Personality Zone

Differences in Abstraction

Rational and Idealist introspection surveyed

Much of my blogging on here and other sites that I inhabit deals with introspection. I suppose that a large part of me has been trying to discover who I am. For example, I’m quite sure that I’m a Rational, and knowing that has helped a lot. Thus much of my self-analysis is done in a Rational manner, as if I am a thought experiment on myself.

It seems to me though that searching for oneself is more the domain of the Idealist. I look at myself and see a lot of traits that lean more towards Idealist properties than Rational. For example, my disgust at conflict is more pronounced than I would expect out of a Rational. I also tend to be very conscious of the feelings of others, often to my detriment, which seems like a classic Idealist issue.

Thus I wonder if somehow I had a hybrid state to me where I am partially Idealist. I note that the first time I took an MBTI survey, my score on the T/F scale lay exactly in the middle, with me being male being the tie-breaker favouring Thinking. (Of course I also scored as a Judger, and I’m certainly not that, so I take it with a grain of salt.) Conversely, my iNtuitive score was extremely high (something like 95%), so within that context, perhaps I am strongly iNtuitive (and thus introspective), but rather either/or with the Rational/Idealist boundary.

With that, I began to explore this some more, starting with the question, “What is the difference between Rational introspection and Idealist introspection?” This is where temperament theory is quite useful, for the partition is Utilitarian versus Cooperative. Still, this is a little vague as would not introspection be an individual effort, apart from tool usage?

Then I apply perspectives to this dichotomy. What I see in myself is that when I’m looking at who I am, I’m doing so with the notion of how I fit into the world, or perhaps the Universe. In that context, I’m simply not looking at myself or humanity individually, but rather the mechanisms of nature itself.

In contrast, I believe that the Idealist focuses more on the humanity of self-analysis. Perhaps the Idealist is generally content to leave the functioning of the Universe as something of a mystery, or perhaps adopting a pre-existing paradigm (religion, philosophy, etc.). That simply isn’t something that a Rational can stand to do.

In this viewpoint, neither method is better than the other, just different. They may seem similar in many ways as the goals are quite compatible. Also, being Rational or Idealist is an all-or-nothing situation as each temperament can find adopting some traits of the other useful.

I suppose that my conclusion is that I engage in Rational introspection primarily, which is perhaps resonant with Idealist practice, but is still its own feature. Thus I feel that I’ve learnt something of myself, but by looking at it as part of a natural system; a truly Rational behaviour.