing in order for the action to be worth something.

However, I did not fully understand if unsaying was related to this idea of knowledge and action or not and I was also confused about the apophatic discourse from Sells' writing.