“Enlightenment is often presented, hastily, as disdain for books, as if inner clarity required the renunciation of knowledge; in a different register, Kant linked the Enlightenment to the public use of reason, not to its abandonment. The more accurate intuition moves in the opposite direction: no received body of knowledge replaces the clarity of wisdom, as the Socratic vein suggests when it distinguishes between repeating and understanding. The misunderstanding arises when the critique of inert erudition ends up judging reading itself, as if the problem lay in the texts and their use. Rigorously understood, enlightenment names a transformation of vision and conduct: less self-deception, greater lucidity. That clarity does not lead to unknowing or intellectual blindness; rather, it renders superfluous the arrogance of ignorance. Hence the warning, reiterated across diverse traditions, against attachment to words: “the map is not the territory.” This warning does not invalidate the map, for books orient, preserve methods, transmit memory, and prevent repeated missteps, always within their proper scale.