Lee Morgan is a contributing guest writer for CelebrityTypes. As always with guest writers on the site, Lee’s piece represents his own insights and type assessments and not necessarily those of the site.
By Lee Morgan
When Nietzsche declared the death of God, what sort of statement was he making? What evidence did he have, and who was his muse? While we’re at it, how could Hume think the self is nothing but a bundle of perceptions? Wouldn’t everyone agree that they have a self, and that that self is real? Kierkegaard wrote lengthy discourses that make philosophers of language roll their eyes. And Wittgenstein believed his corpus contained earth-shattering insights. Was he wrong? How would we even determine that? Martin Luther King Jr. captivated the world with his cry for compassion. But was his dream just that – a dream? After all, studies in contemporary race relations turn many idealists cynical. So do those studies invalidate his speeches? Is it even possible to invalidate them?
The four individuals named above represent four different approaches to the formation of judgment. I contend that their approaches are archetypal. My article thus has a twofold purpose:
- First, I hope to prove that these four approaches constitute a complete set (that is to say: That they exhaust the ways in which we can form judgments).
- Second, I hope to relate these four archetypal ways of judging to Jung’s psychology of judgment.
With my intentions declared, let me attempt my first point.
1: The Four Approaches Constitute a Complete Set
Nietzsche was not a rationalist. In The Birth of Tragedy, he applauded Kant and Schopenhauer for (what he saw as) their victory over logic. He praised them for overcoming its intrinsic optimism (no doubt also taking a swipe at Leibniz’s work). But how did Nietzsche even know that logic needed overcoming in the first place? What did he know that Leibniz did not? Could it be that optimism was incongruent with the world as it presented itself to him? As he made clear in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche observed a conflict between logic and the world.[1] And unlike Leibniz, he sided with the world.[2]
But what if he had sided with logic like Leibniz did? Well, that is just what Kant and Schopenhauer did – in a certain sense, at least. And it is for that reason that Nietzsche applauded their efforts. Read through the prism of Nietzsche’s philosophy, both Schopenhauer and Kant are immeasurably important as logical destroyers – as ‘re-evaluators of value’ as he would put it.[3] For they had succeeded in doing what he could not: They had used logic as a tool against itself and twisted it into submission. Kant did not attack the ontological argument with empirical evidence. Rather, he applied cold, legalistic deductions to deprive it of its cogency. And Schopenhauer arrived at his famous pessimism after pushing the Kantian philosophy to its limit. Neither of their methods resembled Nietzsche’s happy facility for spirited and penetrating observations.
Let us return to Nietzsche’s proclamation on the death of God. We note, of course, that he meant it as a sociological statement and not a theological one. His meaning is that religion has outlived its welcome. It is no longer the benchmark for truth it once was.
With that in mind, let us take a closer look at his statement. Under what circumstances is it true? Unlike Kant’s refutation of the ontological argument, Nietzsche’s declaration is not always true. For example, it would hardly hold true in medieval times. Conversely, Nietzsche’s statement might also become false again in the future, say, if we enter a new dark age in the aftermath of nuclear war.
But the statement did possess a shocking truth when applied to nineteenth-century Europe. And for our purposes, this is the essential crux of his statement: It was true of the specific reality that he was trying to describe, and no amount of theoretical tinkering would change that. His statement was an extra-logical one. One that could never have been made, had he been more beholden to logic, the way Schopenhauer or Kant were.
Nietzsche was an empiricist in the same remorselessly chaotic sense that had been pioneered by Hume and Machiavelli. Though beholden to his influences, he nevertheless departed from them whenever they disagreed with the raw and unmediated observations that presented themselves directly to his cognition. His preference for Hume over Kant was not beholden to the quality of Hume’s logical analyses, but to Hume’s capacity for critically examining the raw matter of experience without recourse to biases such as the ‘thought-metaphysics’ of logic.[4] It was for the very same reason that Nietzsche rejected Schopenhauer’s petitions for compassion and fellow-feeling as a way to redeem the world of all its wretchedness: In the raw stuff of experience, Nietzsche saw no evidence that man deserved it.[5] And without thought-metaphysical biases, such as morality or logic, he had no reason to think otherwise.
Nietzsche makes no secret of the fact that he thought of himself as just as penetrating, just as ‘raw’ as Hume in his examination of the world. And in a certain sense, he even superseded Hume, for like Berkeley and Locke before him, Hume still drew conclusions from deduction, postulating principles and rules, even as he professed to smash these very devices into the ground in the name of his new ‘experiential’ philosophy.
Like the Socrates of the early Platonic dialogues, Hume followed an idiomatic cocktail of raw experience and detached deduction wherever it led him. In both cases, whatever incongruence resulted was no cause for alarm – on the contrary, it sometimes reads as if it was almost a source of pleasure for these men.
Hume’s empiricism so contradicted what was ‘self-evident’ that his readers laughed at him, just as many people still reject his conclusions today. However, they do not do so because they present a competing philosophical critique, but because they feel instinctively that the conclusions presented by Hume cannot possibly be true. So is debate even possible when fundamental instinct and temperament seemingly have more to say than argument? Remember that it was Kant and Schopenhauer who defeated Leibniz, not Nietzsche. Are we born into different psychological categories, with no hope of truly reaching those not of our own category?
At this point we will introduce Kierkegaard, the foremost philosopher of subjectivity. Like Nietzsche, he studied man’s existential predicament and his relation to the modern world. But while Nietzsche tore down all thought-metaphysics in his effort to penetrate into the stuff of objective, raw experience (which he identified with liberation), Kierkegaard found liberation in the subjective standpoint – by finding himself in himself, so to speak. In this respect, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are opposites.
To Kierkegaard, truth was found in subjectivity. He focused his inquiries on himself, considering man and the world primarily in the way that they affected him. His thought retains the same empirical quality as is found in Nietzsche’s work. But his subject is himself and not the world. Kierkegaard’s evidence was his personal feelings – the subjective evocations that presented themselves to consciousness as he ventured into himself.[6]
Finally, to complete our set of four, let us turn to Martin Luther King Jr. In our introduction, we have already touched on the idealism of his dream and contrasted it with the rather cynical picture often painted by studies of real-world race relations. Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche could have painted such a picture, since the ideal of Dr. King is altogether different from their experiential approaches. Dr. King speaks to the better angels of our nature by invoking a better vision of ourselves and a more exalted idea of what interpersonal reality could and should be like. It is an appeal to a potential. Not just any potential, but a rationally formulated one. It might not be immediately attainable, but our mutual recognition of this vision as an ideal – as better versions of ourselves – suffices. It has value too, and very real effects, spreading through the social fabric of society like ripples through water.
2: Relation of the Archetypes of Judgment to the Psychology of Judgment
We form judgments in response to problems. But for any given problem, a variety of strategies are available. Psychologically, most of us seem to have an unstated preference for certain types of judgments over others. What’s more, these preferences even tend to determine which problems we find it worthwhile to investigate.
There are two fundamental forms of judgments:
- A priori judgments, which are derived from abstractions and principles, but cannot be proven (or disproven) through observation.
- A posteriori judgments, which are derived from observations and cannot be proven (or disproven) through abstraction or principles.
Each type of judgment can then be modulated further into objective and subjective kinds. Some people have trouble understanding how Kant’s philosophy could be regarded as subjective, since his outlook is very dispassionate, legalistic, and even “scientific,” so to speak. However, as the site admins have pointed out, the selection of premises and principles allowed into the analysis, as well as which counter-principles to consider, is ultimately up to the subject, wherefore we call this tendency “subjective,” even though it usually is logically valid.[7]
We are thus left with four archetypes of judgment:
- Subjective a priori judgments. Kant.
- Objective a priori judgments. King.
- Subjective a posteriori judgments. Kierkegaard.
- Objective a posteriori judgments. Nietzsche.
In my earlier work, I referred to Fi/Te as the angular axis and to Fe/Ti as the rounded judgment axis.[8] We now see that the angular judgment axis is thus a preference for a posteriori judgments while the rounded axis is a preference for a priori ones. I thus concur with what Boye Akinwande and the site admins have said in their earlier work.[9] The rounded judgment axis is principled and abstract, while the angular axis is empirical and evidential. The latter is like a detective with his facts; the former like a mathematician with his identities. Angular judgers view progress as the changing of a posteriori facts, but rounded judgers view progress as the realization of universal truths that are true, always, yet only approached ever less imperfectly by imperfect human beings. They are two ways of viewing the world; two ways of describing reality.
NOTES
[1] Nietzsche: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks §11
[2] Nietzsche: Human, All too Human §11
[3] Nietzsche: Ecce Homo: Why I am a Destiny §1
[4] Nietzsche: KGW viii.2.4 (1887)
[5] Schopenhauer, quoted in Cartwright: Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge University Press 2010) p. 78
[6] Kierkegaard: Journal Entry, Journals §1A
[7] CelebrityTypes: The Functions: Te vs. Ti (CelebrityTypes 2014)
[8] Morgan: Determining Function Axes, Part 9 (CelebrityTypes 2016)
[9] Akinwande: Determining Function Axes, Part 3 (CelebrityTypes 2015), cf. Gregersen & Smith: Determining Function Axes, Part 1 (CelebrityTypes 2012)