In his Psychological Types of
1920 Carl Jung asks,
Who does not know those taciturn, impenetrable, often shy
creatures, who form such a vivid contrast to those open sociable, serene maybe,
or at least friendly characters, who are on good terms with all the world? (p
413)
With this rhetorical question Jung
launches his seminal dichotomisation of personality into Introverts and
Extroverts; a dichotomy that is perhaps the most successful of all of such
polarities, and one that has long been part of common usage.
Yet Jung’s conception of the
antithesis is much more than the commonplace contrast between the gregarious
and the reclusive. In Jung’s analysis the antithesis is at bottom about two
contrary relations between the Subject and the Object. To put the difference in
a single sentence: the Extrovert ‘discharges’ energy upon the Object, while
Introvert draws charge from the Object. Thus, to use his illustration, the
extrovert sees that the weather is freezing, and puts on a coat to go outside.
The introvert sees that the weather is freezing, and - fired up by the
resolution that he must harden himself - goes outside without a coat. The
extravert dislikes cold weather and so battles it; the introvert dislikes cold
weather and soaks it up. The extrovert acts in way that directly corresponds to
objective conditions; while the introvert’s acts in an indirect, and seemingly
less effective, relation to objective conditions.
What makes Jung’s analysis so
interesting to the student of economics is that he applies it to thought as
well as action. Jung maintains, in other words, that from the different
orientation of the two types to ‘the without’ there arises an extrovert
‘cognitive style’ (as we would say today) distinct from the introvert cognitive
style.
The difference in the cognitive
styles is partly manifested in the more obvious social aspects of the
intellectual existence. The extravert thinker, says Jung, ‘begins to publish
very early, becomes rapidly famous ... He cultivates personal relationships ...
[and] takes an unusual interest in the development of his pupils’. The
introvert, in contrast, feels a ‘distaste for teaching’, and because of his
‘absolute need to stand without error or blemish in the public eye ...
his style is loaded and complicated by all sorts of accessories’. His
melancholy fate is often a misanthropic isolation.
But Jung also pursues the more truly
intellectual biases of Extroverts and Introvert thinking. His position on these
might be best brought out in reviewing his procession of examples.
In keeping with the fundamental
importance he attached to the antithesis, Jung traces manifestations of the
dichotomy back to the beginning of Western thought: Plato, he surmises, was an
introvert, while Diogenes was an extravert. Plato’s disregard of the external
world as mere ‘shadow’ is obviously introverted, and the hard-bitten ‘here
and nowness’ of Cynicism seems extrovert in its heed of externals.
Jung deems Christian theology to be
richly illustrating of the impact the extravert/introvert dichotomy has on
doctrine. Jung identifies the Ebionite tendency in Christology – that Jesus was
human, and any divinity an illusion – as extravert; the Docetist tendency -
that Jesus was divine, and any humanity an illusion – is introvert. Perhaps the
most piquant of Jung’s contrasts is between two Church Fathers: Tertullian and
Origen. Origen is pure extrovert: all that “extensive journeying ...
constantly surrounded by pupils and a whole host of stenographers who gathered up
the precious words that fall from the revered masters lips”. Tertullian’s
polemical posture, by contrast, is pure introvert: as introvert does not
necessarily mean ‘quiet’, and to Jung’s mind ‘affect-explosions’ (wonderful
phrase!) are telltale give-away of introversion. But Jung clinches the
difference by reference to the two men’s modes of Christian sacrifice. Origen,
notoriously, sacrificed his body: Tertullian sacrificed his mind. ‘To
believe because it is absurd’: this was Tertullian’s notorious maxim, and in
holding it he was making a perfect sacrifice of mind. Of course, it is mind
(inward) rather than body (outward) that would constitute sacrifice to an
introvert.
By obvious reasoning the Nominalist metaphysicians
of the middle ages are judged by Jung to be introverts, while the Realists were
extrovert. Luther was extrovert, and Zwingli introvert: the doctrine of the
Real Presence that Luther maintained was a characteristically extrovert example
of concretising the abstract; while Zwingli’s symbolic interpretation was
introvert example of abstractising the concrete.
The contrast does not fade with the
secularisation of thought. Darwin, Jung says, was extrovert: all that
omnivorous roaming around the whole realm of knowledge. Kant was introvert. Humphry
Davy, the rock-star showman of the laboratory was evidently extrovert; and
Faraday, the oddball seer of the invisible physical world, was Introvert.
Georges Cuvier was extrovert, and Friedrich Nietzsche introvert.
Jung, regrettably, never used
economics to illustrate the contrast. Can one successfully identify the
dichotomy among the famous economists? Let me try.
Of the classical economists Adam
Smith (1723-1791) is plainly an introvert; and David Hume (1711-1776) an
extrovert. The allocation is so obvious from their characters that it hardly
craves justification. But notice that Hume’s flamboyant aphorism that ‘reason
is the slave of passion’ distinctly correlates with Jung’s contention
that extroversion inclines to make thinking the slave of feeling (Jung’s
words); since thinking impedes feeling, and so obstructs that discharge of
‘psychic energy’ on the object.
Of the Ricardians, J.S Mill would
seem fall into the introvert category on account of his aloofness from the
common herd, while the uninhibited sociality of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), David
Ricardo (1772-1823) and T.R. Malthus (1766-1832) seem fairly definitely
extroverted.
The neoclassical economists H.H. Gossen (1810-1858), W.S. Jevons
(1835-1882) and Vilfredo Pareto (1851-1923) are definite candidates for
introversion. Jevon’s copious and earnest diary keeping is a dead give-way;
while Pareto’s mysteriousness and misanthropy encourage the same diagnosis.
Gossen’s ‘broad’ interests (painter, insurance salesman, musicologist, civil
servant ....) by Jungian criterion would suggest extroversion. But
his acute mental solitude suggests the reverse: not to mention a literary
style was so ‘tortuous that even Germans have trouble reading it’’ (Meijer and Vogel 2000).
Other neoclassical seem to provide some pairs of opposites. Knut Wicksell (1851-1926) and Phillip Wicksteed (1844-1927) were doctrinal allies who occupied opposite positions psychologically . Wicksell’s gauche manners, drastic religious fluctuations, and clumsy public stands contrasts with Wicksteed’s ‘extraordinarily broad range of scholarly and theological explorations’, his longtime dedication to adult education, and his dextrous forays into public life.
Another contrast of neoclassical economists
well illustrates the cognitive implications of the dichotomy. I refer to the
two combatants of capital theory: John Bates Clark (1847-1938) and Eugen
Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914). On one side Clark, ‘simple and childlike" (in the
words of one eulogist); and on the other Böhm-Bawerk, president of the
Austrian Academy of Science, a member House of Peers, ambassador to
Germany, and three times Minister for Finance. His pedagogical texts are
fluent, persuasive and very much directed to ‘without’, be it Clark, Marx or
the literally one hundred other authors he took on. By contrast Clark’s
‘students would often try to induce him to accept or refute Böhm-Bawerk's
theory of the dependence of the interest rate on the undervaluation of the
future. Clark would merely re- state ... his own productivity theory of
interest’. (Jonson 1938). This quote is so starkly illustrative of
Jung’s contention of the defective self-absorption of introvert teaching that
Jung could have well added it to his own store of instances.
But there is another more
intellectually significant contrast between Clark and Böhm-Bawerk; one that
concerns their relative aptitude, and incapacity, for ‘theory’ and
‘parable’ Böhm-Bawerk was talented at presenting parables, but never
managed to articulate his notions in abstract theory. With Clarke it was the
reverse; his thought reclines in cloudy abstraction and never condenses on the concretely
illustration. Clark, of course, had a doctrinal aversion to thinking of capital
in terms of a concrete array of pick and shovels etc, and was father of the
‘neoclassical aggregate production function’; Böhm-Bawerk’s theory of
‘roundaboutness’ was brought to life by a suite of stories about woodcutters,
fishermen, etc. This contrast seems to manifest a difference emphasised
by Jung: that extroverts are given to ‘concretising’ the abstract, while
introverts are attached to abstracting from the concrete.
In the 20th c Keynes
flagrant personality obviously conflicts with the secretive and enigmatic
Marshall: the first flinging aphorisms and essays at the public; the second devoting
his prime of life to clot, from his bathchair, the pages of his Principles
with ever more footnotes and qualifications. From about the same period
(see Coleman, Cornish and Hagger 2006) a similar contrast can be drawn from the
antipodes: between the blatant D.B
Copland and the remote and massive L.F. Giblin. (Copland’s periodic collapses
corresponds well with Jung’s contention that extroverts are susceptible to
‘hysteria’). It was perhaps not accidental that it was a protogé of Giblin – Arthur Smithies – who perceived that J.A. Schumpeter
(another diarist) was an essentially solitary figure. ‘No one was invited to share Schumpeter’s intellectual life’, Smithies
observes. ‘He made his intellectual journeys alone’. Smithies added, ‘To
explain his personality I am convinced we have to go back to his earliest
childhood and recall that he spent most of his first 10 years as the only son
of a young widowed mother’. The only son of a young widowed mother? Precisely Adam Smith’s predicament ...
In the post-War generation Milton Friedman
is obviously extrovert; all that globe-trotting, the high media profile, the
sunny demeanour. Ronald Coase serves to illustrate the introvert; the sheer individuality
of his contribution, his oblique exposition of his ideas, the vinegary
presentation, the overall maverick aspect.
But what in summary is the difference
in cognitive style? The above would suggest that the essence of introvert thinking
is a hankering after the abstract, while the extrovert embraces concrete. But
Jung declares in rebuttal,
Extroverted thinking, therefore, need not necessarily be
concretistic thinking – it may equally well be ideal thinking, if, for instance
it can be shown that the ideas with which it is engaged are to a great
extent browed from without and transmitted by tradition and education
‘From without’ : there lies what critically distinguishes extrovert style from introvert
style . And to Jung the key application of this critical distinction is in Judgement,
the great end of thinking.
‘whether or not thinking is
extroverted hangs directly upon the question: by which standard is its
judgement governed ... from without , or is its origin subjective?’ (p
429)
The upshot, therefore, is that the
essence of extrovert cognitive style is a favour of public (‘scientific’)
methods of evaluation. Introvert
cognitive style inclines to appeal to intuition and insight in methods of
evaluation.
Not surprisingly, Jung sees dangers
in both tendencies pushed to far. Jung believed extrovert intellectual products
risk yielding a ‘stale and hollow positivism’. To add to the indictment he
suggests extroversion risks transforming reason into sophistry; morality into
Pharisaism; religion into superstition; and intuition into ‘mere personal
subtlety’. But at the same time Jung complains that the introvert forgets the
point of thinking, and ‘creates theories for the sake of theories’.
Jung expresses the failings of
both styles in parody: whereas the Extrovert argues ‘It is therefore it
is’, the Introvert argues ‘I think therefore I think’.
Jung seems even handed in judging the
two cognitive styles, is uninterested in awarding a superiority to one or the
other, and at various points presses their complementarity; extrovert style
lends ‘breadth’, while the introvert lends ‘depth’.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of
Jung’s notion is not to award victory to one style, or to secure a bland
peacemaking between the two, but to heighten our consciousness of the
dependence of the apparently logical on the psychological, and thereby foster a
intellectual scepticism in both ourselves and others.
References
Coleman, William 2007, ’Arthur
Smithies’, Biographical Dictionary of
Australian and New Zealand Economists, J. King ed, Edward Elgar, U.K.
Coleman, William, Selwyn Cornish
and Alf Hagger 2006, Giblin’s Platoon:
The Trials and Triumph of the Economist in Australian Public Life ¸ANU
EPress, Canberra, http://epress.anu.edu.au/gp/pdf/gp_whole.pdf
Jung, C.G., 1924 (1920), Psychological
Types, London.
Meijer, Gerrit and Richard F.A.
Vogel 2000, "The fate of new ideas: Hermann Heinrich Gossen, his life,
work and influence", Journal of
Economic Studies, 27 (4/5), 416 – 420.
Johnson,
Alvin 1938, ‘Memorial
to John Bates Clark, 1847-1938’ American Economic Review, 28(2), 427-2.
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