The Usefulness Of Books

Intelligence is wholly separate from one's ability to read and recall the contents of a book; doing so only shows that one has a functional memory.  Now that I have returned to college for another semester, I have observed, yet again, the tendency for many professors and students at my university (HBU) to treat texts with an irrational reverence, as if they are the key to obtaining knowledge.  Books can certainly preserve and transmit knowledge.  That they can do these things is beyond legitimate dispute, but epistemology does not hinge on one's repertoire of finished books--it hinges on first principles, introspection, and deduction. 

Reading the works of philosophers, businesspersons, poets, does not make one more intelligent.  Even if reading a book meant that one would absorb the entire mindset and worldview of the author, reading books would scarcely help, as many books are just as fallacy-riddled as the worldviews of most people!  Books can at best serve as aids to self-education via the supplying of information to readers, with there being no inherent connection between the contents of a book and the intelligence of a reader.

A book is no better than the author(s) who crafted it: only an intelligent author can intentionally produce an intelligent work.  It follows, then, that if many authors are not intelligent, they cannot yield writings that purposefully reflect reality in an accurate way.  This is one of multiple reasons why those who look to books as their epistemological saviors seek something that does not exist, another reason being that even a hypothetical book that contains all knowledge must be verified independently.  Even if a book's contents are true, simply reading the contents does not automatically grant knowledge, since one must prove the claims on one's own wherever necessary.

The best thing one can do to actually develop intelligence is to merely contemplate reality, and the second best thing is conversing with people who are intelligent.  These are the pathways to knowledge and certainty, not the treatment of books as if their authors are correct by nature of being authors.  An irrational reverence for books is, ironically, counter-productive if one's goal is intelligence and education.