Jung in Plain Language, Part 1: Te and Ti

By Ryan Smith

As with all functions, there are two types of Thinking: Te and Ti. One is fed from unconscious premises, governed by what is important to the individual (Ti), and one is fed from external data and direct sense-perception (Te).

Extroverted functions are oriented to external data and to cognizing external data objectively, that is, as it exists without human cognitive filtering.

All four judging functions (Te, Ti, Fe, Fi) must have a standard to judge by. For the extroverted judging functions (Te and Fe) the standard is supplied by external conditions – things and phenomena that are plain to see and observe.

Te is not just concerned with facts like “this phone weighs 400 grams.” Te is also concerned with ideas; however, these ideas must be external, “objective” ideas. By contrast, Ti judges on the basis of internal, “subjective” ideas. For example, in explaining the success of the iPhone, Ti will more naturally stress the “internal” aspects of its success such as the iPhone being associated with a certain lifestyle, with its owner being thought to have certain values (such as ingenuity and individuality), and the owner generally being “ahead of the curve” with regards to social trends. By contrast, the Te function is more likely to stress external parameters, such as the iPhone being amongst the first phones to introduce a touchscreen and Apple’s distinct brand of aesthetics.

Though Te is fed by external data, the data that feeds it needs not be concrete. It can also be abstract as long as the seed of the data is supplied from external factors. For example, Te can compare the specific amount of iPhones sold and ascribe approximate values to each of the new features introduced by the iPhone in order to form an overall, abstract matrix that can explain the relation between a new phone on the market and its predicted success. However, the Te type will be largely blind to the elements that are precisely not reducible to objective parameters. For example, an abstract Te matrix for predicting a phone’s sales may say that whenever the quality of a given phone’s touchscreen increases by a certain amount, its sales will increase by a proportional amount.

But at the same time, such a Te matrix will be blind to whether a given innovation in touchscreen technology will change the fundamental perception of the product. To be concerned with the overall idea that the new phone communicates to the world is the antithesis of Te; it is the domain of Ti. For example, when the iPhone came out, it was thoroughly tested by the engineers at Nokia and by all the objective standards they could think of (such as signal strength, durability, and battery life), it was plain that the iPhone was nothing to worry about. Yet in the end, Nokia lost out. The consumer wanted to be perceived as part of the “in-crowd” more than he wanted increased battery life and durability. It was the irrationality – the un-objectivity – of the consumer that brought Nokia to its knees.[1]

In this way we may say that Ti is concerned with the qualities of the object (what ideas does it evoke?), whereas Te is concerned with the quantities of the object (what properties does the object have and to what degree does it have them?).

Thus we can say that when a qualitatively new idea is bound to be a game changer, then Ti will be more likely to have an edge in arriving at that idea. But when we need to predict how a given entity will perform within an already established framework, then Te will have the advantage. For example, in the discovery of evolution in biology, Ti types had the advantage in discovering the problems with the existing theories and in finding out what the new overall theory (evolution) was going to be like. But once evolution was accepted, Te types had the advantage in predicting how well a given species would do in a given environment, or how many generations of fruit flies or microbes it would take for a colony to evolve a given mutation in an experiment.

How to Determine Te/Ti

When we are confronted with the use of Thinking and we want to figure out whether it is Te or Ti, we must therefore ask: By what standard does it judge? Does it rely on external data or is it in the final instance governed by internal ideas? Likewise we must ask: Are the conclusions that it draws directed outwardly (this phone will sell) or inwardly (this phone will communicate the idea of ingenuity)?

In determining whether Thinking is Te or Ti, it is no proof to say that since Thinking is concerned with a specific object (and not an overall principle), then Thinking must be Te and not Ti. In the same way, it is not enough to state that because a person’s Thinking is concerned with a principle, then it must be Ti. Both Te and Ti can be either abstract or concrete and both can be concerned with either objects or principles.

When Thinking is occupied with a specific, external object, such as a phone, it is true that the Thinking is just now operating in the external domain. But even if Thinking is just now focused on the external domain, it still has a direction inwards or outwards and that direction remains an essential characteristic of the function. If the Thinking is extroverted, it leads from the object to the principles that can objectively be extracted from the object and back to the object again.

For example, Te will say: “This phone has a touchscreen of this high a resolution. I know from analysis of previous data that similar phones with this kind of touchscreen will sell this much. Therefore this particular phone can objectively be expected to sell this much.”

But with Ti it is different. Here we are ultimately concerned with an internal idea that does not directly pertain to the object (in this case the phone). So Ti will seize upon the internal idea in explaining the success of the iPhone (e.g. that it invokes a certain image) and neglect or coerce external facts that might explain the success (e.g. that its screen was better than that of any competing product at the time).

Thus we can say that, while Te will go from the thing, to the principle, and then back to the thing, Ti will go from the principle, to the thing, and then back to the principle again.

Intellectual Te Types

When we see Te in businessmen, technicians, and experimental scientists, the extroverted direction of their Thinking is obvious enough. But when we look at philosophers, we must ask whether ETJ philosophers are really concerned with ideas or whether they are just forming grand data matrices abstracted from external experience. If a Te philosopher predominantly forms his concepts based on external experience, his concepts are wont to concern us all as they represent the collective facts and experiences known to us in abstracted form.

A good example of such abstracted collective experience may be found in the work of the psychologist H.J Eysenck who crunched the numbers of any and all psychological phenomena known to his time, pronouncing clearly what was “sense” and what was “nonsense”.[2] After Eysenck, psychologists could no longer go about pronouncing this or that to be true without hard evidence to back up their claims. Thus, by the work of H.J. Eysenck, the collective, external facts and experiences were ordered into “sense” and “nonsense” in an irrefutable way that could not help but concern everyone with an earnest bid to being taken seriously.

However, if the concepts of an ETJ intellectual are not abstracted from external experience, they are probably derived from the tradition of his community or the intellectual atmosphere of his time. That is why ETJs (even ENTJs and even ENTJ philosophers) will often be found to have a significant element of practicality and conventionality to their thinking. On the one hand, that makes them less interesting for posterity. But on the other hand, that makes them highly relevant for their own time and also instructive if one wants to deduce the values and atmosphere of their time. For example, Aristotle would say that a son can never disown his father because the father is the very source of the son’s life. While this represents little in the way of analytical truth, it still provides us with invaluable clues to the social atmosphere of Ancient Greece.

Another way to highlight the difference is that with Te, the conditions that form the basis of judgment are external and outside the person that is making the judgment, whereas with Ti, the conditions that form the basis of judgment are inside the person. Therefore, two Te types will be more likely to arrive at the same judgment on a matter than two Ti types will. For when two Te types set out to judge, they use the same external premises (such as the resolution of the iPhone’s touchscreen), whereas when two Ti types set out to judge, they each use their own internal premise, namely each party’s own idea of how the introduction of the iPhone will qualitatively change the market for mobile devices. Obviously the premises that are given priority by Ti have far less of a connection to external data and therefore the judgments of Ti types will often differ more widely amongst themselves than the judgments of Te types.

The Logic is the Same

It must be said that while the two kinds of Thinking are different in the standards that they select for the basis of judging, the logic of both Thinking functions is the same. There is not one kind of logic for Te and another for Ti; it is the orientation and selection of the premises which are used to form judgments that are mirrored between Te and Ti, but the logic is the same.

Because of its dependence upon external objects, Te can appear as an uncreative function that is shackled to objective reality. To someone who doesn’t appreciate Te, the process can seem like an endless sequencing of impersonal and unimaginative facts that are just reeled off without end. It is as if it keeps feeding on objective data and then turning out general ideas about objective data with no thought for what it all means. In the eyes of an antagonist, it can seem as if Te can only draw an exciting and imaginative conclusion when the external facts are already there to allow and “give permission” for Te to do it. Hence Te can be perceived as joyless and unfree, even in spite of the fact that it is extremely adroit in predicting and optimizing anything that can be analyzed by means of previously existing external data and experience.

With Ti, however, because of its dependence on the internal idea rather than external data, Ti always risks making use of sophistic and finicky arguments and the Ti type can easily be perceived as a crank. For example, by discounting external data, the philosopher David Hume could postulate that there is nothing in the domain of internal ideas themselves that suggests that because the sun has always risen every day up till now, then the sun will also rise tomorrow.[3] Likewise, by disregarding external data, Hume could also doubt whether cause and effect are really connected. Though external data and sense-perception suggest that eating food relieves you of hunger, there is really nothing within the realm of internal ideas to suggest that it was actually the food that satiated your appetite.  Hume’s arguments appeal to professional philosophers, but his arguments are clearly sophistic to many.

As for being potentially perceived as a crank, since the Ti type uses internal ideas that are derived from his own consciousness to evaluate external occurrences, he forever runs the risk of using the wrong idea to evaluate the data. By “wrong idea” I mean an idea that is not warranted by the external data. For example, I know a prominent anti-feminist who is bound to ascribe any bad news concerning men’s lot in society to feminism. When a report was released describing how women’s life expectancy is, on average, higher than men’s, he was quick to seize upon the internal idea that feminism was depriving men of their standing in society, thus exerting a deteriorating effect on men’s health. However, on close inspection of the external data, it was soon discovered than men’s average life expectancy had always been lower than women’s, even before the rise of feminism. The idea that feminism caused a condition that was older than feminism itself was clearly an internal idea that was derived from the Ti type’s own consciousness and did not fit the data. Thus, while the anti-feminist was intellectually in earnest the whole time, he was nevertheless perceived as a crank who was capable of making anything about his personal dislike of feminism.

Conclusion

Such are the differences between Te and Ti. The intellectual fashions are such that one function will often appear more glamorous than another. According to Jung, Te was deemed more glamorous than Ti at the start of the 20th century. Yet now, at the start of the 21st century, it seems that Ti is often deemed more glamorous than Te. But neither function is really less fruitful or creative than the other. Each merely serves a different end.

There are some who would divide the two into distinct spheres of influence, saying, for example, that Te is the domain of business and experimental science, whereas Ti should be the domain of philosophy proper and pure mathematics. But not only is such a division impossible, it is also inadvisable. Left entirely to their own devices, both Te and Ti will be of limited validity, so each needs to be influenced by the other in a sound exchange.

When only Te dominates, all Thinking processes become a mere appendix to what already objectively exists and Thinking is no longer capable of developing innovative concepts that are truly and qualitatively new. Human thinking will be a mere imitation of the data that already exists, never going beyond the data of external facts and experience. It will be self-referential and even circular. To return to the iPhone example, we would keep making better and better iPhones with a higher and higher screen resolution, but we would never move beyond the iPhone and on to the next revolution in mobile devices.

Conversely, if we were to have only Ti, all Thinking processes would be relegated to the type of ivory tower thinking that predominated in Kant’s philosophy. We would have lots of rich, original concepts, and metaphysical and epistemological speculations, but we would have little ability to determine which concepts and ideas were fertile and which were merely dead ends and intellectual window dressing. We might make qualitatively new discoveries from time to time, such as a new star in physics or a new periodic element in chemistry, but we would have only the faintest, most basic idea of how one discovery relates to another, and their potential uses and more precise properties would remain undiscovered. In short, we would have a big pie in the sky with little actual progress.

In the end, the best recipe for success is probably a cross-fertilization like the one that took place between Bill Gates and Paul Allen in the first years of Microsoft. As Paul Allen recalls:

“My ideas were definitely key to the company. [But] Bill would test my ideas. [For each idea that was accepted] I would come to him with another 10 ideas that never went anywhere – he was the sanity check on the flow of ideas.”[4]

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Jung in Plain Language © Ryan Smith and CelebrityTypes International 2014.
Image in the article commissioned for this publication from artist Darwin Cen.