Judgement
A page for the judgement attitudes (Feeling and Thinking)
Judgement attitudes govern our ideas and criteria on the world around us, be it via logical relationships (Thinking) or ethical relationships (Feeling).
Extraverted judgement is capable of binding a society, enabling people to know their obligations and where they stand; but its rules are harsh and somewhat crude. Introverted judgement creates a moral sense that goes beyond publicly recognized rules, leading to greater humanity, mercy, intelligence, consideration of all the factors in a situation; but introverted judgement is too subtle and idiosyncratic to serve as the basis for social order.
See Truth-and-Language Exegesis, Checks and Balances, Dobie Gillis show.
Extraverted Judgment
Forms of Extraverted Judgement:
Introverted Judgment
Forms of Introverted Judgement:
Transcendent Justice
From the standpoint of introverted judgement, you understand justice in transcendent terms: not what the agreed-upon man-made law says is just, but what is just, regardless of what anyone agrees with.
To see how this can be, consider that you can judge a law unjust. To take extreme (but real) examples, if slavery is legal in your society, or a law prescribes death by stoning as a punishment for adultery, you might judge such laws unjust. From what perspective can you make this judgement? Can you make appeal to a stated a priori principle, or to the written law or to the negotiated rules that your society has agreed to abide by? By definition, no. You judge the law just or unjust by reference to an understanding of how life works and how people fit into the cosmos, which you know independently of social agreement.
As a matter of justice, written laws and rules can never take precedence over what is truly right.
What makes this approach to justice introverted is that it cannot serve as a shared agreement that binds the members of a society. Transcendent justice is not fair. Fairness has nothing to do with treating people humanely, or a person's right to defend himself against abuse. Laws created according to extraverted thinking represent the society's standards of fairness. People can recognize them as a consensual, shared definition of fairness--one that they can also expect other people to abide by-- because they specify the rules independently of the participants and the situation. Introverted judgement responds to all aspects of a situation simultaneously, without defining the situation or its criteria of judgement in advance. It leaves room for the unexpected, and for criteria to shape themselves anew in every moment.
The clash between defenders of "situational ethics" and "objective law" is thus a clash between introverted and extraverted judgement, as they apply to justice.
Rudyard Kipling and Clint Eastwood might be among the clearest exponents of the Ti view of justice. From a developed Fi perspective, justice might be an irrelevant concept. From this standpoint, mercy should always trump the law. What matters is not that criminals be put to death, but that every living being thrive in its own way.
Strange marriages between extraverted and introverted judgement
Sometimes people attempt to resolve the fundamental clash between Je and Ji directly. This results in some strange behavior.
The clash of Te and Fi leads to "souls on trial": an attempt to come up with fair, objective criteria for judging people's souls--the kind of "judgement" that people have in mind when they say "you shouldn't judge a person". It looks like you did something wrong, so we're going to have to have a fair trial to determine whether your soul is in the right way or not. It's all for the good of your soul. Christianity would appear to be driven almost entirely by this dynamic, especially in its more ancient forms (and in the purer "reawakening" forms that recur from time to time).
The clash of Fe and Ti leads to attempts to argue over who society should respect and who it shouldn't--on the basis of aesthetic or logical appreciation of a kind that most people don't share. Larry Groznic might provide a typical example, arguing that The Prisoner TV show deserves more respect than his friend was giving it, and therefore Larry is right to shun his friend's wedding invitation. From Larry's standpoint, everyone ought to recognize that. If people only watched the show and took the necessary time to fully appreciate its magnificently high quality, they'd see it, too. Indeed if they took that much trouble, they might see that quality, too, but from the standpoint of social agreement, something that esoteric can't serve as a basis of law and custom. With that kind of thing, different people have different interpretations, so if agreements were defined that way, people couldn't all trust that everyone is playing by the same rules.
As a tertiary function
INJs
p.238: The problem is the type's inability to deliver what's gestating inside. It's too large, too unformed; it won't survive in the world if it's cut off from the INJ's Intuitive nourishment. The only way they know how to witness to it is to point out the poverty <ed: lack of understanding of all the complexities, etc...> of others' positions, showing how they fall short of understanding.
-- This is a result of a motivational need to be seen as distinct from others, as well as envy of others being able to put out their understanding to the real world. It takes the form of a peculiar kind of deconstructive critique.
Hypothesis: no definition of external reality
The rebellion of Introverted Judgement against any external definition of reality is summed up in the words of Jiddu Krishnamurti: "No organization can lead a man to truth. It is a hindrance, it can only impede. It blocks a man from sincere study. The truth comes from within, by seeing for yourself."
Would this also match with Lenore's concept of Introverted Intuition? See, for example, the description on Truth-and-Language Exegesis. Ni is also about "seeing for yourself", but with a different emphasis: on finding your own interpretation, as opposed to finding the one, true, reality-fitting interpretation.
Yes. That particular quote sounds like either Ti or Ni, though the rest of Krishnamurti's work sounds like dominant Ni.
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