Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘value creation’ emerges not as an economic metaphor but as a fundamental ontological category describing how psychic substance is forged through constrained mortal experience. The most sustained and original treatment appears in Cody Peterson’s Homeric-Jungian synthesis, which argues — drawing directly on Jung’s ‘Answer to Job’ — that value is not discovered, inherited, or transmitted but must be created through what Peterson terms ‘Mortality’s Three Constraints’: permanent loss, radical uncertainty, and utter powerlessness. This position carries a sharp theological implication: divine omniscience and immortal consciousness are structurally incapable of generating value, a deficit that compels Jung’s Yahweh toward incarnation. The Homeric vocabulary of thumos, paschō, and tlaō supplies Peterson with an empirical grammar of value-formation, locating the process in the sedimentary accumulation of suffered feeling. Adjacent to this axis, Hillman’s work on the feeling function identifies the thumotic soul as the proper site of relational value-engagement, a site catastrophically marginalized by Platonic rationalism. McGilchrist and Seaford approach the question from orthogonal directions — the former insisting that discursive reason cannot reach the depths where values are apprehended, the latter tracing how coined money reconstituted Greek conceptions of abstract, self-subsisting value. The central tension throughout is between value as substance forged in suffering and value as abstract form imposed from without.
value is not an a priori truth to be discovered but a psychic substance forged under ‘Mortality’s Three Constraints’: permanent loss, radical uncertainty, and utter powerlessness.
This abstract statement is the paper’s central thesis, locating value creation in constrained mortal suffering rather than in timeless truth or divine knowledge.
, The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: The Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job’, 2025thesis
value is not information; it is a psychic substance fused into one’s very being. As Pascal observed, ‘The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.’ Value cannot be taught or discovered — it must be created.
Peterson’s foundational argument distinguishes value creation from knowledge-transmission, insisting it is an irreducibly somatic and historical achievement that cannot be imparted.
, The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: The Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job’, 2025thesis
something emerges through mortal suffering that divine power cannot produce: the capacity to create value — a capacity that requires mortal constraints.
The introductory claim that value creation is exclusively a mortal capacity, inaccessible to omnipotence, frames the theological argument for incarnation.
, The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: The Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job’, 2025thesis
value requires a physical history of feeling accumulation that divine nature cannot replicate. The gods experience emotion but they lack the sedimentary structure from which value emerges. Value is not information; it is substance.
Peterson grounds value creation in the sedimentation of suffered feeling within the thumos, explicitly contrasting mortal accumulation with divine emotional volatility.
, The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: The Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job’, 2025thesis
No longer the site where value is forged through relational engagement, the thumos is reduced to the enforcement arm of a logic it did not generate.
Peterson and Hillman jointly argue that Platonic rationalism severed the thumos from its proper function as the organ of value-creation, subordinating feeling to logos.
, The Abolished Middle: Retrieving the Thumotic Soul from the Unconscious, 2026supporting
inner chorus never goes silent; value-creation continues as long as one remains enduring. Odysseus’s title polytlas names not the suffering he has undergone but the material substance he has become.
The Homeric figure of polytlas (‘much-enduring’) is read as the embodied marker of sustained value-creation, a status categorically unavailable to immortal beings.
, The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: The Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job’, 2025supporting
Unlike the mortal thumos, which trembles under the weight of Mortality’s Constraints, the divine vessel is not subject to gravity — it collects no residue, remaining silent.
Peterson demonstrates through Homeric formula analysis that divine and mortal soul-structures are grammatically segregated, the latter alone capable of the residue-accumulation that value requires.
, The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: The Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job’, 2025supporting
SCHELER: THE IMPORTANCE OF VALUE IN CONSTITUTING REALITY … the reduction of the world to commodity, has not led to the happiness it was designed to yield.
McGilchrist introduces Scheler’s argument that value is constitutive of reality itself, not a secondary projection, implicitly contesting reductionist and commodity-based frameworks.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
On Golgotha, the physics of extraction becomes the physics of transmission … Jung reads the outpouring as ‘the broadening of incarnation,’ a ‘kinship’ in which humanity receives ‘their share of the blood and flesh of Christ.’
Peterson traces the Passion as the moment when the value forged in Christ’s constrained mortality is transmitted outward via the Paraclete, extending the physics of value-creation to humanity.
, The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: The Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job’, 2025supporting
The most essential possession of any living being, at any time, is the balanced range of body chemistries compatible with healthy life … The notion of biological value is ubiquitous in modern thinking about brain and mind.
Damasio’s concept of biological value offers a neurobiological counterpart to the depth-psychological claim that value is rooted in the body’s life-sustaining processes rather than abstract cognition.
, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010aside
Exchange-value acquires in money a substance, and through coined money an abstract substance … general acceptance of this disparity is required for coinage to function.
Seaford’s analysis of how coinage abstracts exchange-value into a socially constructed yet materially embodied substance provides a historical-economic context for contrasting monetary with psychic value.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside
Protagoras’s relativism … reflects the idea that money, a pure nomos, a human convention, is the measure of all values.
Vernant identifies the Protagorean equation of monetary convention with the measure of all value as the philosophical foil against which Platonic and later depth-psychological accounts of intrinsic value are defined.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983aside