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[INFJ] INFJ Trouble

the state i am in

Active member
Joined
Feb 12, 2009
Messages
2,475
MBTI Type
infj
Enneagram
5w4
Instinctual Variant
sx/sp
Oh so I did actually understand! This is great because I always feel stupid talking about this stuff with other people, especially this particular INFJ, because I never feel like I understand work like this 100%. Sometimes I think it's because the structure of the writing is specifically not meant to be understood 100% by anyone, which is totally why the INFJ (and ENTP) likes it, and totally why I tend to have problems with it. In other words, the question "is it true" is just not one that you ask with something like Heidegger.

topological models of all types really favor Ni. we see them as a scaffolding that we can rotate. your ability as an intp to lock in to specific scales of analysis really helps clarify what we gloss over. the overall big picture feeling you get from these theorists is what we go off of, whereas intp types tend to locate the limitations of use between the metaphorical constructs we bridge/fudge so easily. deleuze, i'd guess, is an intp. it's a topological spring cleaning, gets me out of the traps i keep creating, etc. Ti precision can be glorious.

Ooh, now I tend to like Foucault, and I've just been familiarizing myself with Latour. Deleuze I cannot understand for the life of me, something about machines and lines of flight and ribosomes. I haven't read much Bourdieu, but I like what I have read. Derrida is also slightly incomprehensible to me, though I have admittedly put little effort into understanding. As a whole, though, this kind of stuff is very interesting.

Additionally, I also find George Lakoff and his work on metaphors to be extremely interesting...how the metaphors that we use in daily speech (such as up and down) are really abstract extensions of our root bodily experience.

i'm a terrible reader and there's no way in hell i could actually make it thru a deleuze book. his conceptual sections are great, but then he just likes to Play, with a read if you dare kind of attitude (or not, go discover your own!) there's secondary literature online everywhere, wikipedia etc, and two books one by todd may and one by brian massumi that i find far more readable than deleuze himself. derrida is only worthwhile when you want to have a similar conceptual set in a more specifically textual domain. he's probably an intp too, but he's not as broadly reaching as deleuze, whose vision is more instantly penetrating wherever he finds himself. less language-based, more pictorial and sciencey. wittgenstein is interesting too as probably the cleanest wisest most elegant philosopher of language (esp. with regard to what cannot be said, clearing away conceptual noise, etc)

i heard this definition in a cogsci class called distributed cognition i took at ucsd. "metaphor is using knowledge in one domain to organize understanding in another domain." i'm in love with this. this concept is pretty much my raison d'etre. or maybe that's just the magic mushrooms talking. pre-semantic priming, there's nothing better.

Oh wow, that is awesome. I have a classmate in my graduate school cohort who is doing religious studies as a secondary MA to his rhetoric PhD. From what he says and the material he brings up, it sounds like a very interesting area of study. And I always liked anthropology...especially this one course that I took in undergrad entitled "linguistic anthropology." This is where I got to read some Bourdieu.

I study rhetoric, though my focus is less on the cultural studies or critical theory side of it (hence my confusion), and more on argumentation and rhetoric of science.

your program sounds interesting. when i thought i was going straight to grad school, the berkeley rhetoric program looked great. judith butler, the foucauldian scholar dreyfuss, etc, great resources.

rhetoric is an interesting subfield. my soapbox, lately, has involved bitching about a nation of lawyers, of legal language, etc. so much of our ethical standards are held hostage to rhetoricians and their tactics. we DESPERATELY need a counterbalancing force. when we cannot successfully tax the hell out of the rich bc they can manipulate the letter of the law. when we have prison overcrowding for drug violations waged on the premise of "WAR," etc. when corporate conglomerates and pharmaceutical lobbies shape the lives of the working class all the way down to the smallest most minute expression (let us rename our species to "customer service representative") with a moral legal literalalist interpretation of our RELIGIOUS "mission statement," etc. crazy, insane, inane, etc. also, politics. news. media. on and on and on.

Yeah, I will definitely try, because intuitive people are hard enough to find, and it's even harder to find intuitive people that I actually like. And she was not hurt over that particular incident, so your comment about being forgiving to other introverts on this point seems to be holding.

eh, we're all in the same boat. introverted intuitives are often almost work-of-art disastrous, but they're creative, clever/fun, and almost always interesting. once you get past (and keep working to get past) the communication barriers from undernourished extraverted articulations, gestures, etc, ESPECIALLY with people who you share a solid and productive cultural ethnicity/interest/attraction blah blah, it's worth it.
 

JAVO

.
Joined
Apr 24, 2007
Messages
9,178
MBTI Type
eNTP
So you're saying that it's Ti that's responsible for the poor uptake of INTP sarcasm?
Not uptake, output. :) I think it's a significant factor.

What do you think it is about Ti that makes the sarcasm less bearable than that of an ENTP? I know I have to deal with the shocked looks of folks a lot after I say something that I find funny.
Ti is blunt, and not everyone wants to hear the truth, especially from someone they don't know well. The dominant Ne of an ENTP causes them to automatically filter the Ti objectivity through Ne, which generates possibilities of how others will react to a statement. As an example of Ne failure:

In college, I was at a dinner with the other RA's, and my boss, a resident director. We were sitting right next to the president of the college, and he was constantly engaged in our conversation. Someone mentioned the newly-installed speed bumps on campus. I thought it would be funny to state the objective fact that there are definite drawbacks to having speed bumps, and then tell the funny story of my roomate's night encounter with them the day they were installed. He rode a bicycle to work, and the speed bumps were installed while he was at work. He rode back on the same campus road, assuming it was the same road as earlier in the day. Instead, he hit a speed bump going fast, and this caused him to fly over the handlebars.

No one laughed. Everyone looked at their food. My boss's face was especially red. I reminded myself to be a good introvert and just not talk. Later, a friend told me that it was my boss's idea to install the speed bumps! :doh:

In fact, it even happened today when, after one of my students had given a speech about the history of the particular building that we're in (a cathedral of sorts), I commented to the class that I should make someone give a speech about the history of people dying from elevator malfunctions. It was supposed to be a joking reference to the height of our cathedral (as emphasized by the person in their speech) and a common place that we share about the rickety-ness of the elevators. They all stared at me like I was crazy (though I did get one snicker from someone in the back).
:laugh: Jokes only a few people get are the best ones.

The INFJ sometimes likes my humor, though. I remember one time I gave her a humorous observation that I'd made about some crazy guy that got kicked off the bus for not paying his fare, and she laughed and said I was a twisted individual. She just does not like it directed at her or anything that she values. I guess I should expect this from feelers in general, though.
:mellow: That's not funny. I forgot my wallet, and I was stranded because of that!

I should learn to do this. Any tips?
It's an interesting circular effect. If I wanted to be more extraverted, I found that I had to engage and develop Ne more. But when I did that, I found it had the effect of making more extraverted! To get started, I had to increase my interactions with others more. I used my online interactions with a few friends on INTPc and here as a basis for real life interactions. I learned how to interact with people I barely knew online, and then transfered the principles I had learned to making friends and interacting in real life. Part of it also involved learning to analyze my own interactions and thoughts and engage in constructive criticism rather than self-destructive criticism.
 
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