Framing the Question
Value is often associated with rarity, uniqueness, utility, desire, or necessity. But none of these words, by itself, explains why something becomes significant for a subject. Rare things may remain irrelevant, necessities may be widely available, and familiar, recurring events may retain exceptional significance.
One hypothesis deserves particular attention: value may arise in relation to a unique distinction that opens the possibility of further development of meaning. What matters is not merely how unusual an object is, but what continuation it can open, what previously nonexistent story may unfold through the subject’s encounter with this difference.
However, we must not silently place ready-made meaning inside an object or turn the possibility of continuation into a mandatory program. The emergence of value itself must be investigated, rather than beginning with an already selected scale.
1. A Definition Under Development
Working formulation: value designates significance discovered or arising in a subject’s relationship to what has been distinguished; one possible basis of this significance is the capacity of a difference to open new continuations of meaning that are not exhausted by its present form.
This is not a final definition. Three questions remain unresolved:
- Does value arise simultaneously with the subject’s relationship to a difference, or does the subject discover significance whose existence cannot be reduced to the act of discovery?
- Is the possibility of further development of meaning necessary for value, or is it only one source of value?
- What precisely is meant by a difference’s “own” productivity of meaning, if its subsequent story is not inscribed in the object itself and is not predetermined in advance?
It is these questions, rather than general doubt about all definitions, that leave the definition under development.
2. Difference Is Not Yet Value
A subject distinguishes many things: shades, sounds, faces, events, positions of objects, changes in circumstances. But the fact of distinction does not imply that everything distinguished is equally significant.
One may notice an unusual shade of a stone and never return to it. One may hear a phrase that stands out neither in volume nor grammar, yet changes the direction of subsequent investigation. One may discover a rare regularity without yet understanding what place it will occupy in thinking.
Consequently, we must keep separate:
- distinguishability: something has been singled out from what was previously undifferentiated;
- difference: precisely how what has been distinguished differs from something else;
- uniqueness: what has been discovered does not recur within the relationship under consideration or has an unrepeatable combination of differences;
- significance: what relationship this difference has for the subject;
- value: the distinct question of significance that has arisen or been discovered, its basis, and its possible continuation.
The last two concepts cannot yet be definitively identified with one another. Saying “everything significant is valuable,” without investigating the relationship in which significance becomes value, would make the definition circular.
The occurrence of a new distinction carries no automatic requirement to regard it as valuable.
3. Uniqueness and Rarity: Two Different Relationships
Rarity describes the frequency, prevalence, or availability of something relative to a selected set and conditions. It presupposes the question: rare among what, for whom, where, and when?
Uniqueness, in one sense, means being the only instance relative to a particular criterion. But in another sense, more interesting for this investigation, it may designate the unrepeatability of a particular relationship of meaning or of a developing trajectory.
These senses must not be substituted for each other.
- A rare mineral may reveal nothing to the subject beyond the knowledge that there are few specimens.
- An ordinary object may become the only evidence of an unrepeatable event.
- Two physically identical letters may have completely different values if one is the direct trace of an important relationship.
- Unusualness may disappear through repeated exposure, while significance of meaning persists or increases.
Rarity can heighten attention, make replacement more difficult, and intensify the consequences of loss. But these effects do not constitute a universal cause of value.
The rarity of a difference is not the value of that difference.
Otherwise, every random deviation that almost never occurs would have to be considered valuable regardless of its significance.
4. Further Productivity of Meaning of a Difference
The hypothesis of a continuation of meaning requires separate investigation.
A subject may encounter a difference that not only stands out against something else, but also opens up further distinctions: new questions, connections, actions, relationships, ways of understanding, and transformations of existing forms.
A conditional structure:
distinguished A → possible continuation B → new distinctions C, D, …
But these arrows must not be read as a physical law, automatic causality, or an already existing algorithm of the future. They indicate a possible sequence of working with meaning. The subject may not take the next step; the step may be unexpected; the new trajectory may change the original understanding of A.
For now, this capacity may be called the productivity of meaning of a difference: what has been distinguished can participate in the emergence of new meaningful connections without being exhausted by its initial description.
The phrase “its own further causality of meaning” is appealing because it emphasizes that something in what has been distinguished is significant for further movement, rather than being merely a reward arbitrarily assigned by a person. But the phrase carries a risk of substitution.
In What Sense Is It “Its Own”?
Not in the sense that a stone, a word, an encounter, or a discovery contains a complete script of future events hidden inside it.
“Its own” can indicate that the characteristics of what has been distinguished genuinely matter for the continuations that become possible. Certain properties enable particular actions, while others exclude them. One phrase contains a contradiction capable of opening an investigation. One encounter leads to relationships that cannot be produced from any other encounter by simply replacing one participant.
The object is not an empty surface on which the subject inscribes arbitrary value. But neither does value reside in it as a ready-made physical attribute.
A relationship emerges here in which it is necessary to hold simultaneously:
- the characteristics of what has been distinguished;
- the subject distinguishing those characteristics;
- the conditions under which the encounter occurred;
- the possibility of further transitions of meaning;
- the absence of any guarantee that these transitions will be realized.
Productivity of meaning does not imply predetermination of meaning.
Possible Causality Is Not an Already Established Cause
If a difference can lead to a particular continuation, this does not mean that the continuation is already contained in it as a necessary consequence.
Possibility must not be turned into either a guarantee or a probability drawn from a closed list of outcomes specified in advance. Still less can every imagined continuation be regarded as confirmed value belonging to an object.
The question, then, is not merely whether something can occur after A, but what grounds allow an emerging continuation to be connected specifically with A and what the subject’s participation in this transition consists in.
5. Can Everything Have Potential for Meaning?
One may hypothesize that virtually anything distinguished is capable of opening a further trajectory of meaning if a subject discovers a previously unnoticed relationship.
An ordinary stone may become material for investigation, evidence of a place’s history, an element of an artwork, or the source of a new question. This demonstrates that the absence of discovered value does not amount to proof that no possible continuation of meaning exists.
Yet asserting that everything already has the same value or that everything necessarily has a preexisting meaning would be another form of premature closure.
We should distinguish:
- a trajectory of meaning already realized by the subject;
- a continuation for which grounds have been discovered;
- a possibility not yet investigated;
- an arbitrarily invented story attributed to an object.
The unknown does not justify declaring an object meaningless. But neither does it justify attributing a particular hidden story to it without investigation.
6. Need as a Source of Significance
A special case arises when a subject experiences a need.
A person is thirsty, needs medicine, a device repaired, food, safety, or the possibility of continuing meaningful work. An encounter with something that makes it possible to satisfy that need may acquire great significance.
But this does not imply that need and value are identical.
Need indicates a particular relationship between the subject, their condition, their circumstances, and what it is necessary or desirable to change. Value may arise in relation to the satisfaction of the need, the object itself, the availability of a solution, the preservation of the possibility of acting, or something else.
We must also distinguish:
- the significance of the need for the subject;
- the value of a particular way of satisfying it;
- the availability of that way;
- the market price of obtaining access to it;
- the consequences of non-satisfaction.
These relationships may change independently.
Satisfying a Need and Reducing Scarcity
If someone always has access to clean water, the next glass of water may seem self-evidently available. The urgency of obtaining that particular glass decreases.
If access disappears, the same water acquires an entirely different significance. Its physical composition may not have changed. What has changed are the subject’s circumstances and access to satisfying the need.
But a reduction in urgency does not imply that water has lost its vital significance.
A decrease in experienced scarcity is not equivalent to the disappearance of value.
Often, what decreases is not the significance of the condition of existence itself, but the significance of obtaining one more unit of something already available in sufficient quantity.
Conversely, severe need can increase willingness to pay for a solution without making any price demanded for it fair.
7. Scarcity of Satisfaction and the Value of Need
It is easy to make a substitution here:
a need is difficult to satisfy → satisfying it becomes especially significant → the need itself is declared a source of market value.
The third transition is not contained in the first two.
A need belongs to the subject who experiences it. It does not automatically constitute another person’s economic resource. When a seller uses another person’s necessity primarily to extract the maximum reward, the significance of the need for one subject is turned into an instrument of benefit for another.
Scarcity of means, high urgency, and absence of alternatives can change the conditions of exchange. But they do not establish that another person’s vulnerability should become grounds for commercial exploitation.
This distinction is examined in detail in “Extracting Benefit from Another’s Need”.
8. Why Did Gold Become Valuable?
Gold is a useful case because physical characteristics, limited availability, aesthetic perception, the history of relationships, and collectively reproduced forms of evaluation all meet within it.
Reducing the history of its value to rarity alone is insufficient.
Gold is relatively rare, and extracting it requires effort. It is noticeable for its color and luster, resistant to many chemical influences under ordinary conditions, malleable, and suitable for making jewelry and objects. These characteristics allow it to retain its appearance and take on different forms. Over time, gold became involved in adornment, rituals, symbols of power, gift-giving, accumulation, monetary relationships, and technical applications.
But listing these properties does not yet explain the emergence of value.
Physical properties do not contain a ready-made social relationship to gold.
A sequence of questions can be proposed:
- What exactly attracted the subject’s attention upon encountering this metal?
- Why did a noticeable difference become significant rather than merely unusual?
- What actions did its characteristics make possible?
- How did the initial significance develop further into jewelry, gifts, symbols, means of storage, or exchange?
- When did recognition by other subjects begin sustaining the evaluation already formed?
- At what point did the established price begin to be perceived as proof of the metal’s intrinsic value?
This is an investigation of conditions, not an assertion of one historical sequence. Gold did not have one inevitable purpose written into its substance in advance.
Thought Experiment: Gold Becomes Very Abundant
Suppose gold suddenly became as readily available as ordinary building material.
Its appeal arising from rarity and some grounds for its high market price would probably change. But its chemical properties, color, malleability, capacity to participate in creating objects, and some historically established cultural relationships would not automatically disappear.
This shows that rarity can be one condition of valuation but is not identical to the entire content of value.
Thought Experiment: An Object That Is Rare but Useless in Itself
Suppose an almost unique stone is found and all that is known about it is that very few similar specimens exist.
For a collector, this rarity itself may open a significant trajectory. For a researcher, value may lie in the questions the stone makes possible. For another subject, the stone may remain irrelevant.
One cannot say that the number of specimens itself produced identical value for everyone. But neither can one claim that the stone’s characteristics play no role. It is precisely the relationship between the object’s characteristics and the subject’s possible trajectory of meaning that requires investigation.
9. Value, Price, Utility, and Meaning
These concepts have different grounds.
Price is a quantitative expression established or emerging under particular conditions of exchange. Price may change under the influence of supply, demand, rules, expectations, and the power of market participants. It is not a direct measure of the full significance of an object for a subject.
Utility is the relationship of an object or action to a particular task, function, or result. The question “what is it useful for?” is not the same as “why is it valuable?”
Rarity is a relationship to prevalence and availability. Low frequency implies neither necessary utility nor value.
Desirability is a relationship of striving. A subject may desire something that they subsequently recognize as destructive; they may recognize the significance of something toward which they do not strive.
Meaning is a separate subject of investigation. In “Meaning”, the question remains open whether meaning is the directedness connecting distinctions or the subject’s movement through them. Defining value must not secretly settle this question instead of allowing its independent investigation.
Value is a relationship of significance, possible continuations, and their grounds that has not yet been conclusively defined. It must not be declared a synonym for any of the preceding concepts.
10. Value Does Not Necessarily Decrease Through Repetition
The reverse side of the rarity hypothesis must also be tested.
What is repeated can lose its novelty yet retain its significance. Sometimes significance even arises through duration, repetition, accumulated shared experience, and the history of a relationship.
A daily conversation may be an outwardly repeated action, yet no encounter is merely a reproduction of the previous one. Repetition of form is not identical to repetition of a trajectory of meaning.
A person close to us does not become less valuable because we can meet them every day. The disappearance of a scarcity of encounters does not turn that person into an interchangeable object.
Therefore, rarity cannot be considered a necessary condition of value. Something else may be more interesting: the impossibility of replacing a particular relationship with another, formally similar relationship without losing essential differences.
But irreplaceability, too, must not immediately be turned into a universal definition. Its grounds and boundaries require separate examination.
11. The Value of a Person and the Danger of Market Analogy
If rarity and uniqueness are declared sufficient grounds for value, a serious problem arises: the significance of a person will begin to be compared according to the number of their replacements, the unusualness of their abilities, their demand, or their usefulness.
This transfers the logic of evaluating objects and services onto a subject.
A human being cannot be identified with the product of their activity, a set of characteristics, or a place in a system. Their unrepeatability cannot be reduced to the rarity of a specimen of some type.
The very question of the “value of a person” requires examination: might it already be a way of evaluating the subject from an external position before establishing what is meant by value?
This difficulty has already been recorded in “Comments on Humanism”. It is necessary to distinguish recognition that the subject cannot be reduced to a finite form from declaring the subject to be the bearer of a predetermined evaluative quantity.
12. Value Does Not Create an Obligation to Act
Even if the subject discovers the significance of a difference and sees a possible continuation, that discovery does not produce a necessary action.
A difference may remain distinguished. A possibility may remain unrealized. The subject may change their relationship to what was previously valuable, refuse to continue, or discover other grounds.
That is why productivity of meaning must not become a hidden teleology:
“This can open an important trajectory” does not mean “this trajectory must be realized.”
“Action for Holding a Distinction” investigates activity not reducible to receiving a reward. “A Goal Does Not Create an Obligation” separately shows that the existence of a goal does not create a necessity to achieve it.
The question of value does not invalidate these distinctions.
13. How Value Is Turned into a Property of a Thing
One of the central errors occurs when a relationship recognized over an extended period is compressed into a characteristic of an object:
- Subjects distinguish something and discover significance.
- Actions, practices, forms of recognition, and exchange arise.
- The relationship becomes fixed in language and institutions.
- People begin speaking as though value had always resided in the object itself in ready-made form.
- The established evaluation is presented to new subjects as an obligatory fact.
This is a particular case of reification: a relationship is taken for an independent entity or an inherent property of an object. Yet identifying reification does not mean that all characteristics of the object participating in that relationship have been invented.
The error lies not in recognizing significance but in removing from the explanation the relationship within which it arose.
The opposite substitution is no less important: declaring value to be an exclusively arbitrary assignment, as though the object, circumstances, and history had nothing to do with further development of meaning.
Both substitutions close the investigation in advance.
14. Test Cases
Unusual but Insignificant
A random, one-of-a-kind arrangement of dust particles may be extremely rare. What makes it valuable? If nothing besides statistical rarity has been discovered, grounds for value have not yet been presented.
Ordinary but Irreplaceable
An everyday object may be connected with a unique history that cannot be transferred to a physically identical replacement. Value here cannot be derived solely from the material’s properties or its frequency of occurrence.
Necessary but Available
Water can be available effortlessly while remaining a condition for the continuation of life. The urgency of acquiring another unit does not exhaust its significance.
A Unique Research Distinction
A new thought may promise neither reward, recognition, nor a guaranteed result. But it opens questions that did not previously exist for the subject. Value here may be connected with the openness of the newly revealed space of meaning.
An Encounter Whose Subsequent Story Is Unknown
A subject meets another person or encounters an event. The encounter itself does not yet contain a story known in advance. Its significance may become apparent later as new relationships unfold. One cannot retroactively present what followed as inevitable causality already present within the initial encounter.
15. Open Research Questions
- Is value a special form of significance, or do these words designate the same relationship?
- Does value arise at the initial distinction, at the discovery of a possible continuation, or at the realization of that continuation?
- Can a difference be valuable without the prospect of further development, for example by virtue of an already completed, unrepeatable history?
- In what sense can we speak of a difference’s “own causality of meaning” without turning the object into the bearer of a predetermined goal?
- How can we distinguish a genuinely discovered basis for a possible continuation from an arbitrary story invented after encountering the object?
- How does the rarity of a thing differ from the irreplaceability of a relationship?
- What exactly changes when a need is fully satisfied: value, the experience of scarcity, urgency of action, or the price of an additional unit?
- Can value exist without desire and without an intention to act?
- How does value discovered by one subject become significant to another without appropriating the right to impose an evaluation on them?
- Can the value of a subject even be discussed in the same language as the value of a thing, or is this already a substitution of the subject matter?
- Is the belated discovery of value the creation of a new relationship or the disclosure of an earlier one that had remained unnoticed?
- If meaning is not given in advance, what explains the persistence of certain value relationships over time?
- By what manifestations does the subject distinguish value themselves: actions, sensations, an experience of significance, changes in relationship, or something else?
- Can a subject discover value without intense sensations and without taking actions for the sake of what is valuable?
- What exactly is discovered through loss: an earlier value or a new significance resulting from a change in relationship?
- How can a subject’s own discovery of value be distinguished from an external observer’s interpretation of it?
- How does a value relationship differ from any other relationship between a subject and what has been distinguished?
- If a subject sees the possibility of a further story of meaning, have they discovered value or only one of the conditions for its emergence?
16. How Value Becomes Distinguishable: Action, Sensation, and the Subject’s Relationship
The question of the origin of value must be separated from the question of which manifestations make value distinguishable. One can establish that a subject performed an action or experienced a particular sensation, but this does not yet establish precisely what is valuable to them and on what grounds.
Here, investigation of value must not be silently replaced by recording its external or experienced indicators. We must distinguish value itself, its discovery by the subject, the mode of experience, its manifestation in actions, and another subject’s attempt to interpret what is happening.
16.1. Action Is Not a Sufficient Indicator of Value
Suppose a person performs the same work every day, spending time and effort on it. Can we conclude that precisely this work is valuable to them?
No. They may act for money, under pressure from circumstances, out of necessity, to prevent harm, from habit, or because continuing the work opens another meaning for them that does not coincide with the external task.
Two subjects may perform outwardly identical actions while maintaining entirely different relationships to what is taking place. One spends ten hours programming for a reward, while the other spends ten hours developing their own research idea. Similarity of activity does not make its underlying meanings identical.
The reverse case is equally important: a subject may discover the exceptional value of a person, event, investigation, or relationship while undertaking no actions whatsoever to preserve or obtain anything. The absence of action does not prove the absence of value.
Action may express a value relationship, but is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for its existence.
Even an action aimed at preserving something requires separate investigation: does the subject preserve the object for its significance, out of fear of loss, out of obligation, for a reward, or for another reason? These distinctions cannot be automatically extracted from bodily movement or an observed result.
16.2. Sensation Is Not Identical to Value
A pleasant sensation may accompany what is valuable, but pleasure does not establish value by itself. A person may enjoy something to which they attach no particular significance, and may experience severe distress while working on a question of exceptional significance to them.
Pain, tension, fear, joy, relief, or inspiration must not be turned into a ready-made scale of value. An unpleasant experience does not mean that what is happening is without value; the absence of a strong emotion does not mean indifference.
However, sensation must be distinguished from the experience of significance. Pleasure or physical discomfort can be described as experienced states. Experiencing significance already involves a relationship to something: this matters, this cannot simply be replaced, I want to return to this, this encounter opened something.
But a boundary arises here as well: if we call the experience of significance itself value, we have not explained why what was experienced became significant. Changing the words does not answer the question of the origin of the relationship.
Experience can make value directly accessible to the subject, but does not necessarily exhaust its content.
16.3. Change in Relationship as a Possible Way of Discovery
Instead of defining value through a particular action or feeling, we can investigate a change in the subject’s relationship to what has been distinguished.
An event may initially occupy no special place in someone’s life. Then the subject discovers previously undistinguished content within it; returns to the question, notices new connections, sees a possible continuation, or relates differently to what is already familiar. Outwardly, the event remains the same, but a new trajectory of meaning has emerged.
We can provisionally distinguish:
- the subject distinguishes an object or event;
- particular significance of what was distinguished is discovered or arises;
- the relationship to it may change;
- further distinctions, experiences, or actions may follow.
This is not a law by which one state automatically produces the next. Even the mandatory order of these moments has not been established. A change in relationship may make value distinguishable without causing it.
The essential question remains open: did the subject create value through a new relationship, or did they notice for the first time something they had previously been unable to distinguish?
16.4. Loss and Belated Discovery
Sometimes a subject does nothing specifically to preserve a familiar condition, experiences no strong emotions about it, and does not call it valuable. But after losing it, they discover what place it occupied in their existence.
Such a case is particularly important for investigating rarity and scarcity.
Two different claims are possible:
- what was lost already had significance, and the loss made that significance distinguishable;
- the loss itself changed the subject’s relationship and created new significance.
These claims must not be substituted for each other. The subsequent experience is not proof that all value previously existed in exactly the same form. But the absence of earlier awareness does not prove that value arose only after the loss.
Thus, scarcity may affect the conditions under which value is discovered, rather than necessarily affecting the emergence of value itself. This is another reason not to identify value with rarity.
16.5. Self-Distinction and External Interpretation
We must separate the question “How does the subject discover value themselves?” from the question “On what basis does another person conclude that something is valuable to the subject?”
For the subject, significance may be disclosed in experience, a change in relationship, a return to a distinction, or the discovery of new meaning. An outside observer may see statements, actions, choices, expenditures of time, refusals of rewards, or reactions to loss.
But observable behavior does not give another subject the direct right to determine what is valuable to the first. The observer constructs an interpretation and must distinguish the grounds of that interpretation from the very subject matter interpreted.
At the same time, even the explicit statement “this is valuable to me” does not automatically reveal the origin of value. The statement establishes the relationship as expressed, while the question of why and how it arose remains separate.
The very possibility of misrecognizing or redescribing another person’s value relates to the problem of devaluation: one subject may attempt to replace another’s significance with their own evaluation and present that evaluation as definitive.
16.6. Five Levels That Must Not Be Collapsed
| Level of Investigation | Question |
|---|---|
| Value | What is valuable to the subject, and on what grounds? |
| Discovery of value | How does the subject first distinguish significance? |
| Experience | How is this significance present in the subject’s experience? |
| Action | How is the relationship to what is valuable expressed or not expressed in activity? |
| External recognition | On what basis does another subject draw a conclusion about someone else’s value? |
Distinguishing these levels does not mean that five separate entities exist. It prevents an unjustified transition from one kind of evidence to another.
Three substitutions are especially dangerous:
- “The subject acts for X, therefore X is valuable to them.” The directedness of a visible action does not yet establish its actual meaning.
- “The subject experiences pleasure from X, therefore X is valuable to them.” Sensation is not identical to a value relationship.
- “Another subject does not discover value in X, therefore X is not valuable to the first subject either.” An external evaluation cannot replace the subject’s own relationship to what has been distinguished.
16.7. Returning to the Productivity of Meaning
The initial hypothesis about a unique difference opening a further story of meaning now requires a more precise question:
When a subject distinguishes the possibility of such a continuation, have they already discovered value, or only the conditions under which it may arise?
An encounter with a person may open many new trajectories, yet the number of possible continuations does not explain why this particular encounter becomes valuable. Conversely, an encounter may acquire significance before the subject knows or is even able to imagine its subsequent story.
We must therefore preserve the distinction between:
- the discovery of a particular difference itself;
- the emergence or discovery of its significance;
- the possibility of subsequent development of meaning;
- the actual realization of a further trajectory.
None of these relationships can be declared in advance to be a necessary cause of another.
Intermediate Formula
Value is identical neither to the subject’s actions nor to the sensations accompanying them. Action and experience may make value distinguishable but do not exhaust its content or automatically explain its emergence.
Discovering value requires investigation of the subject’s relationship to what has been distinguished. It is also necessary to investigate separately whether the subject creates significance in the act of distinction or discovers what was previously indistinguishable.
The main question of this section remains: how does a value relationship differ from any other relationship between a subject and what has been distinguished? Until this difference is established, observable actions, sensations, and even the experience of significance do not amount to a complete definition of value.
Current Formula
Value does not follow automatically from rarity or uniqueness alone. It requires investigation of the subject’s relationship to what has been distinguished: what exactly became significant, why the difference is irreplaceable within that relationship, and what realized or justifiably possible continuation of meaning is connected with it.
Rarity may heighten the significance of possible loss or inability to replace something. Uniqueness may signify an unrepeatable trajectory. Need may create particular urgency. But none of these factors is a self-sufficient formula of value.
The central unresolved question remains open:
Is a difference valuable because it opens further development of meaning, or does the very possibility of such development become valuable only after a particular relationship between the subject and what has been distinguished arises?
