Feeling
What does Lenore mean by "Feeling"? What is the difference between Extraverted Feeling and Introverted Feeling?
Quasi-defining statements
p. 318: "Extraverted Feeling is conceptual and analytic. It encourages us to make rational choices, to measure our options for relationship against an external standard of behaviors. What distinguishes this function from Extraverted Thinking is the fact that relatedness involves human beings, not impersonal abstractions."
p. 320: "[Functions] operate separately from our emotional system. When we use a function often enough, we’re emotionally invested in the choices it encourages, but this is true of all functions, and it’s not the same thing as acting directly on what we feel"
Hypothesis: (As a Semiotic Attitude) Signs are meaningful only insofar as they relate to needs
Emotions are the expression of whether a person's needs are being met or not. Signs of emotion are thus the truest and most important signs, because they relate to the most important matters.
Fe: Every need relates a person to part of the socially shared world, at a specific time and place. For example, "I need you to cook dinner tonight." A need makes you part of the world outside yourself rather than a self-contained entity. It gives you a stake in the social arena.
Everything that a person says or does expresses a choice about who he has common bonds with: where that person's life is embedded. "Life is with people."
A person declares his loyalties via arbitrary behaviors: behaviors that show that he is not merely pursuing his needs on his own, just efficient means to an end, but that his needs overlap with specific other people. Through arbitrary behaviors whose meaning derives from shared social convention, you cast your lot with others. Your fate is intrinsically bound to the fate of those for whom you have feelings.
Fi: A need exists entirely within the person. For example, "I need food" or "I need companionship". It can be met in an infinity of different ways. I might get food and companionship from having you cook dinner for me tonight, but I might get my needs met in other ways, too. A need and its conditions of fulfillment are completely different things.
Everything that a person says or does expresses his unique needs and callings. These needs and callings are intrinsic to the person. They are not embedded in or related to the world outside him, though whether they are met or not might depend on his surroundings. "We are in the world but not of the world."
Each living being expresses its needs differently, but the needs themselves are universally understandable. We understand the signs that others give off via empathy: by tapping into that universal vocabulary through which we can understand their need as if it were our own. We do this by abstracting out the differences of background and environment that cause the same needs to be expressed differently.
Judaism and Christianity
Judaism would seem to be an Fe religion while Christianity is an Fi religion.
Judaism is about a "chosen people". It's one tribe, a big family in a world that contains many families. In practice, the religion consists primarily of rituals through which people transmit practical wisdom about getting along in the world with others (the Fe view of ethics), and indicate that they cast their lot with the Jewish people.
Christianity is about God's unconditional love for all his children. There is only one family, and it includes everyone. Christianity focuses on getting in touch with God, doing good works only because they are good, and thereby transcending all divisions of tribe and family.
A possible refinement to the religion idea. While Genesis is certainly Fe, and the rest of the Torah is to a lesser degree, it is not a very clean split, as the religion as a whole emphasizes serious questioning of absolutely everything, and actually encourages arguing with God, in an almost Ne way. So while Judaism is more Fe than Christianity, it is not predominantly Fe as a religion or a culture, only genesis is.
What about Genesis leads you to say that it's Fe? --Ben Kovitz
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