Reply To: Pi Worldview Function (Ren)

[Ren]

I've resisted adding too much of that language to the Pi profile, because of how it complicates the typing process, but perhaps I over-corrected. There is something very nuanced about Pi and Ni, which needs to be differentiated from the general nature of the unconscious, as may exist in everyone. One of the things I found somewhat problematic about Jung's descriptions of Ni is his connection of it with unconscious imagery. However, perhaps the problem is not that this is incorrect to say so, but that it makes descriptions challenging to get right, because the experience of insights rising spontaneously out of an unknown place - is one that every human will have.

 

For convenience's sake, let's call insight the kind of spontaneous flash everyone can have. I think Ni flashes are a special case of insight. The best conceptualisation of it, to my knowledge, is in the work of Martin Heidegger, where he defined truth as the phenomenon of unconcealment. (I think Heidegger was basically, and inadvertently, describing his own cognitive process.) Unconcealment is not exactly an experience of insight bursting forth from of an unknown place. What is felt is that something which was already there is 'unconcealed', lit, moved from a tangled forest of the psyche to a clearing. This is not the kind of phenomenon for which the phrase 'lightning bolt' is adequate. The Ni lead immediately has the awareness that the content of the insight had been with them for a long time in gestation, only concealed, hazy. I discuss the experiential phenomenon of haziness in my book, by the way.

One consequence is that the insight that's reached is immediately familiar. What cannot be explained is how the Ni lead arrived at it deductively, because in a genuine sense, they did not. But once the truth has been unconcealed, they can certainly provide a map of the psychical territory where the truth has arisen, and this is how they make sense of it; this is their explanation. Instead of being able to say: "I arrived at x by deducing it from y and z", they say: "x belongs here on the map". It's a phenomenon of ostensive explanation, explanation by showing rather than demonstrating. There is something very visual involved. Ludwig Wittgensein puts it wonderfully in the Tractatus when he says: "Truth is a form of beauty." Elsewhere he also says: "Truth can only be spoken by someone who is already at home in it." You can clearly see that here the flash of insight is not described as something utterly unfamiliar, nor even really new. It is rather experienced as something aesthetic, an experience of unconcealment of what was always there, which is an experience of beauty.

If Ni is taken to be a kind of ever-growing map of the world, flashes of insight are sudden unconcealments of certain regions of the map hitherto darkened. To some extent the Ni lead could tell where the regions were located; but he could not access them in any level of detail. The Ni insight brings him from haziness to clarity, or from indeterminacy to determinateness. And I would claim that the vast majority of Ni insights are unconcealments of this kind; that the way the Ni lead gets closer to truth, develops his knowledge, reasons his way through arguments, etc., is mostly through series of such unconcealments. He is rarely awestruck by flashes, because to him unconcealment is a deeply familiar, everyday phenomenon of consciousness (for all its unpredictability, it will regularly take place). He would be far more awestruck if he suddenly stopped experiencing unconcealment. There is, if you will, a certain everyday-ness to the experience, however strange this may sound.

Perhaps you will say once again that everyone will relate to the above, but at least I've attempted to specify the Ni insight further, lol.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by Ren.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by Ren.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by Ren.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by Ren.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by Ren.