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The role of literature as the key to personal freedom | Aeon Essays

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Stripped of easy moralising, literature makes us relish the search for truth in an age when many believe truth to be dead

Does reading turn us into better people? Does it make us more sensitive and empathetic? Does it improve our judgment? And if it is not edifying, then what good does it do? About 120 years ago, the indecisive, dilettante offspring of a wealthy physician found these questions so important that he took up his pen to argue that, no, books are never the instruments of moral betterment. He based his argument on his own memories. Though he had always been an avid reader, books, he claimed, never gave him any sort of useful, respectable instruction. That does not mean they were meaningless – far…

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