Does Reading Many Books Help? What Plato Would Say

You read. You finish books, underline, take notes, and the list for the year is long. Even so, when you look at yourself, you feel more or less where you were. That is when the question many people ask under their breath comes up: does reading many books help? It does. But your doubt is more precise than it seems, and Plato has an answer for it, written right after the allegory of the cave.

It helps, but the good is not in the quantity

Reading a lot does help, and nothing in the Plato passage that matters here says otherwise. What he rejects, in Book VII of The Republic, is a very common idea of education: that to educate is to put knowledge into a soul that does not have it (518b-c). He says some people keep claiming this, and the image he chooses for it is deliberately harsh: it would be like giving sight to blind eyes.

The source lesson for this article puts the same idea in a more domestic scene. Imagine the educator as a surgeon who opens your mind, puts all the content inside, and closes it. You would arrive empty, leave full, and that would be that. If education were that, quantity would be what matters: the more books, the more educated. That is exactly the calculation Plato takes apart, and that is why your question, asked the right way, is a Platonic question.

The eye already sees

Plato's answer is that no one needs to install sight in you. In paraphrase of the central part of this passage (518c-d): education would be the art of turning this organ around in the easiest and most effective way, not of giving it sight, because it already has it. What it lacks is being in the right position and looking where it should, and education is the art of giving it the means to do that.

Notice what changes. The problem stops being capacity and becomes direction. You are not reading too little, nor understanding too little: the eye works and is pointed the wrong way. And the turn it asks for is not only of the eye. Plato says the eye cannot pass from darkness into light without the whole body, and in the same way the whole soul has to turn. The Greek word for this turning is periagogé (περιαγωγή), a leading around, a conversion. In this sense, to educate is to turn, not to fill.

You can read a hundred books staring at the wall

Here is the practical consequence, the part almost no one mentions. The lesson puts it this way: you can read a hundred books like those men who watch the shadows on the wall. They ignore nothing they see. They know the shadows, they name them, and in Plato's cave there are even prizes and honors for whoever distinguishes them most sharply (516c). What they lack is not information about the wall. It is the turn.

Note that Plato is not talking about books. He is talking about education, and the application to reading is the lesson's, not his. But the application is faithful to the image: accumulating and turning are different things, and you can have a lot of the first with none of the second. Someone who leaves a good book exactly as they came in has not learned less; they have simply learned while still facing the same direction.

And there is something reassuring. Plato does not blame the prisoners. They were born in that position, and no one chose the wall. The starting point can be small or large, and formation is built over time. If you feel you read a lot and change little, the question the text opens is not why you failed, but how someone in that position is set free.

What turns the eye: the text that resists

If to educate is to turn, the next question is with what. Plato's answer is not vague: what pulls the soul from what changes toward what endures is whatever forces thought to work when the senses don't settle the matter. His favorite example is mathematics, and after it dialectic, which at the end of the path is the capacity to give an account of what a thing is (522c-531c; 532a-534b).

The criterion that follows applies to any reader, and the lesson states it plainly: a text that does not challenge you only entertains you. Readings that only confirm what you already know are pleasant distractions and turn no one around. What forms you is reading, conversation, and study that resist you. So the useful question when you close a book is not how many you have read. It is what this book forced you to look at that you had not looked at before.

Someone at your side, pointing

The lesson adds one last piece, which changes the role of the teacher. The word educate comes from educere, to lead out. The teacher is not the source: they are the one standing beside you saying "look over there." The mind is not theirs, and neither are the eyes. This is liberating for the learner, because your formation does not depend on access to someone special, and that is also why formation, as the lesson keeps insisting, is rarely a solitary path. Reading together, listening to another person's reflections, and having someone to exchange ideas with help you turn more than a stack of books beside the bed.

So reading many books does help, and the doubt of someone who reads a lot and does not change deserves to be taken seriously. It does not ask you to read less. It asks you to notice where you are looking. Everything attributed to Plato in this article is paraphrase, using Stephanus numbering and the reference edition of The Republic by Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation). Book VII is short, and the most direct way to check what Plato actually wrote, after watching the lesson, is to read it, not only the allegory but the pages that come after it.

Continue: Plato on Education: After the Allegory of the Cave · A Hard Book to Read: When Discomfort Helps · Paideia: formation is not instruction · What does "no one enters the same river twice" mean?
Source lesson: O Mito da Caverna explicado: a educação segundo Platão