Introverted Intuition and the Meaning of Music
Here's a wild hypothesis, going far beyond (even further than usual beyond) what Lenore has explicitly written.
The meaning of music
Music seems to mean something, but what does it mean? People sometimes say that a certain piece of music makes them think of a desert or flowers or something like that, but surely that's not what music means. There's something that you "get" when you "get" a piece of music, and that you can't "hear" until you "get" it. Sometimes it takes many listenings before you "get" it. Clearly there's something encoded in the music that your brain decodes. Sometimes the decoding happens instantly, sometimes you have to listen a whole bunch until you "see" what the composer "has in mind". When you "get" it, though, you can't say what it is, because there is no extra-musical vocabulary in terms of which to say it. And yet, the thing you hear "in" the music is not mere rhythms, pitches, etc. The content of music is not music.
So what kind of "message" do you "decode" when you "understand" a piece of music? What is the "space" in terms of which the "content" of music exists?
Hypothesis: What you "get" is a way of seeing the world.
A way of seeing cannot itself be seen or pointed to. It's a way of tuning your mind and senses to perceive and interpret what's there in the world. This partly explains why there seems to be no vocabulary in terms of which to describe musical content (aside from music). The rest of the explanation is that the space of possible ways to see the world is so filled with incommensurability that it's virtually impossible to even describe relationships between ways of seeing. There is no natural coordinate system or systematic way of organizing all the possible ways of seeing that are expressible through music. The best we can do is make very coarse comparisons, like observing that some music has more "depth" than other music.
This hypothesis would also explain why we sometimes experience a strong feeling of assent or disagreement in response to music. For example, many people feel a visceral revulsion toward most country music. They hear in it a certain worldview, which is tough to describe, but, roughly speaking, the country-music worldview is somehow hopeless, taking pride in accepting a certain rottenness and injustice in life, and taking pride in being stuck at a low level of aspiration--a world where there's not much to do but get drunk, cheat on your wife, and fail to show up at your unpleasant, meaningless job--and take pride in the fact that you accept this and make no effort to rise above it. That perhaps gets at what people "hear" in country music that makes them love it or hate it.
When we hear a great piece of classical music, we find ourselves wondering, "How could anyone have ever thought such a thing?" Not the pitches and rhythms, but the idea that the music conveys. When you hear music that you find profound, your assent is your belief that "yes, the things that one sees when one looks at the world in this way are real and important." The music has brought you something precious: a way of perceiving that transcends what you would have found if you'd looked at the world only using your pre-existing way of perceiving. When you don't yet "get" the classical music, you just think of a bunch of 17th century European courtiers in wigs dancing the minuet (which could explain why so many people don't like it).
Ni, at least understood in a "gear-shifting" way, would be attending not to the real-world content of an idea but to the "way of seeing" that gave rise to it. Music would thus be the ultimate Ni playground: a medium in which one refers only to ways of seeing, completely on their own, massively incommensurable terms, and avoids all matters of external, real-world content.
It's no big deal for anyone of any Lenore-type to attend to something in an Ni manner, focusing on the way of seeing rather than the content. The hypothesis of this page is that when you "get" a piece of music, you are indeed consciously attending to a way of seeing; and of course non-INJs are perfectly capable of understanding music.
This might shed some light on the difference between taking a Lenore-attitude and creating a sense of self via a Lenore-attitude, i.e. ego-orientation. As a dominant function or secondary function, Ni would mean holding yourself apart from specific interpretations about real-world matters, viewing any attempt to make a statement about anything as "relative to" the way of seeing that gave rise to it and not really true or false on its own.
A dominant function is the attitude through which you understand the stake that you have in things--the concerns that embody you (or at least your ego). Thus dominant Ni would lead a person to consider detachment essential to having a sense of self. Indeed, the sense I get from most INJs is that they consider it unseemly and disgraceful to let loose and be a part of things, where you view your very self as having a stake in concrete events. For example, it would be absurd from a purely Ni style of ego-orientation to care one way or the other whether a particular football team wins a particular game.
A path to understanding Lenore-types?
This all implies, then, that by noticing what you assent to or find revolting in music, you might gain some insight into Ni types even if you aren't one (and perhaps even if you are). The fact that we all share this experience of "understanding", "agreeing with", and "disagreeing with" music might itself provide a common reference point for understanding Ni, distinguishing between an Ni function attitude and Ni as a dominant function, and generally what Lenore-attitudes are.
The Ni attitude might become especially clear if you think of how you might understand music as having influence on someone. What sort of worldview is transmitted through gangsta rap? Never mind the words, just listen to the sound of it. What worldview are people expressing and propagating to others through rap music? What kind of a culture would that create, if rap music were its primary shared medium of expression--the common worldview in terms of which everyone in that culture formed and shared their experiences and created their sense of self?
As an attitude of ego-orientation, then, Ni leads you to continually ask this: What is my own way of seeing things, independent of influences such as other people's music, other people's ideas, other people's expectations, my culture, my language, or reality itself?
-- Ben Kovitz, sitting here listening to Debussy's String Quartet on KUSC and thinking of the book Beethoven: His Spiritual Development by J.W.N. Sullivan.
I think you could extract viewpoints from writing or film or indeed any mode of expression as easily as music ... nice concept otherwise.
btw, I most certainly do not think of real and important things when I hear classical music. More like, "Where's the remote??" :P
-- Michelle, sitting here listening to throwaway Top 40 R&B
Triggered vs. represented ways of seeing
Here's another angle on how Lenore's ideas might relate to all this: being in tune with multiple or shifting "ways of seeing" is common to and distinctive of Intuition; it's extraverted or introverted according to whether these ways of seeing are experienced as thrust upon you by reality, necessitated by your immediate sensory experience (extraverted), or as things you can hold within you and carry around so that your way of seeing is under your control and not at the mercy of whatever sensory experiences you happen to have (introverted).
Taking the perspective of Extraverted Intuition, you look for reality to continually trigger you to have new ways of seeing. For example, how might seeing Richard Feynman break the tiny O-ring after soaking it in ice water change the way you understand the Challenger disaster? From this perspective, a way of seeing that is not triggered by something concrete would seem artificial or sterile. A way of seeing that truly relates to the world is one that arises out of real patterns that you really find in real things.
Taking the perspective of Introverted Intuition, you look to find ways of representing different ways of seeing, so that you can understand what lies outside their scope of vision, and thereby free yourself of their limitations. For example, how might you understand your beliefs about economics if you understand them as arising from the way your experiences are filtered by your growing up within your social class? From this perspective, a way of seeing that is triggered by something concrete is inherently suspect: Why that concrete? Who set things up to lead you to see things that way? How would you interpret that O-ring if you were aware that it's only one person's choice of what to show you?
An Ne perspective leads you to use each new concrete found to shift your way of seeing so that it encompasses more and opens up new insights and lines of investigation. "What could I look into that might trigger me to radically alter or expand my understanding of this situation? What new concrete element could change the rules by which this situation apparently works?" An Ni perspective leads you to try to characterize a way of seeing--to name it or describe it or explain it as a limitation resulting from the deck being stacked by your circumstances--in order to view things from a perspective outside that way of seeing. "How might I change my own self so that I evaluate this situation differently and see aspects of it that are currently within my blind spots?"
The meaning of music, then, would relate to Ni in that from an Ni perspective, you might try to represent ways of seeing through music, or use music as a way of exploring new ways of seeing that are not necessitated by any particular life experience. From an Ni perspective, you might come to see music as a way of representing different ways of seeing and thereby making yourself able to carry them around and bring them to life at different times.
Something I've noticed is that introverts tend to refer to extraverted functions, even their own auxiliaries, as coming from the outside and impinging on them. Such as on this page, "these ways of seeing are experienced as thrust upon you by reality."
Many extraverts I've spoken to do not use metaphors of invasion or outward impingment on inward realities to describe their extraverted functions.This probably goes back to Jung's description of extraversion in general as libido flowing outward to the object. Extraversion is objective investment, not subjective impingement.
-- Gib Wallis
Another hypothesis: All introverted attitudes are this way
Another possibility is that cultivating, attending to, expressing, even describing a "way of seeing" is not distinctively Ni, but distinctively introverted.
Ti: Aligning your perceptions with causal order found in the world.
Fi: Aligning yourself with the life force, what is truly good in each situation.
Si: Attending to, and learning to pick out of the complexity of the world, the stable meanings of things, especially when you represent them in some way (facts, memories, impressions, mental associations).
Ni: Attending to what is assumed or left out of any given conceptual scheme: inventing a vocabulary that is free of external reference points (assumptions) in order to describe "the box" that people are pouring the complexity of their perceptions into.
All of these attitudes lead you to cultivate something that cannot easily be pointed to in the world of shared vocabulary. Hence the difficulty that introverts have in talking about what interests them, especially with strangers. The thing that primarily interests them is actually a way of seeing, which takes a long time to develop.
For example, Richard Feynman (presumably ENTP) wrote that he wanted to make art to express the peculiar order that exists all throughout nature (illustrating introverted thinking according to this hypothesis).
Can anyone find the exact quote? It's in either Surely You're Joking or his Lectures on Physics.
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