More on the feeling function.
In the Work, we talk about external consideration. I think external consideration is not possible without a certain level of development of the feeling function. We need the help of all the functions in this respect, but let us focus more on the feeling aspect of it.
James Hillman writes
[quote author=Lectures on Jung's Typology]
The ability to handle a problem or talk with a person in the right way shows a rational discrimination and an adjustment to what is needed. Yet, the entire operation may not be intellectual. One says different things to different people according to the values of the situation and according to the requirements of the other person. These answers to questions may not be either truthful or correct in the logical sense, but from the point of view of feeling they may be exactly right.
When a child asks for an explanation, an answer may be given from thinking or from feeling; at times, a story that answers to the anxiety in the child may be “truer” than an intellectual explanation of causes. To hit the mark truly does not mean always to tell the factual or logical truth. In therapy, a problem may often be relieved by absurdities of anecdote or parable, in the manner of the masters, rather than by relentless logical reductions. In resolving a conflict often the whole picture of harmony is more important than either logic or facts. The function of feeling then creates a situation in which viewpoints may rationally blend even though the opposing logical and factual issues have not been settled and may even have been compromised.
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This brings us to timing and tact and their relationship with the feeling function.
[quote author=Lectures on Jung's Typology]
There is a time sense connected with the feeling function, which is not mentioned in the literature, yet which is part of the ratio of the feeling function.
The sense of timing and tact is a function of feeling often incompatible with the reason of thinking. This division gives occasion to doing the right thing at the wrong time. There is a “feel” to each discrete moment and each chain of moments. Each life has its “feel” to it, the way its time courses, which turns a case history into a soul history, a chain of events into a patterned rhythm.
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Tact, or the sense of timing, is perhaps the crown of appropriate feeling. Ecclesiastes puts it simply: to everything there is a season. Everything has its time. Perhaps feeling is merely tactfulness, a matter of timing. Humor depends wholly on it, and music is the art of time. The feeling function perceives time: as, for instance, when visiting a person in the hospital, staying not too short or too long, feeling the time to get up and go. The quality of time, rather than the amount one gives another, carries the feeling. For this reason, disturbed feeling – the guilty feelings from the mother complex – distorts the time sense, and one gives quantities of time with only grains of feeling.
Time has a quality – or is a quality. It is not but an accumulation of endlessly clicking identical minutes into eternity. The development of the time Sense means the development of feeling awareness of the moment and of biography different from the moment constructed by the thinking clock. Rather there is a moment as quantitatively long or short as feeling shapes it. Moments have sizes: there are long moments, big moments, and moments so crowded that nothing finds place.
Feeling shapes time, breaking it up into various kinds of feeling tones. These tones are not on the same band of continuity as seven o’clock follows six, which followed five. Feeling time is organized in clusters, more like an organic growth, so that today has its roots perhaps in a day last summer (and not yesterday which belonged to a wholly different branch). Thus we do pick up old relationships again where we left off. And thus is continuity so essential for feeling development.
The elapse of time may or may not alter the feeling function. When we hold a thing long and wrong, we still resent; but sometimes, through continuity, the feeling function finds a new connection and new value to an event and we can forgive. Again, there is no other education possible but that of courage to bear the long-drawn-out unchanging aspect of oneself. This teaches the feeling function patience.
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The role of manners has been discussed here :
External Considering and Good Manners . Manners is one of the traditional ways of training the feeling function.
[quote author=Lectures on Jung's Typology]
The education of feeling involves also the observance of objective patterns of relationship.There are rules, for instance, about the relationship of guest and host, of senior and junior, between master and servant, between friends, even between husband and wife.....We find it difficult to observe objective patterns, especially when they are hierarchical. To hold a superior position without either arrogance or obsequiousness, to give an order without its turning into either a request for a favor or a command, to observe filial piety without succumbing to the family complex – these are beyond our usual capacities and are not educational aims in a society of democratic individualism.
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The objective patterns of relationship are codified in manners. Learning manners means learning forms of feeling. Again, it can be argued that what one really feels has little to do with manners. Manners, it would seem, prevent feeling, because feeling has come to mean a breakthrough of sincerity, putting aside all manners, and “coming out with it,” “feeling it like it is.” Problems of human contact between black and white, between revolutionary and establishment have reached the place of nonnegotiable demands where manners are a laugh! To make a case for manners in a historical period of violence points up the difference between feeling and affect. (Not that feeling cannot also be a conduit for aggression, as in cruelty, brainwashing, or the code of the military.)
Yet manners at their best oppose only affect (i.e the expression of emotions) , not feeling (which is an evaluating function). Feelings that seem too deeply personal for manners reveal the inadequacy of our manners, that they have lost touch with their original purpose. For manners, whether polished or pioneer, give to feeling a form in which it can be understood and received. They offer feeling channels for communication; even the negative feelings of insult and spleen can be passed on by manners. Through the
adroit use of them we can freeze, snub, hurt, and ridicule, or show off to arouse envy. That manners become dry, that they reflect only persona, that they become mannered and lose all content and connection with sensitivity only confirm the primary thesis of this chapter: the feeling function is in decay. A standard sign of psychological decay is the split into polarities. On the one hand we have blunt and pregnant feelings, on the other, manners emptied of all service but defense.
The rediscovery of the archetypal significance of manners as necessary and viable channels rather than protective moats would re-ritualize them and give to the careless acts of every day an aspect of ceremony. We would feel with certainty about the simplest aspects of daily life – how to behave and what is expected. Manners would give us the “manner” of dealing. Instead, we must give worried time to molding for each inconsequential thing its own form, or we abandon all such feeling efforts, leaving it to the mothering mass of democratic fellow feeling, which is always supposed to “understand what I meant by that.” (“The general mess of imprecision of feeling / Undisciplined squads of emotion” – does Eliot not refer to decayed manners?) The obsessive worry with which we confront daily decisions of feeling, to the profit of advertisers and advisers who batten on our uncertainty, is the result of feeling forms having fallen into unconsciousness. Unlived ritual becomes unconscious obsessions and compulsions.
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The archetypal dimension of objective patterns of relationship in different situations is explored in
The Odyssey - Manual of Secret Teachings
To train the feeling function so that it can reach the heights it has the potential to reach and become the driver of development we need courage and faith.
The courage is required to acknowledge the reality of the situation - which is our feeling function is for most cases poorly developed. To train the function, the first step is to accept it as it is today - in a poor, wretched condition. Covering up the reality of the situation with ready-made emotions learned through imitation or hiding behind the twin refuges of intellectualization or aestheticization (becoming fascinated or indiscriminately appreciative of the perceived "beauty" of the various aspects of life and existence) are detrimental to the development of the feeling function.
Faith is needed to let the poorly developed function grow by making mistakes. This means becoming vulnerable to a certain extent in appropriate circumstances. Jung believed that the psyche itself has a self-correcting and self-regulating tendency and the unconscious can and does work in favor of development and wholeness (or individuation) provided the conscious ego enters into a proper balanced relationship with it. Since most if not all of us would likely have troubles in plumbing the depths of the unconscious by ourselves, we can take advantage of networking with others, in whom we very often find the reflection or projection of those parts of our own unconscious which we repress or reject or even overvalue.
A well developed and differentiated feeling function can often make its presence felt in the small things of life. It shows through small acts - what is said or done - and also what is not said or not done - according to the needs of a specific situation. Intellect finds it difficult to pin down exactly - yet it is a rational, logical art of small things. This imo brings out the essence of living life according to the Stoic teachings.
You know sometimes I really love feeling stupid (not in the ignorance is bliss sense though).
It's interesting to observe how, depending on the situation and subject matter, we can switch between these general combinations.