Into the Transcendent Light: Awakening Through Plato's Republic - Paperback

by Jack Crittenden (Author)

Each year, worldwide, people spend millions of dollars on self-help books, motivational lectures, and life coaches, trying to improve their lives. What people don't realize is that 2,500 years ago Plato, one of our greatest philosophers, provided a guide on how to integrate mind, body, and spirit as the means for living a flourishing life. That guide is Plato's dialogue the Republic. But modern readers miss the relevance of Plato's central message. Why? They miss it because Plato has Socrates, considered the wisest man in all of ancient Greece, fill the Republic with bad arguments. Readers follow those bad arguments and conclude that the Republic is about the constitution of an ideal society. Instead, the Republic is about how to constitute character to live that flourishing life. In this work of creative nonfiction, through a fictitious conversation between Plato and three of his students, Jack Crittenden explores and redeems those bad arguments. By doing so, and by reinforcing his interpretation with excerpts from the Tao Te Ching and the Upanishads, Crittenden shows that all of us, and not just philosophers, can learn from the Republic how to live authentic, rich, full lives by searching out the transcendent light.

Author Biography

Now Professor Emeritus, after 30 years of teaching political theory, Jack Crittenden writes full-time. He is the author of five books related to politics, democracy, and education: Beyond Individualism, Democracy's Midwife, Wide as the World, Direct Deliberative Democracy, and his ebook, What Hath Trump Rot? He is also the author of a book on psychology, philosophy, and spirituality: Stalking White Crows, as well as a novel, Pinzak. His latest book is Into the Transcendent Light. He's stunned that he has yet to win a National Book Award, a Pulitzer, or a Nobel Prize for something. You can find his other written work under his pen name, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.