Judging/Perceiving
Judging
“When
we think, it is in order to judge or to reach a conclusion, and when we
feel it is in order to attach a proper value to something; sensations and
intuition, on the other hand, are perceptive – they make us aware of what is
happening, but do not interpret or evaluate it. They do
not act selectively according to principles, but are simply receptive of what
happens. But ‘what happens’ is merely nature, and
therefore essentially non-rational.”
Jung calls the
first duad sensibility (or feeling) and
intellect. There are
two ways of analyzing what you perceive around you. You can
base your life on evaluating things by how they feel; then you will have a
wonderfully differentiated and developed sensibility. Your
appreciation of the arts and the nuances and the richness of life will be great.
On the other hand, you can judge things in terms of intellectual
decisions – right and wrong, propitious and unpropitious, prudent and imprudent.
If you make your decisions on only one basis, the other is not being
developed.
(Western) society requires men to develop the thinking, intellectual function, while it requires women to develop the feeling function, sensibility. Of course, whichever function isn’t stressed takes on an inferior quality.
It is the
dialogue between these two functions that educates us. The
inferior function – whether intellect or sensibility – remains in the
unconscious.
Intellect and feeling, however, are difficult to put into one harness – they
conflict with one another by definition. Whoever identifies
with an intellectual standpoint will occasionally find his feeling confronting
him like an enemy in the guise of the
anima; conversely, an intellectual
animus
will make violent attacks on the feeling standpoint.
…
the fact that the perception or seeing of inner images requires an attitude of
feminine receptivity, whereas the ability to grasp and understand what has been
seen is made possible by the masculine mind. TGL 77
The intellect is undeniably useful in its own field, but is a great cheat and illusionist outside of it whenever it tries to manipulate values.
It would seem that one can pursue any science with the intellect alone except psychology, whose subject – the psyche – has more than the two aspects mediated by sense-perception and thinking.
The function of value – feeling – is an integral part of our conscious
orientation and ought not to be missing in a psychological judgment of any
scope, otherwise the model we are trying to build of the real process will be
incomplete. Every psychic process has a value quality attached to it, namely its
feeling-tone. This indicates the degree to which the subject is
affected
by the process or how much it means to him.
When
(a man) does come forth with sentiment,
the kind of books or plays or music he likes will tend to be thin and trite;
they’re no good at all.
Well, you can’t argue with a woman whose
perception has been primarily developed in terms of feeling functions; her
decisions do not come from logical connections.
“Here we should speak of
“sensation’ when the sense organs are involved, and of intuition if we are
dealing with a kind of perception which cannot be traced directly to conscious
sensory experience. I have
therefore defined sensation as
perception
through conscious sensory processes,
and intuition as
perception by way of unconscious
contents and connections”
If you always live in terms of the
potentialities of things – the intuitive realities – then you’re not living in
terms of the actualities, the sensual realities. And of
course, vice-versa.
Intuition is the primary political
talent.
It is the tact for time, the sense of
the possible. The intuitive person sees the future
and past stretching out like ribbons of probability.
Sensation
By sensation I understand what the French psychologists call "la fonction du réel", which is the sum-total of my awareness of external facts given to me through the function of my senses. So I think that the French term "la fonction du réel" explains it in the most comprehensive way. Sensation tells me that something is: it does not tell me what it is and it does not tell me other things about that something; it only tells me that something is.
anoesis \an-oh-EE-sis\, noun:
A state of mind consisting of pure sensation or emotion without cognitive content.
When
it comes up, it comes up compulsively; it can’t be argued
with. So these two are sides that have to be developed; one will be
inferior and the other superior. This works like the sex and power
balance, but it is a totally different matter; sex and power, for our purposes,
are unrelated.
He (Jung) felt you have to balance out
these competing functions – sex versus power, intellect versus sensibility,
intuition versus sensation – in order to escape the
enantiodromia of the midlife
crisis.