Quoting personalityjunkie on Fi: For example, I didn’t have to factually discern a respect for human dignity; I simply found myself in situations where people did not respect human dignity, and it made me angry — I found out that I hate bullying.”
Ha! I love Personality Junkie. I think it's about the best, most reasoned and careful site out there on the functions, etc.
That said, he was describing one person's feelings. He's not saying much as to where these values actually come from. I have to confess that it is difficult to describe these things. In the same way, it's difficult to describe where Ti gets its foundational structure. I like this quote, btw, from the same guy, right before what you quoted:
My inner values and feelings (Fi) are like a building, a structure of affections that inform my worldview. This involves an inner love for certain things, and an inner repulsion for other things. My values and feelings form “blocks” of varying hardness, depending on how strongly I feel about them; the stronger ones are more resilient…I constantly discover more about the structure as I go, and what I should change to make it better.
What he is describing is his values/feelings being built out of blocks. This is kind of like how my wife describes her Ti. But the question is, where did those blocks come from? As adults, we like to think that we approach things as they are, but there is a lot that we have gotten, from our infancy up. The example you quote--bullying. That is a particular Fi trait, but as a young child--infant, really--our mothers, and/or family tend to protect us--value us. You take that away, and you frequently end up with a bully. So, a protected and safe-feeling child would revolt at the bully's behavior. Beyond that, starting in the earliest years in school or preschool, bullying is spoken and acted against, or at least given lip service. But a healthy Fi would hate to be bullied, so recognizes bullying as wrong, as well. So again, what you have is the external informing the internal, without prescribing. That's why I said what I said. Everything goes in, but only what matches what we have settled (those hard blocks) gets assimilated. Those harder blocks are the ones we have held the longest, and are the most reinforced. Like I said, nothing comes from a vacuum. It has to get in there somewhere. For Fi, though, I don't think it's always obvious--usually not.
Oh, and one more thought. ;-) Fi is fed by our lesser functions. The first is our extro-sensing. We see around us, but our Ni also informs and reinforces our Fi. Again, Ni is very much beyond or outside language. How does one express these things in human language? I think this reinforces that sense that my values come from myself alone--and they do, in so far as our minds synthesize and build and create our own values from what we've taken in, thus appearing, even to ourselves, as if they have no outside influence. But I think there is an influence, but it's doing nothing more than informing, and shaping in little ways (and possibly indiscernible at the same time). So, the end result is that what comes out may look nothing like what went in. I think, on the other hand, that for Fe types, what goes in comes right back out.
I don't know if this will help the OP or not, but I hope our discussion on Fi does.
