Concluding Remarks

The second sailing is not a method in any technical sense of the term. It is not a protocol, a series of rules to follow. It is not a collection of laws of thinking. It is not reproducible independently of that onto which it is “applied.” The second sailing is a method, however, in the ordinary sense of the Greek word methodos , that is, if we hear and emphasize the hodos , the way, the path. For a second sailing is after all a journey. It is the journey of Socrates, the story of which he himself tells his friends on his deathbed in the Phaedo . It is the story of a reorientation that involved more than simply thinking differently. It involved a much more radical, existential change, a dedication – one is tempted to say a conversion, a periagôgê of one’s own whole life, of one’s psuchê . The fact that Socrates conceived this change as involving his whole way of life finds its expression in the Apology of Socrates , where Socrates, right before being condemned to death by Athens, recounts to his fellow Athenian citizens the story of his philosophical awaking as a Delphic mission. While we are entitled to doubt that this mission was truly Delphic, it is quite clear that it was a mission. The arc of this twofold autobiography is the image of the philosophic life as an existential journey.