For those who may benefit from it, I hereby share some excerpts from my half of a correspondence I had by email last year.
Let’s suppose the T- and F-types are simply the masculine and feminine versions of the same types. I identify Thinking and Feeling with the systemising and empathising from Baron Cohen’s book [The Essential Difference]. Though not all men are T-types or all women are F-types, the division is not 50/50; I’ve seen numbers quoted amounting to 60/40 (which, by the way, is about the Golden Ratio).
The [Keirsey] Idealist is then the female version of the [Keirsey] Rational. This is a great mystery, perhaps not unlike Ariadne. Let’s leave it be for now.
The [Keirsey] Guardians are then the second caste, the lovers of honour and glory. And indeed, that’s what Shadia Drury calls them in this interview:
[size=95]"There are indeed three types of men: the wise, the gentlemen, and the vulgar. The wise are the lovers of the harsh, unadulterated truth. They are capable of looking into the abyss without fear and trembling. They recognise neither God nor moral imperatives. They are devoted above all else to their own pursuit of the ‘higher’ pleasures, which amount to consorting with their ‘puppies’ or young initiates.
The second type, the gentlemen, are lovers of honour and glory. They are the most ingratiating towards the conventions of their society – that is, the illusions of the cave. They are true believers in God, honour, and moral imperatives. They are ready and willing to embark on acts of great courage and self-sacrifice at a moment’s notice.
The third type, the vulgar many, are lovers of wealth and pleasure. They are selfish, slothful, and indolent. They can be inspired to rise above their brutish existence only by fear of impending death or catastrophe." http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5010.htm[/size]
The occasion of my new approach is my reading the following last night:
[size=95]"What is needed for politics is a class of men who reject hedonism [both the philosophical and the vulgar kind] altogether. These types of men Strauss calls ‘citizens’, and the most superior among them, ‘gentlemen’. Citizens and gentlemen have no pleasures: being a citizen and especially a gentleman is a serious business. Citizenship is a ‘loveless affair’. The citizen must renounce the natural human dedication to pleasure. He must subordinate his own pleasures to his duties to others.
Strauss is well known for his claim that the political solution par excellence is the [ostensible] rule of gentlemen. This must be understood in the light of his conception of gentlemen as a special breed. They are people capable of harboring the noble self-deceptions without which the city cannot exist. They are people who believe that the just life is the happy life, and that the life dedicated to the service of others is truly the most pleasant life. They are people who believe that the [morally] noble is choiceworthy for its own sake. The philosopher knows that these are political fictions; he knows that the good life by nature is a life dedicated to the pursuit of one’s own pleasure; he knows that the life of the citizen and gentleman, the life dedicated to the service of others is indistinguishable from servitude." (Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, page 82.)[/size]
I formerly identified the gentleman with the Idealist. However, I was not aware of the citizen. I would certainly have identified the citizen with the Guardian. But perhaps even the gentlemen are just the highest Guardians. Keirsey’s most important book presents Washington as the signature Guardian, whereas it presents Gandhi as the signature Idealist, Hemingway as the signature Artisan, and Einstein as the signature Rational.
It’s strange though that, according to Keirsey, there are at least as many Guardians as Artisans. And especially if we identify the citizen with the Guardian and the gentleman with the Idealist, the second caste is significantly larger than the third; at least as large as the first and the third combined. And yet both Guardians and Idealists are “cooperative” types, dedicated to the service of others.
To me the following makes more sense the more I think about it:
- the naturally lowest class consists of the Artisans, i.e., people who live for the Sensual pleasures;
- the naturally “middle” class consists of the Guardians, i.e., people who live in the service of the Law;
- the naturally highest class consists of the Rationals, i.e., people who live for the iNtellectual pleasures;
- the “naturally” highest class consists of the Idealists, i.e., people who live in the service of Justice.
Not only has it been an eye-opener for me to identify the Guardians with Strauss’s citizens and Plato’s Auxiliaries; it has been an even greater eye-opener for me to identify the Idealists with Strauss’s gentlemen and Plato’s Guardians, and to entertain the notion that the latter eclipse the Rationals, the (natural) philosophers, who are subsumed by them, hidden and thereby protected by them… Consider Plato’s image of the Line: eikasia corresponds to the Artisans, pistis to the Guardians, dianoia to the Rationals, but the highest of these turn to dialectic and go down to rationally apprehend the probable archê of all, eros or the will to power, yet suggest that they, like the Idealists, go up to have immediate intellection of the “true” archê of all, the good in itself:
[size=95]“To Glaucon, who’s just heard the bright and beautiful image of the good as king of the intelligible, archê may well appear here as ‘the first principle of the All,’ that shining unity of the Good whose rule gives the ideas their intelligibility and being. Yet archê can be heard differently: as the antecedent to those beginning points of thinking that logos undertakes to examine by dialectic because thinking itself cannot imagine its suppositions even though they determine how everything appears to—is imaged by—thinking. The first interpretation of archê leads upward to an ultimate principle of the All; the second suggests the very kind of inquiry that Socrates elsewhere says was his own form of investigation.” (Lampert, How Philosophy Became Socratic, pp. 358-59.)[/size]
What makes one class naturally higher than another is this. The philosophic life is the good life according to nature. Thus the philosophic class is the highest class. In Plato’s (ostensibly) tripartite system, one of the two non-philosophic classes is higher than the other because that order of rank is necessary for social stability, without which philosophy is impossible.
I don’t necessarily identify Keirsey’s Guardians with Plato’s Guardians myself. Both the philosopher-kings and their auxiliaries are sometimes called “guardians” by Plato. I definitely identify the auxiliaries with Keirsey’s Guardians. However, I think the “philosopher-kings” are rather Keirsey’s Idealists. A clue in this direction can be found in the fact that Keirsey mistypes Plato as an Idealist (according to one source even as “the quintessential Idealist”). If we combine Keirsey’s Idealists and Guardians into one class, then they become the majority, yes–though not, unless it is a pleonasm, necessarily the common majority; certainly not the vulgar majority. And of course, this is according to Keirsey’s numbers, which differ drastically between his book and his website.
The more I read about it, the more I am persuaded that the Guardian temperament is so moral and dutiful etc., not out of virtue, but for the sake of honour, of esteem.
[size=95]“He [the Choleric person] acts far more out of principles than the Sanguinic one, who is motivated merely by casual impressions; but these are not principles of virtue, but of honour, and he does not have a feeling for beauty or for the value of actions, but [only] for the judgment that the world might pass on them. Because his practice, insofar as one does not look at the source from which it springs, is, by the way, almost just as advantageous for the common good as virtue itself, he acquires, before common eyes, the same esteem the virtuous one does, but before more subtle eyes he hides himself carefully, because he knows well that the discovery of the secret motive of ambition [Ehrbegierde, “desire for honour”] would cost him the regard. He is hence very much given to dissimulation, hypocritical in religion, a flatterer in social intercourse, [and] changeable like the weather in politics if circumstances require. He is gladly a slave of the great, in order to be a tyrant over lesser ones.” (Kant, “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime”, section 2, my translation.)[/size]
I disagree, though, with what Kant immediately goes on to say, namely that the Choleric person can never be naive. I think such hypocrisy may very well become second nature. As Zarathustra says, “The stupidity of the good is unfathomably clever.” (“Of Old and New Tables”, section 26, my translation.)
Today I found this article: http://www.rogerbissell.com/achillestendencies/atmirror.html. It has allowed me to design a new class division, which turns out to be pyramidal regardless of whether we subscribe to the numbers in Keirsey’s book or on his website. Here’s the division according to his book:
NTP 5%
NTJ 5%
NFP 2.5%
NFP 2.5%
NFJ 5%
SFJ 20%
SFP 10%
SFP 10%
STJ 20%
STP 20%
And here’s the division according to his website:
NTP 3.75%
NTJ 3.75%
NFP 4.375%
NFP 4.375%
NFJ 8.75%
SFJ 21.25%
SFP 8.125%
SFP 8.125%
STJ 21.25%
STP 16.25%
As you can see, according to his book, the three classes contain respectively 12.5%, 37.5%, and 50% of the population, whereas according to his website, they contain respectively 11.875%, 42.5%, and 45.625% of the population. And that’s dividing the NFPs and the SFPs equally over the two classes in between which they rank. I’ve ranked the types first according to the division utilitarian/cooperative/utilitarian (hedonistic/moral/hedonistic), and then, in order to distinguish between the highbrow and the lowbrow variety of hedonism, according to the division abstract/concrete (iNtuitive/Sensing). The highest value of the lowest class is sensual pleasure, of the middle class, moral virtue, and of the highest class, intellectual pleasure.
I just realized that SFP and STJ should probably be turned around, as the J/P distinction is more important for Ses than the F/T distinction. This does not change the percentage spread, though.
According to my view of the Keirsey temperaments–which is not the same thing as my insight into Plato, by the way–, an Artisan cannot be bounded by spirit and honour. Or maybe I should modify that view. After all, with the aid of that article I linked to, I have now conceived the Keirsey temperaments in terms of poles: on the one hand, the TP (or Ti!) pole as the positive pole of the N-types and the JF (or Fe) pole as their negative pole; and the latter as the positive pole of the S-types, and the TP (or Ti) pole as their negative pole. In terms of TP/FJ, the SFP Artisans are already rather divided between two poles; and in terms of Ti/Fe, they’re even as close to the Fe pole as the–Guardian–SFJs! Here’s my order of rank according to the functions:
- INTP/ENTJ
- ENTP/INTJ
- INFJ/ENFP
- ENFJ/INFP
- ESFJ/ISFP
- ISFJ/ESFP
- ESTP/ISTJ
- ISTP/ESTJ