Self-Valuing Logic

Self-valuing can not be seen as temporal-causally prior to valuing in terms of self-value, i.e. valuing the world, as the two are seen/understood to occur at the same moment, and the latter is indeed needed to enable the former to be manifest. However, as we must infer from the terms, self-valuing is logical-causally prior to valuing in terms of self-value. We see a difference between the logic of value-causality and the logic of temporal causality.

The problem with applying causality to value is that we are here working with logic that is not adequate to the thing which needs to be explained. The logic of causality is derived from a classifying-observing the physical world in terms of a continuum, and so to be valid always requires a continuum, a chain, in which each cause is also an effect of something else than to which it is the cause.

In the post linked here I have explained self-valuing as the activity of consistency. Consistency does does not itself have a cause, in the sense of transferring energy quantities, that is to say, in the proper sense of causality. As no cause can be inferred from it, there is no manifest ground to it, except “possibility”. I keep arriving at this ultimate ground for being in terms of value ontology – being is because it is not impossible, and its possibility escapes its impossibility because if its particular form/mode, which is consistency, specifically, consistent self-value.

Now, “possibility” flowing out into consistency may be described as “necessity”.  Self-valuing is possible, not necessary –- valuing-in-terms-of-self-value is necessary where-ever this possibility is actualized. We see how necessity is subservient to possibility, whereas possibility is subservient to nothing, except to the absence of its negation, impossibility. Impossibility of anything is of course an extremely positive, active classification, entirely dependent on a general possibility of being.

As it requires only possibility and not necessity, self-valuing can be seen as transcendent. It stands “behind” the manifest world, and its logics of causation, quantity, sequence and temporality. If one were to apply such logics to self-valuing, it would appear as “self-caused”, but this goes against the very logic of causation, so it is wisest to simply dismiss the concept of causality if we are describing its ground as a principle.

As a manifest being, however, a self-valuing is indeed caused by that which it values in terms of itself. This is the case when temporality has taken hold, when we speak of growth, of being, matter.  Self-valuing “becomes itself” by enabling principle of causation, by which it is then indirectly self-caused as an ongoing process.


[2012]