Seba.Health

Concept · Seba Knowledge Graph

Feeling as Rational Valuation

Feeling as Rational Valuation

The most easily lost claim in Jung’s typology is the rationality of feeling. Popular usage equates feeling with the irrational, the merely subjective, the merely affective. Jung is explicit against this: “Feeling values and feeling judgments—indeed, feelings in general—are not only rational but can also be as logical, consistent and discriminating as thinking” (Jung 1921, §953).

Feeling is rational because it operates by principle: it weighs a content against a value, accepts or rejects, and produces a judgment. “Hence feeling is a kind of judgment, differing from intellectual judgment in that its aim is not to establish conceptual relations but to set up a subjective criterion of acceptance or rejection” (Jung 1921, §725). The criterion is not arbitrary; it follows the laws of an ordered evaluative process that von Franz characterizes as “a function that establishes order and judges, saying this is good and this is bad, this agreeable and this disagreeable to me” (von Franz and Hillman 2013).

The misreading runs in both directions. The popular reduction of feeling to mood erases its judging character; the rationalist reduction of reason to intellect erases the discriminative work of valuation. Both reductions impoverish the psyche by collapsing the four-function compass into a single axis of cognition versus affect — the axis Jung’s typology was specifically constructed to dissolve.

The classical analogue is plato‘s placement of the thumoeides under the rational part of the soul, allied with reason against appetite (Hobbs 2000; Sorabji 2000). Aristotle complicates this — sometimes calling boulēsis rational, sometimes irrational — but the older intuition that the spirited valuating faculty belongs with reason is preserved through Jung’s classification.

Relationships

Primary sources