I didn’t start out thinking this intellectual stuff is necessary, it just feels necessary. It’s just the way I am. Classifying and defining is just something I automatically do — always.
It isn’t a basic need on the same level as food, sex & shelter. It’s even more basic – on the level of breathing, or maybe sleep is a better analogy. It just happens. It isn’t something I have to go out and find or fabricate or fight for; I’m not driven to it or by it, I’m driven through it. It’s a part of the rhythm of my life, affecting everything.
So while I write a lot about why intellectual stuff is so important, advocating it and explaining how our society could accommodate it more effectively, and benefit more by it, I’m not actually advocating this for everyone, I’m only trying to encourage people who are already inclined the same way — people with the same personality (call it “intp“ if you want) — and to make my kind of creative thinking familiar and acceptable enough that people aren’t so quick to complain it’s “not the way things are done.”
Per my last post, on the Virtues of Idleness, this kind of activity is good in itself. Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t also have an important social utility; it also happens to generate a lot of great stuff in the process. But the paradox is that when you try to do it for the sake of utility, it doesn’t work as well. We can actually accomplish more when we do it foremost for it’s own sake.
So I do this simply because there’s nothing else I’d rather do, then I also hope to encourage other people to do the same (those people who might already be inclined) and – to introduce a little modesty here — to find people who are already doing the same thing, to engage in a generative conversation and learn from them.
After I wrote a bit about my intp personality I got a surprising amount of traffic from keyword searches that included “INTP” (and other humourously relevant terms I wouldn’t have expected, e.g. “always bored personality type,” which pointed someone here a few days ago).
So this post isn’t just about explaining, it’s also about me finally coming to terms with the need to optimize my damned keywords for search engines. I guess this means I’m maturing as a blogger. I’m starting to get a sense of who my best readership would be and how to find them. I’m conceiving this more and more as (among other things) an outlet for discussing and articulating how to live as an intp, what’s the best way for introverts to contribute to society… thinkers’ happiness, intuiters’ virtues and values, perceivers’ productivity, intp frienship for introverted-intuitive-thinker-perceivers… [shameless, I know]
Underlying all of this is an insight that I think is a genuine advance in moral philosophy, affiliated with Pragmatism but maybe not quite articulated there. For centuries moral philosophy was absolute: it came from religion (and later from habits held over from religious ways of thinking) — e.g. ”These are the rules for everybody… life has a single purpose that applies to everyone.”
Then around the 19th century things got pretty sophisticated — which is to say, scientific and bloodless. Philosophers were finally outgrowing many of the habits of religious thinking but then went to the other extreme, which was no less absolute and all-encompassing (the one major habit still held over from religion). Society started to be conceived as a kind of machine, in which everything could be measured and calibrated, and virtue meant maximizing utility.
Then just before the start of the 20th century (and ever since), philosophers working in and around the shadow cast by Nietzsche challenged all of that and we ended up with a philosophy of moral relativism, which comes down to saying (very roughly) that there are no universal values and everyone can do whatever they damn well want to.
Now in between absolutism and relativism there is room for an attitude that integrates the best of both while expelling their flaws. Psychology and neuroscience etc are finally giving us a clear idea of what we can change and what we can’t — i.e. what we learn and decide versus what we’re compelled to do by the chemistry and biology of our bodies and brains. The chemistry and biology shouldn’t just be used as an excuse (as in ”I can’t help killing people, I have a violent brain.”), but rather as a platform from which to begin trying to orient ourselves and define for ourselves what kind of person we each can and should be, to get a sense of our natural opportunities or limits.
This doesn’t mean we should all submit ourselves to laboratory testing. The real world is the laboratory, and the process of “orientation” goes on day-by-day as we interact with people and try to figure out where we ought to be in relation to them. It isn’t about meddling with other people, it’s about positioning oneself with reference to them. Meanwhile they’re doing the same. Life is a process of constantly wiggling and growing and adapting into the most appropriate niche.
Science infiltrates this process because there are many people whose most appropriate position is doing science – i.e. accounting for and explaining the chemical and biological factors that make us different — and then there are people whose most appropriate position is to interpret that work, to apply it, or popularize it, etc, and on and on through the crowd so even the people who couldn’t care less about science are affected by the waves.
Personality “types” are abstract and unreal. When I say I’m an intp I’m generalizing, and I don’t take it all that seriously: it’s a reference point — a point of “family resemblance” — that helps me orient my values, wiggle into my niche, and figure out what my real, specific personality might be.
When I looked at that intp type, I recognized qualities and inclinations that I always felt but didn’t quite realize were real until I had that “reference point” making things clear — to give me something concrete to grab ahold of. That gave me leverage to continue clarifying things even further, developing a moral code for myself.
A “moral code for myself” isn’t exactly just for myself: it isn’t an act of moral relativism, it’s an act of moral relation or moral reference. I know there are other people (maybe not many) who share my family resemblence to the intp type, who also enjoy categorizing and defining and conceiving moral codes for the sake of doing it – simply because it’s in our nature: it’s the rhythm of our lives.
So a conversation will ensue about how we should live, what kind of values and rules and norms we ought to follow — and maybe for the sake of discussion, some of it presumes to be absolute and universal (i.e. applicable to everybody) — and ultimately we won’t all agree on the same moral code because we’re all at least just a little bit different, or at least we live in different circumstances and have to address different kinds of problems and opportunities.
But agreement on a single set of rules isn’t the point. The point is that we’re already doing what makes our lives meaningful and productive and fun. Someone more inclined towards platitudes would say, “the journey is the destination.”
And the ideas, formulas, principles, rules and theories we compose along the way, although they are incomplete (or perhaps just plain wrong) in themselves, they are nonetheless essential material with which we continue to refine our thinking and define our lives and make our world more hospitable, like the ground we walk on and the roofs over our heads – it’s important they be strong, but it’s more important to master the trades of making them better and keeping them up.
