{"id":7335,"date":"2016-10-25T12:04:43","date_gmt":"2016-10-25T12:04:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/?p=7335"},"modified":"2020-06-20T22:38:48","modified_gmt":"2020-06-20T22:38:48","slug":"the-archetypes-of-judgment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.idrlabs.com\/articles\/2016\/10\/the-archetypes-of-judgment\/","title":{"rendered":"The Archetypes\u00a0of Judgment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lee Morgan is a contributing guest writer for CelebrityTypes. As always with guest writers on the site, Lee\u2019s piece represents his own insights and type assessments and not necessarily those of the site.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>By Lee Morgan<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Nietzsche declared the death of God, what sort of statement was he making? What evidence did he have, and who was his muse?\u00a0While we’re at it, how\u00a0could Hume think the\u00a0self is nothing but a bundle of perceptions? Wouldn\u2019t everyone agree that they have a self, and that that self is real? Kierkegaard wrote lengthy discourses that make philosophers of language\u00a0roll their eyes. And Wittgenstein\u00a0believed his corpus\u00a0contained 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\u00a0his dream just that \u2013 a dream? After all, studies in contemporary race relations turn many\u00a0idealists cynical. So do those studies invalidate his speeches? Is it even possible to invalidate them?<\/p>\n

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\u00a0purpose:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. First, I hope to prove that these four approaches constitute\u00a0a complete set (that is to say: That they exhaust the ways in which we can form judgments).<\/li>\n
  2. Second, I hope to relate these four archetypal ways of judging to Jung’s psychology of judgment.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    With my intentions declared, let me attempt my first point.<\/p>\n

    1: The Four Approaches Constitute\u00a0a Complete Set<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Nietzsche was not a rationalist. In\u00a0The Birth of Tragedy<\/em>,\u00a0he applauded Kant and Schopenhauer for\u00a0(what he saw as) their victory over logic. He praised\u00a0them for overcoming its\u00a0intrinsic optimism (no doubt also taking a swipe at\u00a0Leibniz’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<\/em>, Nietzsche\u00a0observed a conflict between logic and the world.[1] And unlike Leibniz, he sided with the world.[2]<\/p>\n

    But what if he had sided with logic like\u00a0Leibniz did? Well, that is just\u00a0what Kant and Schopenhauer\u00a0did \u2013 in a certain sense, at least. And it is for that reason that Nietzsche applauded their efforts. Read through the prism of Nietzsche\u2019s philosophy, both Schopenhauer and Kant are immeasurably important as logical destroyers \u2013 as \u2018re-evaluators of value\u2019 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\u00a0arrived 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.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    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\u2019s statement might also become false again in the future, say, if we enter a new dark age in the aftermath of nuclear war.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    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\u2019s logical analyses, but to Hume\u2019s capacity for critically examining the raw matter of experience without recourse to biases such as the \u2018thought-metaphysics\u2019 of logic.[4] It was for the very same reason that Nietzsche rejected Schopenhauer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

    Nietzsche makes no secret of the fact that he thought of himself as just as penetrating, just as \u2018raw\u2019 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 \u2018experiential\u2019 philosophy.<\/p>\n

    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 \u2013 on the contrary, it sometimes reads as if it was almost a source of pleasure for these men.<\/p>\n

    Hume’s empiricism so contradicted what was \u2018self-evident\u2019 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?<\/p>\n

    At this point we will introduce Kierkegaard, the foremost philosopher of subjectivity. Like Nietzsche, he studied man\u2019s 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 \u2013 by finding himself in himself, so to speak. In this respect, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are opposites.<\/p>\n

    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\u2019s evidence was his personal feelings \u2013 the subjective evocations that presented themselves to consciousness as he ventured into himself.[6]<\/p>\n

    Finally, to complete our set of four, let us turn to Martin Luther King Jr.\u00a0In our introduction, we have already touched on the idealism\u00a0of\u00a0his 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 \u2013 as better versions of ourselves \u2013 suffices. It has value too, and very real effects, spreading through the social fabric of society like ripples through water.<\/p>\n

    2: Relation of the Archetypes of Judgment to the Psychology of Judgment<\/strong><\/p>\n

    We form judgments in response to problems. But\u00a0for any given problem, a variety of strategies are available.\u00a0Psychologically, most of us seem to have an unstated preference for certain types of judgments over others. What\u2019s more, these preferences even tend to determine which problems we find it worthwhile to investigate.<\/p>\n

    There are two fundamental forms of judgments:<\/p>\n