Kalach
Filthy Apes!
- Joined
- Dec 3, 2008
- Messages
- 4,310
- MBTI Type
- INTJ
I'm not defining what your experience is. I'm simply pointing out that Fe isn't necessarily "truly empathetic" and that Fi vs. Fe isn't selfish vs. selfless. I sometimes wonder if people with Fi think they have Fe because they think of themselves as as more "other focused."
I'm gonna go with "Fe is empathetic, frequently truly so". I'm taking it for granted that people with Fe actually do have feelings. Thus, one must ask, feelings about what? Why, feelings DIRECTLY about stuff "out there". No intermediate step. Technically, they don't need the "if that were me" step. Instead they get the feelings directly from what happens out there.
And before any Fi user jumps up and says we do that too, we don't. Our locus of feeling is inside. Their locus is outside. Our order and harmony is inside. Theirs is outside. They're not satisfied because they contributed to a harmonious environment, instead a harmonious environment is happy.
It's a fine technical point to make, and the language easily obscures it, but there it is. Fe users recognise actual feeling value inhering immediately in outside acts--body language, choice of expression, and so on--where Fi users recognise feeling flowing from outside acts. They are all together, we are all separate. They act to harmonise environments, we act to harmonise ourselves.
And yes, everyone can use the same language to describe what they do. And they're still describing different things.
Focus, people. Focus.
It is presumably only difficult to understand because it amounts to the seemingly preposterous claim that Fe encompasses the whole world, whereas Fi lays claim only to you.
But it does allow us to say that Fe users are able to make decisions about right and wrong above and beyond the social graces. They are able to bring their own judgment to what is and isn't good community.