The Self - Series Part 1 by Fred Blackburn

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Dr. Julie Hayden:
All right, everyone. Welcome. My name is Dr. Julie Hayden, and I’m the chief academic officer at Rhombus University. I’m glad everyone’s joined us for this exciting life class. This is going to be part one of four parts that Fred Blackburn will join us and be presenting. He’s going to be looking at the philosophy of the self as those who have been a part of Rhombus know, the Rhombus model is looking at things from a lot of different perspectives, and I happen to know that professor Fred loves that. So in introducing him, he was at, well, is I guess he’s still here, my favorite professor.

Dr. Julie Hayden:
Yes. And I was thinking how long ago that was. So I won’t mention it, but he’s been doing this for many, many years. And at the time I had him, how he taught would create a divide, and you would hear amongst students areas where they loved him and hated him. And I remember some student, I don’t know the whole scenario, but yelling and screaming that Fred’s going to hell, and they can get intense. And one of the reasons is because when he’s teaching something, he truly believed that giving whatever he is teaching a full experience of what that is like as if he believes it and how he presents it you truly dive in and I wanted that for philosophy. So, we’ve looked at philosophies before a biblical perspective and how we approach humans.

Dr. Julie Hayden:
We’re going to be looking at psychology through the curriculum, and yet, we believe God’s word is true. So I love knowing we have truth. And then, seeing what’s out there, studying, understanding the great minds of history and how they viewed the world and how they viewed people. So on his adventure with us, I hope you are brave and passionate and interactive. I think that would be great to ask questions and to be ready to see how he presents it. But I would say professor Blackburn definitely shaped a lot of who I am and how I approach things with the critical thinking as well as openness to see other people’s perspectives. So I’m very honored to have him tonight, and if you need anything, let us know, but I’m going to pass the baton to you. You can share your own intro as well and take it away. Anything you need from us, just let us know.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
All right. Thanks, Julie. That was sweet. I should give a couple qualifiers in case you’ve never had me give a talk before, it could be a little unnerving. I like to teach first person. And the best way I could explain that, it’s like method acting where you actually take on the persona of who you’re portraying. And so, when I’m teaching these different worldviews and perspectives, I’m going to be teaching them like I believe them. And if you ever want to know what I personally believe, you can email me or whatever, I’m sure Julie will have my contact info and I’d be happy to have a longer discussion. But the reason I do this is because I was brought up in a lot of educational, I use educational loosely, it was really more indoctrination environments where they would give their perspective or their commentary on other worldviews or other beliefs.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
But what I ended up getting was a very anemic or watered down version of those beliefs. Sometimes it wasn’t even accurate. And so, what I’m going to try to do for you is give the strongest version of different worldviews and perspectives as I can. So you’ll be prepared when you meet people that think differently, believe differently than you. And so, I probably won’t come out of character while I’m teaching, but maybe during the question and answer, I might be able to ease myself out of it. I’m a perspective junkie. I love learning about and hearing other people’s perspectives. And it doesn’t mean you have to agree with them or believe them, but to become aware other people are seeing the world radically different than you or I are seeing it. And especially, those of you going into counseling. My goodness, I mean that this will be incredibly invaluable as you come across different types of people.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
And the reason I picked this topic of the self, I’ve had suffered a lot of loss, personal loss over the last few years. And one of those losses was a good friend of mine, Carl [Turp 00:04:54]. I was his traveling companion for 30 years. He was a quadriplegic, but he also was a deputy district attorney for the State of California. He was very accomplished. He traveled in different circles than I did, and he would take me on trips to all these exotic tropical places and I would take care of his physical body and he would provide for the trips. And when I lost him, I knew we were close but I didn’t realize how much of my identity had become entangled with this man. And it really caused a unraveling for me where I had to go back and you can see I’ve been around the sun a few times, but even at my age, I had to go back and reevaluate, who am I?

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
And what is my role? What is my place apart from college or apart from my job, apart from my friends, apart from my family? Who is Fred and is Fred even my real name? But we’ll get to that maybe week four, but that’s part of what prompted this exploration of the self talk. And I gave it a similar talk of what I’m going to do for you up at the Joshua Wilderness Institute, which is a gap here program at Hume Lake. And I think I did it in one shot, almost like a two hour session, and it was pretty heavy, but I’m going to slow down a little bit, because I want to give you guys some tools, some resources if you want to study more. But that’s what spurred this talk and I’m super excited to share these different cultural and religious and philosophical views of the self with you.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
And in some aspects, especially when we get into philosophy and psychology, I’m definitely going to want your help and your expertise, because you all probably know more than I do about Myers Briggs and some of the more contemporary temperament evaluations and personality types. All right. So that’s enough intro, and let’s get on. So I thought we would start with the Hebrews since this is a Christian college, you’re going to have a lot of the Hebrew base coming through, but I am going to try to keep it separate from a Christian view of the self, even though the Hebrew and Christian views are very similar, there are some fine distinctions.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
I remembered something. I have to take notes at my age. Okay, so then I’m going to pivot from the Hebrews into the Greeks. And a lot of Christian views of the self are like a syncretism between Hebrew thought and Greek thought, and you’re going to see a lot of that come through, especially when we get into medieval views of the self. And I was also a history major in my undergrad, so I like chronology. So we’re going to start Hebrews go to the Greeks, and I’m going to show some parallels with Native cultures, because I think it’s super for interesting when we talk about temperaments and personalities, but that’s enough ado. So I think I’m going to start with I’m going to share my screen. All right. If you’re not familiar with the Blue Letter Bible app, I would highly recommend it.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
It’s super helpful, especially if you don’t know Greek or Hebrew and part of what I wanted to show you is some of these keywords that have to deal with the self. And so, if we come down here to Genesis 1:2 we see, “So in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God move upon the face of the waters.” And if you go over here to this little toolbar, it shows you what each of those words that are translated to English are in Hebrew, and I think this is super interesting. So when you go down and look at the Hebrew word for spirit, it even shows you how they believe it was pronounced through

Speaker 3:

[inaudible 00:09:04]

7307. [foreign language 00:09:04].

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
Okay. So remember that word as I’m showing you a few of these verses. The next one I want to show you is Genesis 2:7. And here we have, “The creation of man and God for man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” So if you go back to the tools and we can look down, so let’s see how they pronounce this one.

Speaker 3:

[inaudible 00:09:57]

. [foreign language 00:09:59].

Prof. Fred Blackburn:

[foreign language 00:09:58]

Speaker 3:

[foreign language 00:09:59]

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
So the breath of God, the [foreign language 00:10:01] of God is what animates gives life to humans. There was a human form already there made out of the dust, but it wasn’t until God breathed into that form that it became a living soul. And so, these are your keyword.

Speaker 3:
Page 5315. [foreign language 00:10:25].

Prof. Fred Blackburn:

[foreign language 00:10:24]

Speaker 3:

[foreign language 00:10:25]

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
So there’s your word for soul. So we have [foreign language 00:10:29] or spirit and [foreign language 00:10:32] for soul. If we go on, I think this is super interesting, one of the things I do with my ethics students is I ask them to define for me, what is a human being and what makes humans unique from other sorts of beings? And often people like to say, “Well, humans have souls and or have spirits and animals don’t,” and certainly some of the Greeks thought that like Aristotle, but if we go to Ecclesiastes three and down verse 21. Oops. So Solomon’s talking about humans and animals, and he’s contemplating that what happens to the beast happens to humans. We all have one breath. And so, man has no preeminence above a beast because all is vanity, or all his dust in the wind. “All go to one place, all are of the dust and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that go with upward and the spirit of beast that go with downward to the earth?”

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
And that is the same word and that same word we saw in Genesis 1:2 talking about the spirit of God. And so, I think this is super interesting. So Solomon isn’t debating whether or not animals have a spirit, he’s debating what happens to the animal spirits when they die. And I got one more I want to show you and this is in Psalm 104, and we’ll start down about verse 24. “O Lord, how manifold are they works and wisdom has so made them all the earth is full of thy riches, so is this great and wide sea wherein are great things creeping and numerable both small and great beast. There go the ships. There is the levitation’s whom thou has made to play their end. These wait all upon thee that thou mayest give them their meat in due season. That thou give us them they gather, thou openest thine hand, and they are filled with good.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
Thou hidest thy face and they are troubled. Thou takest away their breath and they die and return to the dust.” Fascinating. So we seem to see a similar animating principle in animals that we see in humans. “Thou send us forth by spirit and they are created and thou renew us the face of the earth.” So we have this beautiful imagery of life coming from God in the Hebrew conception. Not only did God make the entire physical material universe, but God also gave his very spirit into the animated beings that live on this planet. And at least in my reading of scripture, that includes humans and animals, angelic beings and I would go so far to say plants. And that’s probably another talk for another time, but I definitely believe plants make choices. They have personalities, temperaments.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
Maybe that’s why I never got ordained. I spent about 20 pages of my doctrinal statement on explaining how trees could [inaudible 00:14:14] and the difference between a good and an evil tree. But Jesus talks about that, right? That poor fake tree that got cursed, because it was a bad fig tree. Why was it bad? It wasn’t doing what God created it to do, and that’s pretty much how we define sin. That which is contrary to the will or purpose of God and righteousness is that which is aligned with the will and purpose of God. So there’ is a little Hebrew sampler and I think it’s super fascinating and I just wanted to share that with you and the Blue Letter Bible app, how interesting that is.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
And that will be a nice setup for, I don’t know, we two or three, we will get into a Christian conception of the self. And so, some of these ideas will be very important to come back to. But now I want to pivot to the Greeks, because at least in Western civilization, and I will spend an entire week on Eastern thought Eastern views of the self. I think that’s super important. Especially living in the Pacific rim and California, you’re going to meet a lot of people from Asia. A lot of people coming from a Buddhist or Hindu background, and they have very different conceptions of the self than a Judaeo, Christian mindset. So I do want to prepare you for that. But let’s start with the Greeks. I’m going to share my screen again.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
There we go. Okay, so physics, that’s basically the discipline where we’re studying the physical material world. Later, we’ll be talking about metaphysics. I would include what our talk tonight is more of a metaphysical talk because it is that which is dealing with what is outside or beyond the physical. A lot of these terms you’ll already know. Psyche, of course, I hope you know, where we get the word soul from. So psychology is literally the discipline or the study of the soul. Nous, this is going to be a really important term. This is translated as mind, but it means a lot more than just your brain, and I will come back to that in a minute. Taxis, like taxonomies, that’s the order of things. Kosmos, fascinating. That is the Greek word for the world and kosmos in Greek is the antonym for chaos. So kosmos means order.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
So when the Greeks were looking at the world and the heavens, they believed they were seeing order. We have being with ouisa, or essence. For those of you that are theologically minded out there, this became the big spat at the Council of Nicaea on the nature of Christ. Was he of the same essence, or being as God? Were they coequal and co-eternal or was that a hierarchy? But we’ll get into that. Genesis, of course, becoming. I wore my becoming shirt for tonight. Anthropos, man. Techne or technique, that’s art. Polis, where we get politics from, city state. Arete, virtue. Eudemonia, wellbeing, happiness and logos, speech or reason. One that they left out here that I’m going to be sharing with you is kardia where we get cardiac. It has to do with the heart, desire, passion, feeling.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
I’m just going to throw this up there for you to see it as a reference, but I’m not going to go into it. Can you see the Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy? Okay. So this is a super great link, and if you just Googled Greek concepts of the soul, I normally don’t recommend encyclopedias, but this is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It’s peer reviewed. It’s really solid, and you can see, they just give a really nice history of Greek thought of the soul and how it developed. But I’m going to give you the brief version of that. So let’s start with Plato. Can you see Plato’s Tripartite Soul? All right. So this is how Plato divided up the soul. Into the rational part of humans, the spirited part and the appetitive part, and these are associated with logic, emotion, desire, the brain, the heart, the belly, and genitals.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
Truth and wisdom, honor, victory, pleasure. And you can see each of these has their corresponding virtues and vices that can go with them. What’s interesting to me in this is Plato has left out the noose, which I personally believe is the highest part of the human soul. And let me pull up a slide. I made a little slide for you. This is the typical one you’ll see people post for people that are trichotomous. They believe humans are made of three parts, a body, soul, and spirit. You see the Greek word there for body is soma the Greek word for soul we talked about is psyche and the Greek word for spirit is [inaudible 00:19:57]. But I wanted to elaborate on this a little bit more for you. All right, so here I’ve drawn the concentric rings like they had. Here we have body equated with soma, so that’s your physical, material body.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
What the other chart did not show is there is this transition zone between our physical body and our soul, our psyche, our soul spirit and this is called the sarx. Now the sarx we find this throughout the new Testament and it can be translated as body, but it can also be translated as the appetites that come from having a body. And this will be really important when we get into a Christian view of the self, especially when we try to figure out what is it that’s causing us all these problems? And a lot of Christians think it’s our soma or our body, but I have to keep reminding people, your bodies are not evil. Your bodies are good. God made them and when he was done making the human form, he said it was good, not evil.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
Sarx, however, these are the appetites that come because I have a belly. I get hungry, because I have genitalia I have sexual urges. Because I have physical flesh, I need to protect it from heat or cold. That’s simply part of having a physical vehicle. I have to give it fuel. I have to give it rest. I have to do maintenance and care of this vehicle that my soul and spirit are dwelling in. And so, sarx is that interplay that comes, even the appetites we have are not evil in and of themselves. It’s not evil to be hungry or tired, or sexually aroused. The problem becomes when the sarx takes control, the appetites become the master, and no longer can our desires or our reason or our higher mind control the appetites, and the appetites run a muck. And so, instead of just satisfying our hunger, we become a glutton.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
Instead of getting the rest we need, we become slothful. Instead of using sex in the way God intended, we misappropriate in different forms. But none of those desires are appetites are wrong in and of themselves. Then when we get into this three parts, the kardia like I said, this represents the heart. This has to do with those high feelings of passion and honor, and these things that drive us and motivate us in our lives. These things that we really want to put desire into. Logos has more to do with analytical reasoning, like how we evaluate a problem, how we process it, how we look at the pros and cons, but the nous, and I personally believe this is part of what separates us from other living beings. I don’t think trees have a nous and I don’t think animals have a nous. And the nous is the part of the mind that contained first principles. And if you’re familiar with platonic idealism, this would be things like the good, the true, the beautiful.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
These were actually all synonyms for the Greeks, if you can imagine, and I also believe they’re all synonyms for God himself. The good, the true, the beautiful. So the nous was this higher functioning of men like these platonic forms. And this isn’t a little off topic tonight, but that is what I believe became separated from God with the fall. When we disobeyed God, I believe the nous became damaged. And so, it had a ripple effect, so we were no longer reasoning correctly. We were no desiring correctly, and our appetites had run a muck and we could no longer keep them under control either through our reason or through our passions. And so, I believe part of what is being restored when we have a renewed mind. In fact, I believe it’s Romans 12:2, “Be therefore transformed, [inaudible 00:24:27], by the renewal of your nous.”

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
And that is part of Christ making us a new creation, where he gives us a new mind and we have access to the very mind of Christ. And then, this pnuema piece, I believe this is what animates us and comes directly from God. The soul, psyche, logos, this is our personality, temperament. What makes us unique and different from other human beings, our various combinations. But this is that life spirit that God gives us, and our life is solely dependent upon God. We are contingent beings. We are not self creating or self sustaining. We depended on another for our existence and for our continuance. All right. I fire hosed you. Any questions or comments? So Plato in his book, [inaudible 00:25:23] was talking about the human soul and he used the analogy of a chariot.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
And so, you have this chariot driver, which in my understanding for Plato was the logos. He believed your logos should have a hold of the reigns because the two horses that are pulling that chariot of your life is that sarx, your appetites and your kardia, your passion and desires. And so, you have these two seeds just plunging down, but you need that logos or reason to keep them from running a muck or running into the ditch. And personally, I love the analogy. I think it works really well. And when we think about the inner conflict we have between our reason and our desires and our appetites, it’s really colorful to put it in a chariot driver, trying to keep the whole thing moving in the right direction and all moving together.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
And I do not think I’m smarter than Plato or Aristotle, but I think he should have had the nous as the chariot driver that was holding the logos, reason and the desire or passions in check. The appetites, that’s a whole other issue to deal with. But a lot of people think as long as they’re reasoning correctly, a lot of people think they can reason correctly. I actually don’t think we can. I believe our reason is broken and is fallen, and it has to be restored and redeemed just like the rest of us. The same with our heart and passions. The nice thing about the heart and passions, they’re at least honest, right? And real. If you are angry, you are really angry. If you’re happy, you’re really happy. Now, your happiness or anger may be based on false interpretations of the data in front of you, but the emotions and feelings at least are real at least while they last.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
Reason is more steady and plotting, and I tell this to a lot of people, a lot of people are governed by their emotions and usually people are more kardia related or more logos related and part of how you can tell is when they talk to you. A logos driven person will tell you, “Well, what I think this means,” and a kardia person will say, “Well, how I feel about this is,” and so, you have the feeling versus the thinking types of personalities in a broad stroke. And the problem is both our feelings, the scripture tells us the heart is desperately wicked, who can know it? The imaginations of our passions and desires. But also, reason we can incorporate into, or our desires can trick into justifying our behaviors. It’s quite fascinating. And that’s what I notice with myself because I tend to be more analytic than emotive, although I certainly have emotions, but I try to let my reasoning trump my emotions when I’m in a conflict with the two of them.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
But my reason can be insidious and misleading in that I can massage an issue or keep coming back to it and if you give me enough time, I can literally rationalize anything. And I think that’s a really poor use of reason and not how it was intended to be used. And once again, neither of those are the highest forms of the mind or the soul. That nous piece is above all of them, but that I believe absolutely has to be renewed by the Holy Spirit. If we want a proper understanding of these first principles, that then cascade down into our thinking, our feeling, and then, hopefully controlling our appetites. So let’s go back up to, I’m going to pivot a little bit now to Aristotle who was Plato’s student, and he had a different idea.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
He saw man as divided in between rational, spirited, there’s your kardia, and appetitive. So that would be like your sarx, the appetites, or maybe even the body, right? The soma or the body. So this is how Aristotle saw living things. He saw plants as being vegetative souls. They could reproduce and grow. Animals were sensitive souls and they had the additional abilities of mobility and feeling or sensation. And then, humans are seen as a rational soul because we have thought and reflection. And once again, I’m not claiming to be smarter than Aristotle, but I think he needed to hang out with more plants and animals. So this is where we get the definition of humans as being rational animals. And part of how the Greeks would evaluate people, of course, was how keen your reason was.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
I found this interesting because it brings it up to the modern. So what I’m going to really focus on tonight is Hippocrates with his four temperament types. And I think this will be really interesting to you, especially those of you that are familiar with Myers Briggs and other more contemporary systems. And you can use your knowledge and try to see where those different contemporary temperament types fit with the ancient Greeks. These are how different Greek philosophers looked at Hippocrates’ major temperament types. So we have the sanguine, melancholic, choleric and phlegmatic. For Plato, he saw them in very different terms and as you go down these things on the charts all the way down to Myers, and this is probably where a lot of you are more familiar. Perceiving would be associated with sanguine, judging with melancholy, feeling with choleric and thinking with phlegmatic. And do any of you know, who this Keirsey person is? Is that on anyone’s psychology radar? I’m not familiar with that name.

Dr. Julie Hayden:
It was on our [inaudible 00:31:52] exam but I do not remember.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
But I like how they’re still going off of Hippocrates’ for basic temperament types. So let’s pivot over to there. I think super interesting. So this is a hybrid chart someone made and I think it’s pretty clever, and I’m going to try to fill in some gaps here. I like how they use earth, air, fire, and water, the four Greek elements to tie in with the temperament types. This is a hybrid between Hippocrates, this is the man where we got the Hippocratic oath from for medical practitioners, and this was part of his study of human beings, what it meant to be human. And then, Galen, another Greek philosopher added the humors into the temperament types. So he’s the one that gave us the dry and the wet and the hot and the cold. And they would use these to diagnose people throughout the medieval period.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
When you had some malady, they would want to know, is it a dry malady? Is it a wet malady? Is it a hot malady? Is it a cold malady? And then, it would also be tied into the elements and to temperament type. So let’s start here. We’ll go clockwise with choleric. And I looked through quite a lot of charts this afternoon, trying to find some to share with you and I thought it was interesting because there was a conflict between I have seen sanguine described as blood, but also choleric described as blood. And I think it’s because they are both extrovert temperaments, both choleric’s and sanguine’s, but let me just describe the choleric for you. The bodily humor or fluid associated with the choleric here, in this case and I’ve seen them switch with sanguine, so I don’t know if we can get an arbitrator for these things, but we’ll go with this.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
Their bodily fluid would be yellow bile, which is a nice way of saying urine. And because like when you have to go to the bathroom, choleric’s don’t stop until they’re done. When they let it out, it just keeps going. They can be touchy, restless, aggressive, excitable, changeable, impulsive, optimistic, and active. [inaudible 00:34:16] interestingly enough, I believe in the ’70s wrote a book called The four Temperaments. And he actually used Hippocrates’ for temperament types, but what I appreciated that he did about them, in each of these, he showed their virtues as well as their vices. And as you can imagine, each temperament type has a range of virtues and shortcomings. But then what [inaudible 00:34:43] did, was he pivoted it or showed it in a Christian perspective. And I thought it was pretty well done and certainly, got my interest up.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
I mean, I remember reading that, what is that? 50 years ago now? Goodnight. So choleric’s, these are your natural born leader type people. They are people of action. Extroverts like the sanguine’s and choleric’s, they get energized by being around other people. They literally feed off that energy and are recharged by being with others. Choleric’s though, if it’s not too much for you guys, I would like to bring in some Native American and other cultural elements to this just because I found the parallel so fascinating. As a young man, I was really interested in setting Native American religions, and I came across this book called Seven Arrows by Hyemeyohsts Storm. And he explained that the Plains tribes had a very similar concept and of temperament types and very similar colors, except they had different symbols or animals to help describe these different temperaments.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
And a lot of them were associated with colors or directions. So choleric would be to the North and they would often be portrayed as a bull, elk or buffalo. And they would be at the head of the herd, defending against all comers but they wanted to be in charge. They wanted to lead. And so, those are the strengths of this temperament type. They are people of action. They don’t just sit around talking or thinking about stuff, they do stuff, they are on it. The problem is sometimes they should have thought about it a little bit more. And they often don’t realize that they’re trampling other people underfoot as they’re accomplishing these great things. So their direction is North, their color is white or red, and they would be a hard driving gale as far as [inaudible 00:36:58] goes, that’s how they would be described.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:

[inaudible 00:37:06]

, If you just had to put it in one nutshell for the choleric, the right way is their way. The next we’ll do is the sanguine’s, and these are your easygoing, lively, life of the party. Often they protracted as green, because this is where you have most of your giving and nurturing people types. These are the people that when they show up, the party begins. They will sit with you. They could literally be laughing with you one minute and crying real tears with someone five minutes later, and laughing five minutes again. And so, it’s very much like an emotional rollercoaster for these people. For the Native Americans, they said this temperament was like a warm gust of air. Almost like feeling that warm Santa Anna coming off the desert and it just envelopes you and it’s like a hug. But their animal types is, oh, their direction is to the South but their animal types is a rodent, like a rabbit or a mouse because like rodents, they’re very sociable, but they can’t see beyond the tall grass.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
Sanguine’s very much live where they are. They’re notoriously late because they are focused with who they’re with at the moment. And super people, people, their weak sides of course would be they can have anxiety, fear, they can get stressed out, overwhelmed and like I said, they can lose track of time or place because they are so relational, so people orientated. Back here with phlegmatic. Their element for the Greeks was water but for the Native Americans, this would be the direction East and it’s often symbolized with gold or yellow. Where the sun comes from, the place of illumination and their animal would be like an eagle or a Hawk because like an Eagle or a Hawk thematic tends to fly above the cares of this world. They see the big picture. I’ve had some phlegmatic friends that you honestly could not see any demeanor change whether they had won the lottery or a family member had died.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
They were just that even keeled about everything. Now, the downside of that temperament, because they do seem to fly above things, they can seem indifferent or callous, or not concerned with the cares that everyone else is getting all worked up about. But for phlegmatic, they’re like, “The sun’s going to come up tomorrow. The earth’s still turning.” So really good at the big picture pieces. And they are like a gentle breeze. Now, I forgot to tell you, for the sanguine’s, the right way to do something is the fun way. For the phlegmatic, the right way to do something is the peaceful way and that’s a good illustration. I like water that water connection because phlegmatic’s are like water. They try to avoid direct conflict. I mean, choleric’s would love conflict, right? But phlegmatic’s, they like to go around. They don’t like the direct conflict.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
They’re your natural born peacemakers, and because they’re observers of the world, they’re really good at graphic arts, architecture, those sorts of big picture, detailed components. So these are your keen observers of the world and as you’ve noticed, we’ve moved into the introvert quad and that is phlegmatic’s and the melancholies. These are your two introvert temperaments, and they actually need to be alone to recharge. They need large amounts of alone time to restore themselves before they brave interactions with other humans again. And then, the last but not least of the temperaments is melancholy. And the native Americans would associate this with the colors black or blue. This was like a cold gust of wind, and I don’t know if you’ve met any melancholies or maybe you are one, sometimes you can feel them before you see them.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
They are just putting out this very dark, intense, cold vibe that’s going on. They show a lot of the negative aspects of melancholies and these are all true, but this is also the most gifted of all the temperament types. This is where you get most of your great artists, philosophers, theologians, poets, but it’s also where you get most of your serial killers, bipolar disorder. Those sorts of things are also, depression is happening in this temperament type. And part of it is because they are so perfectionistic, and for these people, the best way to do something is the right way. And because of their analytic minds, these are your thinkers. They probably actually know the right way to do it. Their animal would be a badger or a bear, burrowing animals that you probably don’t want to disturb.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
And so, I just found this super helpful, and I love the different imagery and temperament types we can find in these. So let me just give you a scenario, say your church decides you need to build a new shed or something for storage, and you guys all get together and as soon as the choleric finds out we’re building up a shed, he’s got his pickup truck and he’s headed down to the hardware store to get supplies, the paint, the nails, all that stuff. Meanwhile, the sanguine’s are thinking, “Oh, this could be a barn racing. We could have a potluck games for the kids. We can make it an event for the whole community.” Meanwhile, phlegamtic’s are thinking about things like, “I think we need to have a permit for that, and we might need to do an environmental impact study to make sure we’re not messing with the little [inaudible 00:43:16] that live in that part of the lot.”

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
And they’re going to be looking at the big picture and the melancholies are going to be thinking about aesthetics. And is this going to match the existing main building? Are we going to have the same color schemes? Are we going to be using the same building supply? So by the time the phlegmatic’s and melancholies figure out the right way to do it, the choleric’s and sanguine’s have already put it up, had a potluck and have headed home for the evening. And so, that’s an example of how these different temperament types would work out in a group project.

Prof. Fred Blackburn:
But you see the advantage if you had them all working together as opposed to just one of them taking the lead. And that’s another qualifier I want to make for you. It’s very rare to have anyone that is a pure temperament type. Most of us are a combination of one or more of these different temperaments. And the goal I would think is to maximize the virtues of your temperament types and to minimize the vices and the shortcomings because all of them have them and we need the virtues, but none of us want vices that correspond with each of these temperament types.

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The Self – Series Part 1 by Fred Blackburn