Philosophy and Personality, part 1

Nature of Investigation, Material, Sources

Nicholas Reitter

This series of articles will attempt to address the implications of the Enneagram for the study of philosophy. Assuming individuals’ Enneagram-types form a key influence on the development of their world-views, I will explore what that influence might mean for philosophy – the arena in which alternative world-views are supposed to be grounded in reason in the most general way. Are individuals given to hold certain philosophical positions in a pattern that could be somehow statistically related to the their Enneagram-types? Or, perhaps more realistically, given the complexities of belief formation, might types be correlated with broader classes of philosophical outlook? For example, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century there emerged a fairly well-known contrast between the “Continental rationalists” (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) and the “British empiricists” (Locke, Reid, Hume). Could an inquiry into the Enneagram-types of these philosophers as historical individuals help shed any light on the larger patterns evinced among their philosophical views?

In a survey of certain key groupings of philosophers in the Western tradition, I will argue that yes, to an extent, such generalizations can be drawn, more clearly for some dichotomies among philosophers than for others, and subject to certain limitations throughout. In particular, when philosophers are compared rather broadly and in a correlated way across time and culture (as in the example of Continental and British figures above), cultural effects seem to swamp the overall effects of individual differences, and such latter effects are therefore unsurprisingly harder to discern. On the other hand, within more circumscribed temporal and cultural contexts, when the philosophical conversation between individuals proceeds more intimately, even over the span of a generation or so, individual effects are clearer. Here, the Enneagram may actually shine a critical and philosophically interesting light.

Even a partial correlation between Enneagram-type and philosophical outlook raises provocative questions about the human possibilities for objective knowledge. If all us have an Enneagram-type, just how strongly might we be predisposed towards such classes of philosophical outlook as might be linked to our type, and against other contrasting classes? Should the possibility that our own habitual opposition to certain (classes of) views may be simply a personality-induced reflex, or least influenced by such a reflex, give us pause, as we take stock of our philosophical positions?

Such questions are perhaps even more difficult than the underlying philosophical questions about which they are concerned. And indeed, one could certainly just deny the troubling implications, saying in effect, “This is the way things seem to me,” and even if it can be shown that others with different types tend frequently to see things differently, “those others may simply be deluded” (or possibly subject to their own type-induced biases, which may somehow be supposed to be worse than mine). But at least from a meta-philosophical, history-of-philosophy-oriented perspective, any philosophical-typological correlations we can convincingly adduce clearly do have significance. And I would suggest the same applies to any reasonable philosophical perspectives as well. In other words, the Enneagram should give us pause when we run into predictable, inter-type conflictual patterns while doing philosophy, just as such patterns of disagreement should give us pause while we are doing a myriad of other characteristically human activities. If I (of Type X) find myself habitually defending “X-type views,” of course it doesn’t necessarily mean those views are outright false, or even that they subject to bias in any given context. On the one hand, philosophical argumentation is not settled by majority vote, nor by typological cross-sectional sampling across philosophers. So simplistic type-based bias-correction techniques cannot work in philosophy. But on the other hand, the clear knowledge that regular patterns of philosophical disagreement actually reflect life-long patterns among myself and my interlocutors should likely provide some kind of “holistic nudge” towards a broader, more accomodating perspective, one that makes more room for type-related disagreements than will many a perspective that does not take account of such patterns.ⁱ However difficult it may be to draw definitive conclusions about the actual veracity of contrasting philosophical views from the type-patterns of those hold them, this little-explored implication of Enneagram-study poses distinct new opportunities for meta-philosophical questioning, which in turn should ultimately have some influence on philosophy itself.

Materials and Sources

Even a mini-survey linking Enneagram study just to the Western philosohical tradition could easily threaten to become a monumental undertaking, with hundreds of philosophers to consider, and a great deal to be said about the views of each. For this first-of-its-kind series,ⁱⁱ I have unapologetically selected just ten. To begin with, six very famous older examples from ancient Greece through the nineteenth century fall into two natural groups of three who fairly closely succeeded one another (and are therefore useful as exemplars of the kind of intergenerational conversation mentioned above). For philosophical and biographical insights on most of these older figures, I plan to make use of various secondary sources, with particular reliance on what I consider a magisterial history of philosophy by Karl Jaspers, the German existentialist psychiatrist and philosopher (1883-1969).ⁱⁱⁱ To complete the survey, four more recent philosophers, active in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, also group nicely into two pairs, each historically close to each other (and in the case of one of these pairs, personally intimate for part of their working lives). While not as universally famous as the examples from prior centuries, these two more recent pairs help represent broad trends in contemporary Western thought, thus rounding out the group as a whole.^iv

Details are shown in the following outline for the entire projected series of articles:

After several introductory sections (1.1 through 1.3), the major portions of this series will involve going twice through the ten selected philosophers by historically-intertwined groupings, first considering their work mainly in philosophical terms (Sections 2.1 through 2.4), and then considering them in more depth as individuals with Enneagram-types that may relate importantly to their thought-worlds (Sections 3.1 through 3.4). The reason for this “double-pass” approach is to put the focus on philosophy itself – that is, to contextualize these philosophers in relation to certain broader maps of philosophical thought itself (introduced in Section 1.2) – before delving into sometimes controversial interpretations of their personalities, with all the potentially voluminous biographical detail that may involve. I also believe it may be helpful to discuss briefly my impressions of these philosophers in ordinary human terms (in Section 2), before coming back to them with my specific Enneagrammatic analyses of their personalities (in Section 3).

To put my judgments about Enneagram-types in context, while I am not aware of any previous effort quite like this in attempting an in-depth survey relating Ennea-types to actual philosophical positions, a quick Google-search (search-terms: “Enneagram Great Philosophers”) does lead to a short Reddit-entry^v posted several years ago, proposing more simply to list the “Ennea-types of Several Western Philosophers.” In this posting, twenty-five philosophers are identified by type in a graphic (unaccompanied by any author commentary, though with some minimal discussion by other site-users). Of the eight overlapping cases between this group and my ten exemplar-philosophers, I agree with the posted typological judgment calls in exactly half (four of eight cases), as will be discussed in detail later. This 50% rate of agreement, which may seem prima facie rather low to some readers, is not particularly surprising or upsetting to me. At least, with nine types to consider, a 50/50% rate of disagreement implies a far greater agreement than that which could be attributed to chance alone. Moreover, I tend to agree with the judgments of the “Redditor” in slightly more than half of the remaining 17 philosophers shown in the posted graphic but not considered in this series.

Assumptions and Disclaimers

It seems fitting to begin a careful analysis of the Enneagram and philosophy, a discipline that stresses exacting reasoning, with a somewhat careful description of some basic assumptions I’ll be making. As is usual among students of the Enneagram, I will be assuming that all human beings have unique, stable Ennea-types (or at least, stable for their adult years); and that these types are generally discoverable, or at least susceptible to reasoned argument, with varying possibilities for reasonable disagreement in individual cases. Equally importantly, for the present enterprise, I will assume that an individual’s Ennea-type comprises not only an encyclopedic key to that individual’s psychological functioning, and thus a significant influence on beliefs, motivations and actions at various levels, but also a key influence, along with culture and family, on the formation of individuals’ world-views.^vi

With regard to how this series will address the history of philosophy, while I do claim to be drawing general conclusions as best I can, I am not making any particular claim to have sampled a broad cross-section of all human philosophizing, that is, across all cultures in which the enduring human impulse to philosophize has appeared. This effort is concerned with the history of Western philosophy alone, mainly because it is the tradition with which I am familiar, and likely the one with which most readers mostly are as well. The Western tradition offers at least what I hope may be generally recognized as a broad canvas from which to to draw conclusions that are valid for many Western sub-cultures, and arguably extendable to some extent to the broad world culture we increasingly inhabit in the current era, and for the foreseeable future.

Lastly, with regard to my own personal relationship with philosophy, I would offer also the disclaimer that I am not in any sense a professional. I have been a longtime student in this field, majoring in philosophy as an undergraduate, participating in occasional graduate study in philosophy, and keeping up over many years with various kinds of informal independent philosophical reading and discussion. The Enneagram itself can be considered a kind of philosophy – depending on the way it is being used, how seriously one takes it, and on one’s framework-views about human beings and their potential – and my passion for what I think of as this emerging philosophical sub-field has only redoubled that I have long felt for philosophy more broadly. It is in a spirit of ardent-but-gentle devotion to both these pursuits that I begin this unusual undertaking, attempting to link them, and invite you to explore this attempt with me.

i It is perhaps worth noting that the subtlety implied here (“holistic nudge,” as distinct from a quantifiable tendency), in regard to applying Enneagram-related knowledge while simultaneously immersed in philosophical activities about which the system forms a commentary, is by no means unique to philosophy. Much of the Enneagram literature is devoted to applying the Enneagram in various real-life contexts, such as navigating hierarchical work relationships, or intimate relationships. But it’s actually very difficult to say exactly how knowledge of Ennea-type-related patterns does or should influence our own behavior: much of the guidance about “stopping ourselves” when we notice destructive type-related patterns spontaneously arising (what might be called a “cognitive override” approach), even if possible to implement on a consistent basis, which I think doubtful, says little about precisely how or with what we should replace these patterns. This is not to deny that the Enneagram has its applications: awareness itself may create openings in innumerable subtle ways. It is simply to emphasize the subtle aspect of such transformations as may occur.

ii So far as I know (and perhaps surprisingly), this series is the first attempting to explore general relations between Enneagram study and some of the broad questions of philosophy, in some depth and across a broad swath of history, despite many references to the work of individual philosophers in an Enneagram-related context – e.g., in the pages of the Enneagram Monthly, among other places, over the years.

iii Jaspers’ historical series, “The Great Philosophers,” was left at his death unfinished but still covering a great deal of ground, including dozens of important philosophers, arranged in a strict if idiosyncratic ordering. The work was published in four “volumes,” the first grouping miniature sub-volumes on what he called the four “paradigmatic individuals” (Socrates / Buddha / Confucius / Jesus) and the three “seminal founders of philosophical thought” (Plato / Kant / Augustine), and the later ones proceeding to various lesser categories of philosopher. Jaspers’ commentary will be extensively quoted for five of the first six examplar-philosophers here, with other sources mentioned in relation to Hume, whom he omits. “The Great Philosophers” (vols. 1 and 2 edited by Hannah Arendt, 1957; vols. 3 and 4 edited posthumously by M. Ermarth and L.H. Ehrlich, 1981) was published initially by Piper Munich, with English translations following some years later.

iv Picking “seminal philosophical thinkers” from the unsorted welter of the contemporary milieu is of course a wholly different undertaking from picking such thinkers from the more distant past, about which we have the cumulative judgments of history to guide us. Presumably, most readers of the Enneagram Monthly (EM) will easily recognize the first two groups of names of older philosophers, and will perhaps easily recognize the third (Russell / Wittgenstein). With regard to the last pair, some readers may have heard of Ken Wilber, whose work has been mentioned fairly often in the pages of the EM; like the Enneagram itself, he has a considerable following of people today interested in both spirituality and science, but is mainly neglected in contemporary academia. Charles Taylor, on the other hand, is likely unfamiliar to most EM readers; perhaps ironically, he is better known in academia today as a learned historian and philosopher, sometimes categorized as a neo-Hegelian or as a Catholic apologist. Although not an ideal foil to Wilber, he does represent a quite different and interestingly contrasting approach, while both these thinkers grapple in their separate ways with a common focus on a deep issue of our times: the persistence, even resurgence in some quarters, of religiously-informed viewpoints, and the on-going strife between religious and secular perspectives, even as both of these types of collective world-views have and continue to undergo vast evolution in relation to one another. So on balance, Taylor and Wilber make an interesting pair, and hopefully comprise a reasonable stab at the quite difficult task of identifying some candidate ”Great Philosophers” of today.

v The Reddit-entry entitled “Ennea-types of Several Western Philosophers,” part of the broader “Enneagram-Reddit” thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/Enneagram/comments/p0kzr6/the_enneatypes_of_several_western_philosophers/?rdt=39802) is currently marked as “archived” (no more comments allowed); it is also marked as “deleted,” at the top of the posting, which apparently means the anonymous author has deleted his/her Reddit-account. For convenience, I will henceforth refer to this individual as the “Redditor.”

vi Taking what we might call the “inter-type-objectivity problem” to an extreme could result in various paradoxes, as may possibly have occurred to others interested in the Enneagram. For example, if Ennea-type is taken to function as too strong an influence on perceptions and beliefs – as well as on motivations, feelings, choices, action – the implication that we all live in a “type-specific world” raises the question of how valid my perceptions may be for others who are not of my type. As far as I am aware, this “inter-type-objectivity problem” does not seem to be a topic of much (any?) interest in the Enneagram world today. And as long as type is taken only as a possibly-strong but still non-determinative influence on human perception/feeling/action, and by extension, on development of human world-views as well, there doesn’t seem to me to be any problem with this.

This article first appeared in Enneagram Monthly, October 2024. © Nicholas Reitter. Do not reprint or share without permission.