The concordance 5 witnesses
Orientation
The passages gathered under value creation approach value through feeling, biology, philosophy, and exchange. In The Abolished Middle, Cody Peterson argues that subordinating thumos to rational control displaces its role in forming value through relationship. Iain McGilchrist, drawing on Max Scheler, treats value as constitutive of reality rather than a secondary projection. Antonio Damasio locates biological value in the bodily conditions that sustain life. Richard Seaford traces the abstraction of exchange-value through coinage, while Jean-Pierre Vernant connects Protagorean relativism with money as a conventional measure of value. These perspectives raise a shared question: how do embodied relations, inherited concepts, and social conventions shape what counts as valuable?
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
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
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