Philosophy Department: “Goddard Library was Plato’s Inspiration for the Allegory of the Cave”

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is a dialogue as old as ancient Greece, with its moral implications still being overanalyzed in high school literature classes and college philosophy lectures to this day. Students suffering through this ordeal need suffer no more, though, according to Clark University’s philosophy department. In the department’s monthly newsletter, Professor Crates announced that scrolls recently unearthed in Athens appear to have been an unfinished draft to a tell-all memoir written by Plato himself. After the chapter that confirms that Socrates was a hoax made up by Plato as a prank, there is a blurb where he discusses the inspirations for some of his works.

“As for my Allegory of the Cave,” he writes, “I was inspired after a night of studying at Clark University’s Goddard Library. The tight confines of the stacks, the disembodied voices, and the shadows dancing off of the rough brick walls? I realized that the upper floors of the Goddard Library are like a cave, where one’s sense of what is real is blurred by those dumb desk lights. Those who study there know no other life and their chains will remain unbroken as they forever look at walls of light, not knowing what’s behind them. Once I was able to find my way out several months later, I immediately picked up a scroll and some squid ink and wrote down the Allegory.”

Although the philosophy department cannot definitively determine the veracity of the scrolls, they believe that they are genuine. Plato accurately describes certain parts of the Goddard, and cross-referencing these scrolls with certain details from the Allegory of the Cave checks out. The Cave itself could very well be that creepy narrow staircase in the stacks, and the students’ inability to leave the library is a possible inspiration for how the Cave is like a prison.

A spokesperson from the philosophy department told The Freudian Slip that, overall, they are very excited about the discovery and that many professors wonder if any other buildings at Clark have inspired famous works. Professor Crates postulated at the end of his announcement in that newsletter that it’s possible that Nietzsche's concept of nihilism was inspired by the futility of trying to hold the doors of Jefferson open for people, only to be bombarded by another set of doors a yard later.

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