We are more inclined to see taking care of ourselves as an immorality, as a means of escape from all possible rules. We inherit the tradition of Christian morality which makes self‐renunciation the condition of salvation In order to excavate and then distinguish the classical Greek and late Roman technologies of the self, Foucault first had to challenge the Christian polemics against the immorality of pagan “self‐pleasers”. Such criticisms, he observes, first appeared among the early Church Fathers who cast a suspicious eye on pagan self‐love. The early Church Fathers, he recollects, saw the care of the self as a source of diverse moral faults, and gladly denounced it as “a kind of egoism or individual interest in contradiction to the care one must show others or the necessary sacrifice of the self”.
Erich Fromm supports Foucault’s historical point. According to Fromm, beginning with Christian theology and reaching through Protestantism, German Idealism and psychoanalysis, the notion of caring for oneself or self‐love has been maligned and salvation associated exclusively with austere self‐renunciation
The doctrine that love for oneself is identical with ‘selfishness’, and that it is an alternative to love for others has pervaded theology, philosophy and the pattern of daily life
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