Thinking vs Feeling

Thinking and feeling are the judging or rational functions. Judging functions are called judging functions because they judge stuff. Quite straightforward, but the process of judgment or judging things isn’t usually considered. Forming a judgment refers to coming to a decided conclusion on something, or forming an opinion by evaluating something. Jung stated that “judgment always presupposes a criterion” which is true because there needs to be a standard by which to judge something. Therefore, the underlying process of judgment refers to the formation of criteria and standards by which to form a conclusion. In short, judgement can be defined as referring to a frame of reference to make sense of things.

Since judgment refers to a set of standards and criteria by which to judge things, it seeks to create measurements. That is, it compares information with the standard that it established, to see if the information coincides with it. It does this passively and actively. By ‘passively’, I mean the mere comparison of data with the standards and criteria; here, I am referring to evaluation. By ‘actively’, I mean the arrangement of data so as to make it coincide with the standards. The active aspect of judgement coincides more with Jung’s term, which was ‘rationality’.

That is the very reason why people in Jungian Typology refer to judgment as the organization of things. Again, Carl Jung’s term for judging was ‘rationality’, which is a better term for it since it doesn’t coincide with the conventional sense of the word “judgment”, and rationality implies a certain orderliness. It was also called ‘rationality’ because rationality is to reason. The set of criteria is the “reason” behind the judgment. So, judgement or rationality entails things like reasoning, evaluation, making sense of things, and consequently, order. As stated by Jung, “Rational judgment, ... is a force that coerces the untidiness and fortuitousness of life into a definite pattern, or at least tries to do so.”

Thinking

So, thinking refers to judging or evaluating things through logic. It's concerned with the impersonal mechanics of something. Consequently, thinking’s focus is on the inanimate qualities of things, or in Jungian typologist Michael Pierce’s words, “the cold attributes of things”. Thinking seeks to see how information coincides with standards of true or false, valid or invalid, functional or nonfunctional. Additionally, thinking is systematic, because logic is concerned with the inferential validity of systems.

Jung referred to thinking as the use of the intellect. But he is not referring to intelligence. Intellect just refers to the faculty of the mind that is able to reason out things in an objective manner, and acquiring knowledge of the raw workings of things.

Feeling

Feeling judges or evaluates things through values and sentiments. Feeling is not just emotions. However, I believe that emotions are an integral part of the feeling function. Rather, feeling can be referred to as the process of making sense of emotions, or the evaluation of emotions; or the establishment of values derived from emotional responses and feeling-tones. The feeling function can be properly described as a process of reasoning. The type of rational justifications from feeling are just different from that of thinking.

The focus of feeling is on the personal, sentient qualities of things. These qualities are standards of harmony, good or bad, desirable or undesirable, moral or immoral, ethical or unethical. And while thinking is more systematic, feeling does indeed create value-systems. They are judging functions so it’s expected for each function to be systematic on some level.

Summary

In summation, thinking judges things by impersonal, mechanical standards, while feeling judges things by personal, sentimental standards.