The Hellenistic model is a hidden model between the Platonic model and the Christian model.
The Platonic model: the model of recollection
Three basic points: 1) if one must care about the self it is because one is ignorant; 2) care of oneself consists in knowing oneself; 3) recollection is situated exactly at the point where care of the self and self-knowledge meet.
The Christian model: the model of self-exegesis or self-renunciation.
The relationship of self-knowledge, knowledge of the truth, and care of the self.
Christian model is not to turn back to the self in an act of recollection in order to rediscover the truth it had once contemplated and the being that it is.
The Hellenistic model contered on the self-finalization of the relationship to self and conversion to self.
Seneca: we must hasten to its point of completion, not in the sense that it will have reached its most distant chronological term, but complete by the fact of having achieved its fullness. We must pass through our life at the greatest speed, at a stroke without even dividing it up into distinct phases with distinct modes of existence in order to arrive at that ideal point of ideal old age.
Seneca: he must not concern himself with an estate, a property far from its master. He must take care of the estate close by. This estate is oneself. In the movement of time that carries us to the final point of our life, we must turn our gaze around and take ourselves as the object of contemplation.
He thinks that it would be better to overcome and defeat our own passions than to recount the passions of others, as historians do. Those who have made themselves masers of towns and entire nations are countless; but how few have been masters of themselves.
Life is a journey: 1) a real movement from one point to another; 2) there is aim or objective; 3) there is a homeport; 4) the navigation to reach homeport is dangerous; 5) the journey will be the one that leads you to the place of safety through a number of known and little known.
The art of living: the idea of piloting as an art, as a theoretical and practical technique necessary to existence. Montaigne should be reread in this perspective, as an attempt to reconstitute an aesthetics and an ethics of the self.
Three types of techniques are usually associated with this model of piloting: medicine, political government, and the direction of government of oneself.
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