INFJ vs. INTP – Spinoza and Kant compared

kant_spinoza

18 Comments

  1. It’s a pretty solid comparison, but I’d also like to see an INFP vs. INTJ comparison if you have the time?

  2. As I was saying before, INFP and INTJ. I saw how this page was comparing and contrasting the Ti and Fe in two INxx types, so I thought “why not do the same for the Fi and Te in the other two INxx types”? Especially since I would imagine this site would have a demographic of sorts in INxx users.

  3. Yes – what we meant was: Which two specific people do you think would make a fruitful comparison?

  4. George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens. Christopher was strongly influenced by George Orwell, and would both refer to his works when discussing political matters (eg. the situation in North Korea) and wrote extensively about him in books and essays (“Why Orwell Matters” is a good example).

  5. Are you sure that Kant was an INTP. I’m an INTP and except for the second line I relate with the INFJ…

  6. I like to see one contrasting Foucalt’s ENTP-ness and Chomsky’s INFJ-ness if you have the time.

  7. @Anonymous Hitchens already has an infographic. A better INFP INTJ contrast would be Albert Camus vs. Jean-Paul Sartre. They’re both 20th century french existentialists, so along with illustrating differences in personality type, the graphic would also present us with some examples of the discourse between philosophers of that epoch.

  8. Good comment. You seem like someone who would be interested to know that we have an essay challenge (see our News page) :-)

  9. “When faced with logical contradiction, adds up both positions to form a greater whole”

    Which cognitive function would that statement suggest? Ni?

  10. “It’s still possible that it’s not wrong; maybe it’s correct if we shift the context” actually sounds more like Ne to me.
    What I experience of Ni is more of “wait, something does not make sense”, because “what it implies is [focused idea in its current, most relevant context]”; Ni is of more singular interpretation (and the “related ideas” should be closely relevant) instead of exploring different possibilities like Ne (and which can easily refer to only-slightly-connected ideas).

  11. Can you put some light on the reason that so many INFJ philosophers/thinkers get typed as INTP, including Spinoza, Chomsky, Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer. Its very pervasive in the broader online “MBTI” community. Is there a specific reason as to why it happens so regularly? Whats the culprit here? Also it would be great if we get a “INTP or INFJ” test… Thanks.

  12. Sorry, but there not “mystical transcendance” in Spinoza’s philosophy, it’s a philosophy of pure immanence, Ethics is demonstrated “more geometrico”, not at all in “aphoristic and oracular axioms”, his method was generally speaking the construction of a formal framework for describing human experience in an analytic style, especially in rational analysis of feelings, and he demands to perceive not to judge. For me, he’s a INTP, the same kind of mind than Einstein who favored the theoretical approach.

    And the philosophy of Kant is essentially a philosophy of judgement in a judiciary meaning. Is it a INTP style ?
    With Spinoza, the causality rules the world, the laws of nature are unsurpassable for humans, with Kant, they can escape these laws, out of the phenomenal world, in the laws of morality logically founded. He tries to reinvent the possibility of free will, moral choice and universal morality, against the determinism of the scientific laws of nature, against the naturalism a la Spinoza where morality is a social phenomenon linked to feelings as psychological phenomenons, everything being connected in a causal chain.

    Kant was very meticulous, compulsive, with strong daily routine, and in fact, don’t you inverse the two types ? Spinoza as INTP and Kant as INFJ ?

  13. There is no doubt that Spinoza understood himself as immanence oriented, though as we also note, the immanence is so pervasive that it becomes its own — if not transcendence — then super-mundane divinity. Spinoza also, at least in the way he expressed himself, seemed to think that he was demonstrating objective laws of ethics, almost as a form of geometrical proof. If you are a Spinozist, you will not agree that many of Spinoza’s utterances — like Wittgenstein’s in the Tractatus — are more or less arbitrary, as philosophers as diverse as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kant have all remarked. For our part, we agree with this characterization of Spinoza, and therefore we come at his philosophy from this angle in our infographic. Kant is, as you remark, much more judicious in his analysis, constantly qualifying what he can allow himself to say and offering either purely logical permissions/denials or getting into long deductive chains of argument that follow pretty clearly from the initial principle or observation, without recourse to a strong personal element in selecting one proposition over another. We don’t know why you would say that Kant allows human beings to escape causal laws, however – that doesn’t seem right. At the end of the day, though, to us, Kant is reliant on clear observations and on an impersonal, accessible logic that brings some very difficult topics into the domain of ordinary thought-forms (Jung would possibly call this “rational”) while Spinoza is — in spite of himself — inwardly personal and mystical while outwardly doing the utmost to clothe his philosophy in mail, mask, and mathematics, in an attempt at making it seem as “objective” as possible. Kant, to us, represents one common outcome of Ti-Ne reasoning, Spinoza one of Ni-Ti. One giveaway of the latter is often the very meager empirical content there, operating in an entirely introverted mode, coining beautiful thoughts and mental images, yet also getting lost in subjectivity. To read the antinomies of the first critique vis-a-vis Spinoza’s ideas of what pure logic can do is telling in our opinion. We agree that Kant had a Compulsive style and that this is pretty unusual for INTPs. On the other hand, it is no more extraordinary than if you read his biography, he was raised in a manner that is often associated with the development of Compulsive traits.

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