Base and Creative Fi

Base Fi (“balanced-stable ethics”, introverted descending feeling) – Ethical Inertness

Attachment to close others, personal devotion and loyalty - maintaining one’s attractiveness to these specific people, and doing so not so much in terms of the beauty of expressing feelings, but in transmitting a sense of reliability, unconditional support.

For possessors of strong, inert, base Fi, there is a characteristic rejection of emancipation and condemnation of objectification of the ascending kind. By the latter we mean an attitude toward others as experimental objects with whom one can and should experiment in order to clarify their true essence, raising particular features to certain impersonal-objective, generalized standards.

Base Fi differs from the other three ethical functions by the restraint and even sparseness of the external emotional manifestations of its feelings (with the same depth of their internal experience), as well as by greater sympathy for another’s misfortune rather than joy (and therefore by a more frequent appeal to the theme of negativity in its creative work).

Creative Fi (“Flexible-Agile Ethics”, extroverted descending feeling) – Ethical Contact

The ability to read other people’s personal qualities and, using this knowledge, flexibly manipulate psychological distances.

For possessors of strong contact, creative Fi, there is a characteristic rejection of any order as constraining their activity, often turning into emphasized alogicality, mockery of any formal logic, any rules. Hence - difficulties with retaining acquired resources, hence the search for a more sober, thrifty, rationally economical partner, but one who does not claim the role of master of the system that forces them to play by its rules.

Among the ethical functions, creative Fi stands out for the superficiality of its empathy, the absence of deep emotional experiences (especially negative ones), and its desire for a certain degree of independence from the partner, even when there is genuine affection.