“Fours are self-aware, sensitive, and reserved. They are emotionally honest, creative, and personal, but can also be moody and self-conscious. Withholding themselves from others due to feeling vulnerable and defective, they can also feel disdainful and exempt from ordinary ways of living. They typically have problems with melancholy, self-indulgence, and self-pity. At their Best: inspired and highly creative, they are able to renew themselves and transform their experiences.” -enneagram institute
After taking the 14 page enneagram test, my results concluded that I was a type four with a five wing. I originally thought myself to be more of a type eight but the brief description of personality type 4 seems very accurate to myself and my personality.
As a type 4, I am very creative, emotional, personal, highly individualistic, and romantic. But also self conscious, vulnerable, moody, and a bit of a snob. And the majority of these things suit my personality well, i feel the 4 personality type does not correctly represent my strong and confident side, my bravery, sentimentalism, logic and openness to new things and people, or my controlling, and temperamental nature. While I am an individualist, I do not tend to have a strong disdain for things that lack originality or that the majority of people enjoy, and i do not feel a strong connection in a personal identity because I have many other things outside of myself that give me confidence and identity.
There are many aspect of my identity that I can say confidently, are a part of my nurture, or how I was raised. But there are also aspects that I have just had for as long as I can remember. Maybe they came from my parents, but maybe they are a result of my genetic makeup or because I am my parents child and was exposed to certain behaviors as a child.
I always will have my mom to thank for my creative, innovative, and artistic nature. Being an artist herself, she raised me as an artist from birth and it was because of her that I pursue art and theater now. Being raised in a home with constant theater influences and broadway music put me at a natural disposition to love it and pursue it later in life. Being in a place with free access to my mother's own art, and all of her supplies gave me a head start to being an artist. It is also because of her that I am emotional, fashionable, vulnerable, and anxious. Which are traits of her that she never intentionally taught me, but showed me throughout my life, or passed onto me from her own personality. The one trait I have no idea how I inherited but is no doubt from her is my sentimental side. I keep everything I can reasonably justify as a momento, and I can always be found with one digital and one film camera on my person, sometimes up to three or four cameras at a time. Something I never knew until this year was that through high school my mom was the same way and ever kept the majority of her film photo collection to show me now that I am in highschool. It’s hard to know where that sentimental trait came from, but it’s one of the traits I find most admirable in myself.
Freedom of Attention
David Foster Wallace wants to remind us that instead of choosing to make everything about ourselves and making ourselves the victims of our lives we can alter our perspective and choose to have empathy for other people and acknowledge that we are not always in the right.
We have freedom of attention in the way that we assign how much attention to assign to things and how much they matter in our lives. When we think about something constantly we assign it a greater meaning. We can assign greater meaning and importance to it by choosing to acknowledge a problem we can stress moreover it and make it appear to be a greater issue than it is.
Humans have a self centered default setting where we are convinced that every situation revolves around us and we are the center of things. It's natural for humans to be more concerned about themselves than others because they can only live events through their own perspectives. In order to get out of this mindset we need to consider how other people feel and admit we don't know everything about any given situation.
Primary and Secondary emotions
Which is more important, action or intention?
In ethics there are many different ways of thinking, but lots of these different ethical dilemmas or differentiation stem from the differences in Consequentialism, or Deontology. Consequentialism is the doctrine that the morality of an action is to be judged solely by its consequences, the polar opposite of Deontology, or Duty Based ethics which believes, an action is considered morally good because of some characteristic of the action itself, not because the product of the action is good. Both of these ideologies have widely different ideas on the question, “What is more important, action or intention?”.
Judging by the principles of Consequentialism the action is more relevant to the results than the intention. No matter what your intention is behind your action, as long as nothing bad happens, no real harm done. This line of thinking can be applied to consequentialism in two different ways.
You accidently hit someone with your car, but it wasn't intentional, and they aren't seriously injured so no real harm done.
You have the intention to run someone down with you car, but you miss, and they live. Again, no real harm done.
Someone who leans more towards Duty based ethics would say that the morals in both examples are flawed and morally wrong, because Deontology is based on moral obligation and right vs wrong instead of just focusing on the consequences. Deontology would say that the above example number one is morally wrong because the driver was failing to pay attention and accidentally injured a passenger. Even though the intent was to cause harm, by being negligent, harm was done and it was morally wrong. Deontology would also say example number two is morally wrong because even though no crime was committed the person had the intent to commit a crime, which is still wrong and dangerous.
I think intent matters just as much if not more when you’re committing an action. But in addition, i think lack of intention is very important. If every time you get in the car you aren't making a conscious decision to follow the traffic laws and be a responsible driver, you are responsible for any harm you cause. Committing an action without intent and having a bad outcome is almost as bad as having bad intentions with an equally bad outcome.