There is a story of the ancient world about the Gordian
knot, a knot so intricate that not even the wisest could untie it.
When Alexander the Great was conquering Asia Minor, the story goes,
he was presented with the Gordian knot as a test of his wisdom. Alexander,
without hesitation, drew his sword and cut the knot in two. This illustrates
two opposite psychological functions and their approaches - Sensation
and Intuition.
Jung had not yet begun
his psychological study of alchemy when he wrote Psychological
types, but in later works he found the symbolism of the four elements
to be illustrative, and to refer to the same psychological reality.
Most of Jung's observations take the form of psychological opposites
and the tension between them, this is true of the psychological functions
he describes. You can combine Earth and Water (dissolve something)
and Earth and Fire (burn something), but Earth and Air are a pair
of opposites and so cannot be directly combined. This is also true
of the functions. Personalities combine Sensation and Feeling, and
Sensation and Thinking, but Sensation and Intuition are not initially
combined. The first pair, Intuition and Sensation correspond to Air
and Earth, and are the perceiving functions. The second pair, Thinking
and Feeling, correspond to Fire and Water, and are the judging functions.
How you approach the world, and what you see there,
is what the perceiving functions are about. Alexander saw the knot
in a different way than the wise men who had tried to undo it before.
His solution must have shocked them, for they themselves had tried
and not known how to begin undoing the knot. This is the abrupt 'out
of the blue' solution of intuition. The Intuitive type, like the all-embracing
element of Air, sees things in terms of possibilities, and as wholes
and related systems in context. Intuitive leaps cover great distances,
but are leaps through the air, and leave no bridge by which others
can follow. Intuitives tend to be very creative, but it tends to be
a 'messy' creativity - often with loose ends, obscure references,
and unclear results.
The Sensation function, like the sensible element
of Earth, sees things in terms of the senses, concrete reality, distinct
objects, and clearly defined concepts. Sensates get from point A to
point B by means of following a road, or building a bridge, step by
step. Such bridges can be based on solid reasoning or crumble under
scrutiny, but for the Sensate the bridge is a necessary path and an
integral part of the conclusion. Sensate creativity id less easily
recognized than intuitive creativity. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions, delineated between normal science,
the work within a theoretical framework or paradigm, and scientific
revolutions, where the theoretical framework is changed. The creativity
of Sensates is the creative problem solving or craftsmanship within
a standard framework, like normal science, while the creativity of
the Intuitive is more likely to break with or change the standard
framework. That is why we have Sensate poets like Kipling, and Intuitive
poets like Blake.
Such functional distinctions
may arise from the organization of neural networks. The Sensate preferences
may arise in the function of a network by inhibiting the spread of
neural activation to other subsystems and their related concepts.
The Intuitive system may, in contrast, develop connections that spread
activation further. If this is the case, the identity function of
the network would be stronger in the Sensate network, and the associative
function would be stronger in the Intuitive.
The goal is to gain facility with both perceptive
functions, to integrate the elements of Earth and Air in the alchemical
vessel of our psyche. The first step towards this is to become aware
that our usual way of perceiving is no the only way, there is an opposite
we must recognize and attempt to understand. For it is the integration
of the disparate elements of ourselves, both conscious and unconscious,
that moves us towards wholeness.
© -1997 Troy W. Pierce
