Originally Posted by
silverchris9
Yeah, I agree with what Golden said. Fe provides an intuitive understanding of how to change what is going on inside of other people. Yes, it often finds expression in the creation of cheeriness, because that is socially useful and everybody likes being happy (well, most people), but it has a much broader range of application.
There's a great quote that comes from classical Indian dance that is something like "where the hand goes, the eye follows. Where the eye goes, the mind follows. Where the mind goes the bhava follows. Where the bhava goes, the rasa is released." And the bhava here is the emotional energy as embodied by the performer, whereas the rasa is emotion-content received by the audience. I like this quote because it makes it clear that there is a connection that goes from the external, perceptible actions of the performer to the internal, impalpable state that is aroused in the spectator. I think that there's a lot of confusion because in English we have the same word for emotion-as-communicated and emotion-as-received or aroused. I use the word "aroused" intentionally, as the most immediate comparison we can all understand is sex. There are certain actions that, while not directly sexual themselves (I mean they're not involved in any way with mimicking or representing any particular sexual act) arouse a sexy feeling in the observer. And you see this all the time with Fe people. Like, a person makes a bunch of other people fall into gales of laughter by dramatically expressing anger. A person makes another person feel sympathy by expressing confusion. And that word "expressing" really should be "embodying," because the way it works is that you assume a certain physical state (a certain state of the hands, the eyes, the lips, the posture, the tone/pitch/volume/timbre of voice, a certain way of touching a person) and that state embodies a bhava (or emotion-as-expressed) which arouses a rasa (or emotion-as-recieved) in the "target audience." And because Fe is a judging function, this isn't experienced as knowledge about how the Fe valuer is arranging his/her face or specifically what emotion the other person is feeling. It's just experienced as an immediate sort of knowledge of what to do to achieve the conscious or unconscious goal. I would argue that if anything, Fe thinks in terms of bhava, of what emotion to express in order to arouse the right response in the observer. And then the knowledge of what face to make, what tone of voice to have, etc., etc., takes care of itself, as the sort of automatic knowledge that Fe consists of.
In other words, Fe is about the relationship between perceptible/sensory causes and emotional/internal effects. And that doesn't limit Fe to making people feel a certain way. Any time anthropomorphism is used as a tool of cognition, that is often Fe in action. For instance, when a computer is frozen for a while because it's doing some sort of computation or whatever, we say the computer is "confused," which is a kind of Fe knowledge: I took action y, it produced internal state z. Certain intuitive ways of dealing with machines or animals or whatever can be seen as manifestations of the Fe ability to understand immediately what action will result in what emotional state. And the more of a "brain" the object has the more effective Fe is, whereas for more mechanical things, often the Te approach is the more common one, although we can see how the one can act in the other's domain. And they really are mirrors of each other; think of mechanics that know intuitively what action will cause the desired result in the car, or electricians, plumbers, etc. We don't think about it a lot, but those are all, by nature, Te: the intuitive understanding of what external action will produce what functional/external result. And in the same way that Fe can have some success applying its approach to things that have less of a "brain" than humans do (from animals to computers to machines), so Te can have some success applying its approach to things that have more of a brain.
So yeah, that's what I think Fe is: a way of relating "internal state of expresser" and "physical modes of expression" and "internal state of observer" and "physical signs of observer's emotions," which can be generalized/metaphorized to other intuitive relationships between external action and internal state.