Abstract

Care of the Self and Conversion are deeply present in our experiences of life, and have been in the center of the Western Culture since the Greeks, continuing by the Romans and recovered by the Christianity. In Antiquity there was a clear and strong relation between the care of the Self and the Conversion, especially in philosophy and religion. After having been focused on the technologies of power and knowledge on Modernity, Foucault concentrated on the Technology of the Self in the Antiquity, describing three different models in which the care is expressed as conversion: Platonic, Hellenistic-Roman and Christian. Despite its specificity, the latter absorbed many elements of the others, including technics of the Self. However, says Foucault, the Christian conversion, based on the Self-Denying, perverted the sense of the care of the previous model, mainly in the first two centuries of the Christian era, in which it shaped the Culture of the Self. We will argue against his position, defending that the Christian Conversion promises the highest possibility of the care of the Self, by the salvation in the other world, through paradoxical ways of Self-Denying.