Studies in Philosophy and Education 20: 75–91, 2001. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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A Critical Theory of the Self: Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Foucault
JAMES D. MARSHALL
The University of Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract. Critical thinking, considered as a version of informal logic, must consider emotions and personal attitudes in assessing assertions and conclusions in any analysis of discourse. It must therefore presuppose some notion of the self. Critical theory may be seen as providing a substantive and non-neutral position for the exercise of critical thinking. It therefore must presuppose some notion of the self. This paper argues for a Foucauldean position on the self to extend critical theory and provide a particular position on the self for critical thinking. This position on the self is developed from more traditional accounts of the self from Descartes to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Key words: self, care of the self, critical theory, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Foucault

All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntary think of ‘man’ as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything that the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers . . . what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty (Nietzsche, Human All Too Human). Introduction Critical thinking is normally considered as a version of informal logic which ‘examines the nature and function of arguments in natural language, stressing the craft rather than the formal reasoning’.1 Whilst then there is room for assessing the context in which assertions are made