Feeling as Rational Substrate of the Ratio

The structural premise that ratio desiderii presupposes — that desire admits of judgment — is supplied by Jung’s classification of feeling as a rational function. “Feeling is primarily a process that takes place between the ego and a given content, a process, moreover, that imparts to the content a definite value in the sense of acceptance or rejection (‘like’ or ‘dislike’)” (Jung, Psychological Types §724). Feeling is not opposed to rationality; it is rationality operating on a different content than thought addresses.

Von Franz and Hillman, lecturing on the typology, insist that feeling and eros must be distinguished even where they appear together: “feeling is human… an individual attribute of consciousness, limited by a spatial and temporal situation. Eros is, as the writings tell us, always universal and impersonal — even inhuman and demonic” (von Franz and Hillman, Lectures on Jung’s Typology). The distinction is operative for the ratio: the ratio reads an erotic charge with the feeling function, not as the feeling function itself. Beebe extends the typological apparatus to internal dialogues between complexes (Energies and Patterns) — the ratio borrows this apparatus when it locates a particular longing within the typological geography of a given soul.

The thread converges on a single claim: there is a discriminating faculty proper to desire, and Jungian typology already names it. The Method’s contribution is the deployment of that faculty as a procedure rather than as an accidental endowment.

Sources

• carl-jung: feeling is a rational function that imparts value to a content (Psychological Types, §724).
• marie-louise-von-franz and james-hillman: feeling and eros are distinguishable even when present together; eros is impersonal, feeling is human (Lectures on Jung’s Typology).
• john-beebe: typological dialogue among complexes is the inner geography on which the ratio operates (Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type).