Articles attempting to link Jungian typology to aesthetic preferences have always been popular, but unfortunately many of them are of poor quality, along the lines of “ISTPs like Bloodhound Gang and ESFJs like roses and rainbows.” With the help of a prior study by Joan Evans, D.Litt., we will nevertheless attempt to give an outline of the aesthetic preferences that usually follow a given function.
In doing so, however, we should not forget that Jung said in Psychological Types §895 that type portraits can never apply to all members of a given type. Likewise, Jung’s theory primarily says something about the cognitive functions and not so much about the specific psychic material handled by those functions. Aesthetic preferences are psychic material, not psychic functions. In other words, the relation of functions to aesthetic preferences is correlative at best.
The Psychological Aesthetics of Ni
Written by the CT Admin Team, with inspiration from the work of Joan Evans.
The four Intuitive types (ENPs and INJs) see not what is, but what may be. The Ne types are always on the lookout for new possibilities arising in the external situation. Any new and innovative combinations, anything about-to-be fascinates him, and his mind is constantly and restlessly perceiving new possibilities in the outer world.
The introverted Intuitive, however, is different. He is not concerned with external facts as these are given to him. His perception is subjective and focused on the inner images that unconsciously arise in his mind. It is his own unconscious that provides him with the materials for his vision, and once the image stands shining before him, he feels compelled to speak his gospel to the outer world. In this way it may be said that while the Ne type is innovative, perceiving new combinations with great flexibility, the Ni type is rather inventive, as he conceives something new of his own accord and applies it to the world with great inflexibility and intransigence.
In giving an outline of the Ni aesthetic we may say that since his extroverted perception is inferior and slow he appreciates pictures that are calm and well laid-out, so that they are not too unwieldy or overpowering for his inferior extroverted perception. Likewise, since the Ni type is predominantly given to introverted reflection, the role of art in his life is more like a backdrop to his own mental processes than it is a work of art on its own terms in his eyes. Finally, since his inferior function is Se there is a tendency in him to abstract from the world and pay only a faint attention to it, while being entirely engrossed in his own mindset.
The psychological aesthetic of the Ni type may thus be summarized as follows:
- A Love of the Calm, Dignified Quietude
- Art as a Trigger to Prompt Mental Reflection
- A Tendency to Abstract from the World
We will now go over these in turn.
1. A Love of the Calm, Dignified Quietude
The Ni type is slower in his aesthetic than other types. He is more personal and distinct than the other types previously discussed (Te aesthetics; Ti aesthetics; Ne aesthetics). The Ni type is mostly concerned with the mental and speculative significance of a thing – what he perceives to be its essential being – and so the aesthetic of the Ni type may be said to be a Platonic aesthetic in the same way that Plato perceived everything in the external world to be simply pale shadows of the ideal forms. (E.g. to Plato, you may have a cup in your hand but, being something worldly, the cup is bound to have imperfections. It is a poor imitation of the Ideal Cup, which exists only in the mind.)
To the Ni type, then, art should represent something that is of mental significance and not merely something that is beautiful on its own terms. For this reason, the Ni type is most likely to find those things aesthetic that prompt his understanding and provokes him into a deeper reflection on the true, ideal, meaning of things. The Ni type wants to capture reality and study it on his own terms; to pause it, mute it. Reality should submit itself to his pace, not the other way around.
Therefore, when we look at the Ni type’s taste in the visual arts, we are bound to find that he appreciates pictures that display a certain dignity and quietude, for these qualities allow him to enjoy the work of art at his own pace. In other words, the work of art should submit itself to his gaze, not the other way around; he feels that he should be allowed to enjoy the work of art on his own terms rather than having the art piece dictating its terms to him.
It is for this same reason that we find a love of simplicity and predictability in the Ni aesthetic. Where the Ne type was bound to appreciate unconventional and eccentric viewpoints, as in the case of Tintoretto’s Last Supper, the Ni type is the very converse: His is the clean, predictable and frontal viewpoint as seen in the case of Vermeer. Never has a picture been painted more remorselessly frontal than in the case of Vermeer’s Little Street. But even in the instances where Vermeer has captured movement – as in the case of his Milkmaid – we find the same inclination towards control.
Though the maid is pouring milk right before our eyes, a great calm pervades the picture. The pouring appears motionless, as if waiting for us to give the go-ahead before another drop of milk may enter the bowl. There is a great stillness here, but it is not the statue-like fixity that we find in the aesthetic of the Ti type; we can feel the maid’s flesh and blood; get a sense of her weight and presence, her sturdy build and the dignity with which she goes about her daily work. Above all, in spite of Vermeer’s technical brilliance there is a great understatement and simplicity in the picture, which harks back to the fact that the Ni type does not need much from the outer world; his inner life supplies him with further stimulation and with all the riches that he needs.
2. Art as a Trigger to Prompt Mental Reflection
Temperamentally, the Ni type is given to slow, deep reflection, which is often of a deeply personal nature (but which the Ni type himself is bound to believe is impersonal or “objective”). For this reason, as well because of his repressed Se, the written work is actually much more “natural” to him than any engagement in the visual arts. To the Ni type, it is the mental significance and not the specific appearance of the artwork that counts – to him, the artwork’s physical form is merely a trigger for what goes on in his inner world.
That is why, in his considerations on the aesthetic, Plato said that the sublime was nothing flashy or loud, but rather that which depended on simplicity, predictability, and grace. To Plato, the truth that is found in art is a mere appearance of truth and ranks far below the actual, speculative truth of the intellect that is found through deep reflection.
To Plato, therefore, if art assumes a corrupting form – a noisy and invasive form – then that art becomes disturbing to the mental processes that are the crux of the Ni aesthetic, the whole purpose of it. Then one might as well ban that art:
“Forbid [the artists] to represent the corrupt disposition, the licentious, the illiberal, the graceless … in any other product of their art. … If unable to obey [they should be] forbidden to practice their art among us, so that [we] may not be … among symbols that lead us astray.” – Plato, The Republic, III, 401b
The taste of the Ni type in the visual arts lies far from direct self-expression. With the Ne type, even his landscapes are imbued with that swirling movement that comes so naturally to him. But as we have seen, a great calm is one of the central features of the visual aesthetic of the Ni type. In this way the Ni type is the inverse of the Ne type: To the Ne type, the artistic expression should be violent enough to break through ordinary reality and penetrate through to the transcendental. But where the Ne type is trying to break through to the transcendental through some change in the outer world, the Ni type prefers instead to approach the transcendental through the calm reflections of his own mind.
Again, the imperative that emerges out of the Ni aesthetic is that art should not merely be art, but a trigger to stimulate the further mental reflection of the Ni type. As the Ni type is a subjective, introverted perception type, he really only needs a very small impetus from the outside before he can withdraw into himself to ponder things amid the archetypical images of his own unconscious. This accounts for the extreme calm that is so often present in the Ni aesthetic: The work of art should only be a starting point; an offset from which the observer can form his own inner images – images out of which the Ni type can later conceive something completely new out of his own accord.
This is what C.G. Jung was talking about when, in the preface to The Red Book, he said that:
“When I pursued the inner images [that was] the most important time of my life. Everything else [I did was] derived from this.” – C.G. Jung, The Red Book, W.W. Norton & Co. 2009 ed., p. vii
Incidentally, this psychological predisposition to rely on the intellect, rather than being passionate about the aesthetic on its own terms, is also why the Fi types are often considered to be more of a “true artist” than the Ni types. Such quarrels about who is the “true artist” are meaningless, of course, but the stereotype does hold one grain of truth, namely that the Fi types strive to do justice to the aesthetic on its own terms where, to the Ni types, the aesthetic is often intermingled with some intellectual conception.
In literature, this is the schism between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Marcel Proust: In his In Search of Lost Time, Proust describes everything in vivid aesthetic detail but without judging the action or the characters. There are no conclusions that the author invites us to draw, no insights that we are prompted to realize; we are simply rustled along for the ride. Not so with Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: Here, Dostoevsky endeavors to show us that man cannot live nihilistically.
To do so, Dostoevsky pursues the idea of a “rational nihilism” as far as he can in order to show how, to his mind, the idea of a “rational nihilism” will ultimately lead to ideas of a “rational murder”. Dostoevsky’s book is not just a work of fiction, but also a work of moral philosophy, and it is this double nature of the book that illustrates the duality of the Ni type with regards to aesthetics: They understand the aesthetic, but they do not surrender themselves completely to it. They also have a mental-intellectual side that is just as significant to them as the world of art itself.
3. A Tendency to Abstract from the World
Like all inferior functions, the inferior Se in Ni types can only enter his consciousness in islands. As we have already noted, any engagement with the visual arts is therefore somewhat unnatural to the Ni type. But, conversely, this also means that should the beauty of a particular painting suddenly manifest itself to him, he will speak with the eruptive force of the inferior function: With a candor and naivete that cannot but command respect as it is obvious that it is completely devoid of pretense. His engagement with the visual arts is therefore one of unforced originality as long as there is a channel open to his inferior Se.
But, being an inferior function, the Ni type is quickly overpowered by his Se if it is active for too long. As a psychological expression of this guardedness, we often find a tendency towards a cubic and closed composition in the visual arts of the Ni type. We have already mentioned Vermeer as an instance of the Ni aesthetic. In his Milkmaid there is already a tendency to enclose the composition in a small cubic room, but in his The Art of Painting, Vermeer goes all-in and gives us a clean, frontal view of a small room with a curtain as his front-piece, so that the cube-like design of the picture becomes complete.
This same tendency towards cube-like and closed composition is present to various degrees in the paintings of Caravaggio, Hugo van der Goes, and Domenico Veneziano who might all be said to exemplify the Ni aesthetic. The psychological significance of this cube-like and closed composition harks back to the Ni type’s yearning to be able to detach from the world at his own leisure: A desire that the external world should be something that one can tuck away in a parcel – a box where one can merely put the lid back on whenever the contents prove unmanageable.
Penultimately, a word about colors in the Ni aesthetic: Many classicists have noted that there is an absence of color-sense in Plato, and the same may be said to be true of the Ni aesthetic in general. We may say that his use of color is limited but it is not, like the Te type, that he does not have a sense of color; it is just that he is very cautious and understated in his appreciation of color. There is a tendency in him to shy away from pure whites, preferring cream whites or yellowish whites instead, and whenever he starts upon a lightness of color, his hues soon fade into deep, dark colors. The greatest example of this use of color is probably found in the Lamentation of van der Goes where even his brightest whites are silvery rather than white, and where every speck of light soon fades into a monochrome darkness.
Finally, his music: Because the Ni type represses Se, the visual arts do not come directly into his consciousness the way music does, and for this reason one will more often find a love of music in the Ni type than a love of the visual arts. Again, the Ni type would agree with Plato that:
“Music is sovereign [of the arts] because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take the strongest hold upon it, bringing with them an imparting grace, if one is rightly trained.” – Plato, The Republic, III, 401d
As indeed the Ni type Schopenhauer agreed with Plato that, while the visual arts imitate the external, happenstance manifestations of the Will-that-drives-the-world, music represents the pure Will itself. (As, likewise, Schopenhauer said that paintings must evoke calm, because to him beauty is the temporary silencing of the Will.)
In music, like in the visual arts, the Ni type appreciates works that allow him to tune in and out at his own leisure. If he is of grandiose taste, he may like Beethoven in particular, but the music that really seems to fit the Ni aesthetic is not found among the older composers. Rather, it is found among modern minimalist composers like Philip Glass. It is in the slowly evolving themes of these minimalists that he finds the same graceful simplicity that he appreciates in the visual arts.