Plato's second sailing: the method of the Forms

There is a passage in the Phaedo where Socrates explains why he changed method before arriving at any thesis. He says he feared going blind, like someone who looks straight at the sun during an eclipse, and that is why he began to examine things in arguments, in words, in reasoning. He gives a name to this change of course: he calls it the second sailing. It is the key to Professor Rodrigo Bitencourt's class on Plato, and it is also the point where most summaries of the Theory of Forms go wrong: they start from the thesis, and skip the method that holds it up.

This gap comes at a cost. Without the method, the world of ideas sounds like a hypothesis Plato chose out of taste, a scenario he preferred to imagine instead of accepting the ordinary world. With the method, the same thesis appears as what it actually is: the conclusion of someone who tried the direct route first, saw that it led nowhere, and only then changed course.

The fear of looking straight at the sun

In Maria Teresa Schiappa de Azevedo's Portuguese edition, translated here, Socrates recounts, in the Phaedo (99c-d), that "once disappointed with observing the things that exist, I thought it wise to take precautions, so that the same thing would not happen to me as happens to those who watch and observe the Sun during an eclipse: it is known that some lose their eyesight, unless they observe its image through water or by some other such means." That is why, he says, "I feared I would be blinded in spirit beyond recovery, if I insisted on fixing my eyes on things, on trying to touch them directly with my five senses. So I thought the best thing to do was take refuge among ideas, and through them inquire into the truth of what exists." That is why, he says, "I had to try a second way to launch myself into the search."

A sailor's expression

The image that gives this shift its name is a sailor's image, and it is concrete. When the wind dies and the sail is no longer of use, the ship does not sit still in the middle of the sea: you take up the oars. It is slower, it is harder work, and it gets you there.

In Greek, this change of course is the deúteros ploûs, literally "second voyage." Schiappa de Azevedo explains, in a note to her translation, that it was "a proverbial expression from nautical language for resorting to the oars, when the winds did not blow," and she chooses to translate it as "second way," in the sense of a second-best way, that is, of method. The class, following Giovanni Reale's reading, calls the same image the "second sailing" and the "second navigation." Recording this translation choice is part of understanding the term, not just memorizing it, because each rendering lights up a different side of the same image: "way" stresses that it is an alternative path, and "sailing" keeps the scene alive, the boat, the oars, the wind that failed.

Neither rendering is wrong. Both come from the same sailor's expression, used by people who knew that a boat stopped in the middle of the sea is not the end of the voyage, only the moment to change instrument.

What the method is not

Every time someone says Plato invented a world of fantasy, they are assuming he simply went off inventing. He did not. He did the opposite: he recognized that the direct route, looking at nature with your own senses, led nowhere, and he took to the oars.

It is worth understanding why the direct route failed first. The philosophers before Plato had tried exactly that: to look at nature and explain what it is made of, observing the world closely. And one of them, Heraclitus, had reached an uncomfortable conclusion: everything flows, everything changes, nothing stays the same for two instants in a row. Taken seriously, this leaves nothing stable to know, and all knowledge becomes opinion, sometimes right, sometimes not, with no way to tell which is which while you are only looking at things. It was this dead end, not a whim, that made Plato drop the sail.

First sailing, second sailing

The first sailing was looking directly at nature and asking what it is made of, the question that had already occupied the philosophers before Plato. The second is asking what makes a thing what it is, a question of another kind, one that is not answered by looking, but by reasoning.

Keeping this distinction avoids the most common mistake about Plato: treating the world of ideas as if it were a scenario he imagined first, and only then went looking for arguments. It was the other way around. The method comes first, and it is the oar that gets you there.

Notice, too, that the second sailing does not discard the first question, it only changes the instrument for answering it. Plato still wants to know what things are made of, and why they are what they are. What he stops doing is relying only on direct observation to get there, because it was precisely by looking directly that those who came before him ran aground on "everything changes."

The book the class recommends to go deeper into the method

At the end of the class, the professor recommends, for anyone who wants a more didactic and more concise guide to Plato, "A History of Ancient Philosophy," by Giovanni Reale. It is that same book that carefully treats the second sailing as a key to reading the whole of Platonic thought, not just as a detail in one isolated dialogue. It is worth it as a pointer for anyone who has finished this article and wants the full argument, with all the context a class or an article does not have room to give.

What changes when you trade the sail for the oars

Keep the image of the rowboat. It explains why the Theory of Forms, once you arrive at it by the right path, stops sounding like invention and starts sounding like a conclusion. Plato did not decide that a more real world existed before asking how one truly knows anything. He asked first, saw that looking directly blinded him, and took to the oars. The thesis, the world of ideas, is what is found after that crossing, not before it.

And this same image returns at the end of the class, when the professor goes back to the two white cats from the beginning. Nothing about them changed during the whole explanation. What changed is that now there is a path, rowed and not invented, to the question of where the equality you already saw in them, without knowing how to explain it, comes from.

Continue: Plato's Theory of Forms: the measure no one gave you · Plato's Phaedo: three passages to read first · Doxa and episteme: why being right isn't knowing · The lion episode in Don Quixote
Source class: F&T 2.4 - Platão I: o Mundo das Ideias e a busca pela transcendência