What I was trying to say was not so much where it was applied; but what you have said there would constitute Fe. He turns to prevailing cultural values to criticize the group.
It still initially stems fro violated personal values, and what he's doing is essentially accuing the group of not being congruent with its own values, which would be a sort of Fi-ish criticism. But that's where the fluidity of the concepts come in. Values are values. introversion and extraversion are tied to the ego's action, bot the function itself.
But he isn't criticizing
everyone in his cultural group--just a few people who are out of line with the prevailing cultural values.
If he were criticizing the prevailing cultural values themselves for being inconsistent with his own, that would be Fi.
If he were criticizing the group based on a belief that it's important to stay in line with the prevailing cultural values, that would be Fe. If you're going to argue that this is really Fi because it stems from some kind of value, then you've effectively reduced all Fe to Fi.
Lenore Thomson Exegesis Wiki said:
Fi: Until I understand it in terms of empathy and how it relates to a living need that I might have, I don't see how I can relate to it.
Fe: Until I can see where this fits into my network of tribal bonds and obligations, I don't see how I can relate to it. How can I tell if I'm for it or against it until I know how other people feel about it?
Fi doesn't need to know how anyone else feels about it in order to evaluate. Fe does. That's the difference.
So if our ENFP friend here is criticizing his friends for being out of touch with the surrounding cultural values (taking into account the objective standards established by others in his culture), it's Fe.
If he's criticizing his friends for being immoral based on his personal belief about morality
regardless of what anyone else thinks, it's Fi. The key to Fi is that it's not taking the opinions of others into account in his evaluation.
So what do you think would trigger this rare manifestation of Fe, then, or have you not worked it out that far?
What would trigger it is the ENFP caring enough about others to temporarily set aside his own feelings about what's right or wrong and blending in with his cultural surroundings.
For example, American ENFP woman visits the middle east and conforms to the cultural custom of refraining from wearing shorts, out of respect for the surrounding cultural standards.
Fi says: "It doesn't matter what context I'm in; I don't need to adjust my clothing habits because that's an immoral imposition on my freedom of expression."
Fe says: "In this case I should adjust to the cultural expectations of the surrounding context and wear long pants. My own beliefs about personal expression will have to be set aside while I am here--because that's the prevailing cultural norm here."
I'm looking at it in terms of the complex being manifested as well, and the complex sis the area of consciusness that bears the archetype. I can compare her cleaning to her psychological knowledge, where she was trained in an extremely Te science of "empiricism", and said that it was not natural for her, but she was forced to adopt the method, and now filters theory through it. So I come with my theories, and she fires into them that they are not empirically tested, and I can tell it is a negative archetype being manifested. Then, I compare that to when she's in "cleaning" mode, and it seems to fit tiogether as a "Destructive" Te (that's only the archetype name).
(It's also similar to some of the flack the theories have been receiving from Te users lately).
Well, obviously you know your wife better than I do, so her cleaning at the moment you wrote that might very well have been Te-oriented. If she starts cleaning on another day for a different reason, her motivation might be Fe--or there might be some component of both. I can't say because I don't know your wife.
The point is that any particular behavior might be motivated by any function or combination of functions depending on the person and circumstances involved.
This stuff is hard to fully explain (much easier to process it in the mind than to get others to understand), but again, the functions are fluid. What are Thinking and Feeling, but foms of J; a rational ordering process.
As I put it, T and F are just two sides of the "rational" coin, and S and N are two sides of the a-rational coin. And then if these function coins are split along the edge into separate coins in themselves, the different orientations of them are just different sides of those coins.
There are no hard, concrete objects here. And I didn't say "neither" Te nor Fe. They just blend together, with the line between them becoming fuzzy at times, and then there's the case of undifferentiated function as well (such as feelings of love, or when any person adds 2 + 2).
Right, but each of us prefers to listen to one side of that coin more often than the other. I agree that the functions are fluid and don't operate in isolation--every behavior that we observe in others is probably a combination of several functions working at once, in varying degrees of influence. Each of us chooses to listen to certain ones more often than others. When we tie a behavior to a particular function, we are trying to isolate whichever function was
most influential on that particular behavior--even though there's inevitably some influence from the others.
However, even though both forms of the one function may simultaneously influence a decision, one will always take precedence over the other when it comes time to make the final say.
If we appease the voice that says, "Go with what you feel inside is right", we're listening more to Fi.
If we appease the voice that says, "Go with what the cultural standards in your surroundings would suggest", we're listening more to Fe.
