Value

values

Within the depth-psychology corpus and its philosophical tributaries, ‘value’ refuses any single domicile. It appears as a biological primitive in Damasio, who grounds value in the homeostatic range of living tissue — the body’s chemical equilibrium that precedes all consciousness and provides the organism its most essential possession. At the opposite ontological pole, McGilchrist, following Max Scheler, argues that value is not an overlay upon a value-free factual world but constitutive of reality itself: the allegedly value-free fact is the anomaly, not value. Peterson’s Jungian-Homeric analysis pushes further still, treating value as a psychic substance that can only be forged under the convergent constraints of mortality — irreversibility, inexplicability, inescapability — making it inaccessible to divine omnipotence and untransmissible as information. The economic-philosophical lineage in Seaford traces value from Homeric exchange and archaic coinage through the Presocratic transmutation of monetary abstraction into metaphysics, showing how exchange-value shaped early Greek ontology. Nussbaum distinguishes intrinsic from merely instrumental or need-relative value within Platonic ethics, while Inwood locates Stoic value in ‘naturalness’ as the criterion for preferred indifferents. Across these traditions the central tension is consistent: whether value is discovered in the structure of reality, forged through mortal suffering, conferred by social convention, or embedded biologically in living tissue.

In the library 24 passages

Within this crucible of convergence value is forged. Job’s suffering generated a new reality — one that Yahweh could not grasp… value is not information; it is a psychic substance fused into one’s very being.

Peterson argues that value is an irreducible psychic substance created only under the convergent mortal constraints of permanence, inexplicability, and inescapability — it cannot be transmitted, taught, or possessed by an immortal consciousness.

Peterson, Cody, The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: The Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job’, 2025thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

something emerges through mortal suffering that divine power cannot produce: the capacity to create value — a capacity that requires mortal constraints.

Peterson’s central claim is that the capacity to create value is the exclusive product of mortal finitude, rendering incarnation theologically necessary for a deity that has encountered ethical consciousness in Job.

Peterson, Cody, The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: The Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job’, 2025thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

It is not value or meaning which is peculiar; on the contrary, it is the allegedly value-free fact which is ‘utterly different’ from anything else in the universe.

Drawing on Warren Heiti and Simone Weil, McGilchrist inverts empiricist ontology: value and meaning are primary features of the world, and the purported value-free fact is the philosophical oddity requiring explanation.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

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 grounds value in homeostatic biology: the primitive of value is the physiological state of living tissue within a survivable range, making value a pre-conscious organismic property shared by amoeba and human alike.

Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the primitive of value is the physiological state of living tissue within a survivable, homeostatic range. The continuous representation of chemical parameters within the brain allows nonconscious brain devices to detect and measure departures from the homeostatic range.

Damasio specifies the neurobiological mechanism through which biological value operates: nonconscious brain sensors detect departures from homeostatic range, generating the experiential substrate that surfaces as pain and pleasure in conscious minds.

Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Plato moves beyond Book iv’s formal agreement about the shape of rational life plans to provide an independent theory of value that specifies the best content for a rational life.

Nussbaum identifies Plato’s axiology as an independent theory specifying intrinsic value, distinguished from merely species-relative value, anchored in a standpoint of rational perfection used to determine aesthetic and moral ideals.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

certain pursuits in which we engage have no intrinsic value… Contrasted with these cases are the intrinsically valuable components of a life: the good functioning of mind and body that is at once both valuable and useful.

Nussbaum maps the Platonic distinction between intrinsic and merely instrumental or need-relative value, locating intrinsic value in the well-functioning of mind and body independent of contingent context.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

value in this sense is the criterion for preferred status… ‘preferred things, then, are those which also have value.’ But value in this sense also has a criterion… it is the natural things which have value.

Inwood reconstructs Stoic axiology: value is the criterion for ‘preferred indifferents,’ and naturalness — defined by the organism’s own nature and contribution to a natural life — is in turn the criterion for value.

Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The Parmenidean One projects monetary value as transcending not only multiplicity of goods but also time and place, thereby as seeming to impose, permanently and everywhere, its own homogeneity on all things.

Seaford argues that Parmenidean metaphysics sublimated the abstract, homogenizing, and transcendent character of monetary exchange-value into an ontological absolute, tracing a direct influence of monetization on early Greek philosophy.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

they are valuing x not for its power directly to meet need — for its use-value — but rather for its power to meet social obligation… for its exchange-value.

Seaford distinguishes use-value from exchange-value as foundational categories, arguing that the social construction of money as exchange-value is the necessary condition for money’s existence and its philosophical afterlife.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Protagoras’s relativism, which can be summed up in an expression such as ‘man is the measure of all things,’ reflects the idea that money, a pure nomos, a human convention, is the measure of all values.

Vernant traces how Protagoras’s relativism — that conventional monetary value measures all things — was philosophically opposed by Plato, for whom the sophist’s equation of conventional with real value was tantamount to confusing being with non-being.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The shift from intrinsic to socially conferred value had a linguistic dimension. Certain words which had once denoted things, or weights, or both, came — during the development of coinage — to refer primarily or exclusively to coins.

Seaford documents the linguistic evidence for the historical transition from intrinsic to socially conferred value, showing how the vocabulary of coinage displaced the vocabulary of material substance.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

any other value the metal may have had (whether beauty, status, social relations, or immortality) seems to have been marginalised by the practical effectiveness of the coins as signs of monetary value.

Seaford argues that the stamping of precious metal into coinage progressively displaced all other registers of value — aesthetic, social, cultic — by subordinating them to the efficiency of monetary sign-value.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Indo-European had words for ‘to be worth’ and ‘value.’ But a study of the Homeric usage of alphánō ‘to bring in, yield, fetch’ makes it clear that alphē designated originally the exchange value of a man put up for sale.

Benveniste establishes that Indo-European lexical roots for ‘value’ were originally grounded in the exchange-value of persons sold in archaic practices of captivity and slavery, tying the abstract concept etymologically to concrete social transaction.

Benveniste, Émile, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

it is worth noting that arh- is applied only to a man and never to an object… ‘merit’ is the personal ‘value’ of a human being.

Benveniste shows that the Indo-European root for personal merit (arh-) originally designated a human being’s exchange-value in sale and ransom contexts, linking ethical concepts of worth etymologically to archaic economic practice.

Benveniste, Émile, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the significance people seek is made up of a system of objects, an organization of values. Perhaps what differentiates individuals and groups from each other most sharply are their patterns or configurations of valued objects.

Pargament locates value within a psychological theory of coping, arguing that the significance individuals pursue is not a single object but an organized system of values whose distinctive configuration differentiates persons and communities.

Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

from a gene — the symbol of ruthless competition, and of the relatively atomistic and oppositional values of the left hemisphere — could arise a skill that would enable further evolution to occur not only more rapidly but in a direction of our own choosing — through empathy and co-operation, the values of the right hemisphere.

McGilchrist uses ‘values’ in a hemispheric-psychological register, contrasting the atomistic, competitive values associated with left-hemisphere functioning against the empathic, co-operative values characteristic of the right hemisphere.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The unitary value of money, which persists through its transformation into different things, was a factor in his refocusing of monism from being onto value.

Seaford suggests that Eucleides of Megara, like Parmenides but more explicitly, refocused Eleatic monism from being onto value under the influence of money’s unitary persistence through exchange.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Pricing involves both delimitation and measurement… It both delimits specific sums from the unlimited homogeneous continuum of monetary value and creates a universe of chrēmata differentiated by number.

Seaford traces how Greek monetary pricing — simultaneously delimiting and measuring value — structurally influenced Pythagorean and Protagorean notions that number and human measure constitute the identity of things.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

wergild may be regarded as an expression of the value the community sets upon the individual, so that it could be interpreted on some occasions as an aspect of baF and on others as an expression of baD.

Bion reads wergild as a group-psychological expression of the value placed upon the individual, integrating archaic compensatory exchange into his schema of basic assumption group dynamics.

Bion, W.R., Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, 1959aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms