You're begging the question (who is doing the assuming?), but in general you'll want to look into critical theory, perhaps beginning with Spinoza's TIE (an easy read). The point as I see it is to analyze what is meant by "self-improvement," and whether the choice of topics of things to improve about oneself involve an ideology that is irrelevant to the process of self-improvement. That is, whatever you become by improving on a specific item or topic involves a question of why that thing was chosen. This is what critical theory helps with. The Spinoza helps to construct a model of first principles.
Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment
“Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant”
However it's a dense read; questioning rationality itself is somewhat broader than your specific question.
> "The whole effort of the book," Greif says, "is to ask whether the reasons that we articulate for our most time-consuming daily habits are actually the reasons we hold." This is a classical enough philosophical objective, and yet Greif’s focus on "daily habits" — his version of Emerson’s "low and familiar" — is also what makes his book so seemingly difficult to describe.
The above paragraph seems a decent enough summary. I would agree with carsongross that the article is fairly meandering. I find the subject matter and the described methods of Mark Greif pretty interesting, though.
