The Size Of One's Personal Library: An Irrelevant Triviality

Philosophy that overlaps with reality is grasped because of reason, not the writings of contemporary academia or historical philosophers.  A bookshelf of any size is therefore not a testament to someone's philosophical standing.  Ultimately, a person's home library, if they have one, tells you just one thing about them: they have books on hand.  That they have a bookshelf or books out on a table does not even establish that they are a bibliophile of any sort!  No matter how many books a person has or which books they own, their household library is in most cases a red herring to sound philosophy at best.

Whether they have even read the books in question or merely display them to manipulate the perceptions of people too shallow to distinguish between intelligence and superficiality is uncertain.  Even if a person had found a book that contained all knowledge--every logical, scientific, introspective, and other kind of metaphysical fact, even detailing everything about the subjective perceptions of each person to live and all future events--they still would not know if the information was true apart from independent reasoning, and even then human epistemological limitations would rule out knowing many facts that involve anything other than pure reason.

Personal libraries do not signify intelligence, philosophical soundness, or even philosophical knowledge (which is derived from reason rather than books anyway); one's library does not grant one a special intellectual or moral status.  It is one thing to find a subjective sense of satisfaction in one's personal library and to have a deep fondness for reading and obtaining books, but to mistake reading for epistemological enlightenment is another thing.  The latter is to make a host of assumptions based upon subjective persuasion or a lack of rational thought instead of evaluating concepts in light of reason, introspection, and, where needed, sensory evidences.

None of this means there is anything philosophically problematic about the enjoyment of reading about the philosophical statements of others, of course.  Reading about the claims of others does not even exert any sort of inescapable influence on anyone's worldview.  It is completely possible to be immersed in philosophical reading and yet still discover and reflect on various logical truths without the writings being responsible.  Rationalism and its ramifications for an individual's life wholly transcend the need for reading in order to construct a logically demonstrable worldview.

Books are indeed not without any merits in the realm of personal pleasure or even when it comes to providing historical or scientific evidence that no one can discover by merely thinking to themselves, as opposed to strictly logical facts.  They are still far below pure reason and introspection in their philosophical significance, but they can still be useful on a lesser level.  Physical and digital writings can even serve as monuments to strictly logical truths accessible to everyone!  I myself write with the goal of encouraging the handful of fellow rationalists just as much as I do with the goal of potentially reaching philosophically apathetic people who have not personally reflected on things for themselves.  One can rightly acknowledge the epistemological irrelevance of books to most philosophical concepts while still reading and writing on certain subjects.