Feeling as Rational Against Popular Misuse

The most consequential misreading of the Jungian feeling-function — in popular discourse, in the typology industry, and in much clinical practice — is the demotion of feeling to the irrational. The misreading is structural: in everyday English, “feeling” names mood, affect, emotion, sentiment, the merely subjective. Jung’s technical sense of feeling as a rational function runs against the grain of the language.

Jung is aware of this and pre-empts it: “Whoever confuses these last two functions [sensation and intuition] with feeling in the strict sense is obviously not in a position to acknowledge the rationality of feeling. But once they are distinguished from feeling, it becomes quite clear that 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). The rationality is not metaphorical. Feeling proceeds by principle (acceptance/rejection along a value-axis), produces judgments, and yields stable, communicable results.

The classical lineage supports this. plato‘s placement of the thumoeides under the rational part of the soul, allied with reason against appetite, is the same intuition Jung formalizes (Hobbs 2000). aristotle, more cautious, alternates between calling boulēsis rational and irrational, but his settled view is that the desiderative part “can even in a secondary sense be said to have reason… because it listens to reason even if it does not reason things out for itself” (Sorabji 2000). The Western philosophical tradition, in its serious moments, has consistently classed the spirited valuating faculty with reason rather than against it.

The cost of the popular misreading is high. When feeling is collapsed into affect, the patient — or the reader — is left with a binary between cold cognition and hot impulse, with nothing in between. The whole evaluative middle stratum of the psyche disappears. The work of the depth tradition, from Plato through Jung to Hillman, is to name and preserve this stratum.

Sources

• carl-jung: feeling values are as logical and consistent as thinking
• plato: the thumoeides as ally of reason against appetite (Republic)
• aristotle (via Sorabji): the desiderative part participates in reason
• james-hillman: feeling as the discriminating faculty, distinct from feelings