Developing One's Own Value
发展自己的价值
The four papers before this one are mostly about how a person holds to his own law and is not colonized from outside. This paper is about the other side: how his own value unfolds in time. Development, in this paper, is the movement in time of something a person has avowed: in the same matter, something new that issues from him surfaces again; one and the same thing he cares about takes on a different concrete shape; the center of gravity shifts; and a new kind of caring may also take shape. It is not visible output; output, and whose end occupies that position, are two axes. Developing one's own value is not proving outwardly that one is useful, nor processing oneself into a better tool for future contribution; one is also an end. Outside recognition can serve as material; output, rank, reputation or some fixed image does not serve as the sole measure; what has already been achieved is not a final draft. Development can deepen, can revise, can rest; it is not keeping the same particular pursuit forever, nor does it become fuller the busier, the more tired or the more visible one is. Science, craft, creation, understanding and relationships can all be places where value unfolds; they are not ranked, and life is not narrowed into a single moral devotion. One's own development need not first prove that it is useful to others, and cultivating others does not come at the price of cancelling one's own development; the two may help each other, and may also hold each other back in limited circumstances; this is not settled in advance. Development is not a new command: not crossing a new bridge is not a loss.
Introduction
He does woodwork, and has done it for seven or eight years now.
A small workbench on the balcony, a set of planes and chisels, weekend mornings. It began with a little stool for the house; later he made bookshelves and a coffee table, and once a chair. This has nothing to do with the reports: no one asked him to do it, and doing it well does not count toward his year-end review.
The four papers before this one were about how he draws a line in a matter, how he walks out of other people's rules, whether the line he has drawn is his own, and what then, when the line is clear but he has not got there. Most of this is holding: not letting the outside decide for him, not calling what he did not do done. If all that were left of a person's law were holding, it would be nothing but defense. This paper is about the other side: how his own value unfolds in time.
First, one word to make clear. Development, in this paper, is how something he has avowed moves in time. In the same matter, something new that issues from him surfaces again. One and the same thing he cares about takes on a different concrete shape. The center of gravity of what he does these days moves somewhere else. Or a kind of caring he never had before may take shape (Value Theory P4 V44, V48, V55, V58). In one place Value Theory uses development for something else: an observable result in capacity, in works or in institutions. It says plainly that this lies on another axis, and that it and whose end occupies that position in a person do not imply each other (Value Theory P4 V57). This paper does not take that sense; why the two senses cannot be mixed is said in §1. In this system the word growth also has a narrow meaning of its own: a new way of carrying-forward, or a new capacity of handling, acquiring real availability (Meaning Theory P2 Y20). This paper does not use that word.
The question this paper answers is: what developing one's own value is, and what it is not. The answer goes in five steps. §1 says what it is not: it is not proving outwardly that one is useful, and it does not take an outside measure as the only measure. §2 says how it goes: discovering, avowing, going on; it can deepen, can revise, can rest. §3 says where it unfolds. §4 says how it gets along with the side that faces others. §5 is where it lands. The whole paper has five propositions (D26–D30), listed together at the end. The body names no outside theorist and cites no historical event. The conclusions of upstream papers are restated only in plain words, with the source given in parentheses. How this paper connects with existing theories is left to Paper 0.
§1 What Development Is Not
Last year he made a chair, took a photo of it and put it online, and a lot of people liked it. A friend said: "Skill like that — it's a pity not to sell." When his manager heard about it, he said too: "That's good. It trains your patience; it'll help with work."
Both remarks were kindly meant, and neither was empty talk. The chair really could have been sold; the woodwork really had trained his patience. But both remarks put the thing into a different account: one asks what it can be exchanged for, the other what use it is for something else.
Developing one's own value is not proving outwardly that one is useful. Making that chair does not wait on proof that it will sell, nor on proof that it has made him a better employee. Nor is it processing oneself into a better tool for some future contribution: he does not do woodwork to have a livelihood after he retires, nor to make himself more useful to anyone. These things can happen along the way; none of them is its reason. Its reason lies with him: he himself is also an end.
The people this series writes about take others as ends, and take themselves as ends too. To pare one's present self down, bit by bit, into the shape some future use calls for is to treat oneself as a means. He can of course learn useful things for his work; that is another matter. What is meant here is his own thing being turned, whole, into material prepared for something else. Paper 4 says that self-preservation rests first of all on one's also being an end (Paper 4, D23). This paper speaks of the other face of the same premise: not preserving, but unfolding.
Value Theory draws the distinction here precisely. What a person has made, what he has learned, what he has left behind: all of this can be talked about. These things, and whose end occupies that position, lie on two axes, and neither implies the other (Value Theory P4 V57). A person can make a great deal, and make it well, inside a scheme of evaluation he has in no way avowed; a person can go a long while and finish nothing in the very thing he has avowed. "There is output, therefore this is not colonization": this step looks most like common sense, and it is the first one Value Theory refutes. It puts something visible in place of something invisible (Value Theory P4 V57). And there is one step further. Not being colonization does not yet mean being his own: what has entered his heart is not his law just because it is there (Paper 3, D14).
So development in this paper and development in that passage of Value Theory cannot be mixed. To take how much one has made for how far one has come is to put the visible in place of the invisible. The development this paper speaks of lies on the other axis, and what happens on that axis cannot be read accurately from outside: under one and the same visible showing there can be several different things (Value Theory P4 V47).
D26 Developing one's own value is not proving outwardly that one is useful, nor processing oneself into a better tool for future contribution; one is also an end.
Outside recognition is not useless. Among the people who liked the photo was an old carpenter, who left a comment saying the tenons on that chair were cut too tight and would crack once the weather turned damp. He took note of this, and later changed how he did it. This is what Paper 3 calls material and illumination (Paper 3, D13). Outside recognition can enter his consideration and can lead him to change. What it cannot do is only this: become the sole measure, or become the one that legislates for him.
The sole measure takes several shapes. Output: how many pieces a year. Rank: what place he is rated at a handmade-goods fair. Reputation: how many people follow him online. And one that is less conspicuous: a fixed image. He has become "the one who makes chairs"; when friends come over, they all want to see the chairs, and he himself gradually makes nothing but chairs. All of these can be known, and all can be cared about. Take any one of them as the sole measure, and development has been exchanged for the increase of that one thing.
Nor is what has already been achieved taken as a final draft. That chair everyone praised is not a peak to be only repeated from then on. Judgment and Aesthetics says there is no endpoint called "supreme beauty" (Judgment and Aesthetics, Proposition 2, corollary). Meaning Theory says that at no moment is there a finished self that could be brought out (Meaning Theory P2 Y15, second). What he has already achieved is a stretch he has walked, not a mold for what comes after.
D27 Outside recognition can enter consideration as material; but output, rank, reputation or some fixed image is not taken as the sole measure of development, and what has been gained is not taken as a final draft to be only repeated from then on.
§2 Discovering, Avowing, Going On
The first time he pushed a plane, the wood came curling off in thin shavings, and the grain beneath showed itself layer by layer. He stood there looking for a long time. It was not like remembering something; it was like seeing it for the first time. Paper 3 said that discovering one's own value is not retrieving; it can be arriving in place for the first time (Paper 3, D15).
Later he avowed it. There was no day on which he announced it. For a while, whenever he had a free moment he headed for the balcony; when people asked, he said it was his own thing, and as he said it his mind was settled. Paper 3 said that an avowal can happen all at once, or can take shape slowly over a stretch of time (Value Theory P4 V46).
After he avowed it, it went on moving, and it moved in more than one way.
One way is deepening. From stools nailed together he went on to mortise-and-tenon joints without a single nail; in the same matter, something new that issued from him surfaced again (Value Theory P4 V48).
One way is revising. At first what he wanted to make was large furniture that could be handed down, made to a master craftsman's standard. Later he changed this: he made small things for people he knew, a pen holder, a chopping board. The thing he had avowed did not break off; what changed was its concrete content. This is a revision (Value Theory P4 V52).
One way is resting. In the year told in Paper 4 he was ill, and did not touch his tools for months. This is not losing it. Something avowed does not lose its standing by going unused for a long time; when it fades, it can simply be that he is not doing it for now, and its place is still open (Value Theory P4 V52, V53).
There is also shifting. For several months his weekends went to taking the elderly in his family to see doctors, and the center of gravity of what he did was not in woodwork. Value Theory writes down the question a reader most wants to ask: have I regressed? Its answer is that the question rests on a presupposition that does not hold. The center of gravity moving away is not a loss, and the center of gravity does not convert into a ranking of value (Value Theory P4 V56). A person having no stable center of gravity is not a defect either (Value Theory P4 V55).
So development is not keeping up the same particular pursuit forever. Nor is it the fuller the busier one is. One year he began to get a lot more attention online. He was making four pieces a month, rushing to photograph them, working faster and faster, and making things less and less like what he himself wanted to make. Making more, being tired from making, being seen more: all of these lie on the axis of output. They cannot show that his own thing is going on more fully (Value Theory P4 V57).
D28 Development can deepen, can revise, and can stop to rest awhile; it does not mean keeping the same particular pursuit forever, nor that the busier, more tired or more visible one is, the fuller it is.
§3 Where It Unfolds
His thing is a craft. Other people's can lie elsewhere.
His sister has been reading histories for many years, not in order to write anything, only because she wants to understand how some things came to happen the way they did. A neighbor downstairs sets up a telescope on the roof every clear night and writes down what can be seen. An old classmate of his writes novels: two in twenty years. What his mother has cared about most all her life is the people around her: who is ill, whose child is about to start school, she keeps track of all of it. Science, craft, creation, understanding and relationships can all be places where a person's value unfolds.
This is not recommending careers to the reader, and it is not a ranking. A person unfolding in a craft is not lower than one unfolding in understanding; looking after the people around one is not higher than writing novels. Judgment and Aesthetics says something of the same shape: the kinds of beauty have no hierarchy, and each is full in its own place (Judgment and Aesthetics, Theorem 4). Value Theory, on its own side, also states plainly that which row an action draws on has nothing to do with a person's standing in value (Value Theory P4 V56).
This section also heads off one thing. After the year told in Paper 4, there was a time when he felt that planing wood on the balcony at weekends was too selfish: other people were volunteering, helping others, and he was making a pen holder. He wanted to give all his weekends to doing something meaningful. Helping people can be his own thing, if he has really avowed something there. But if it is only because he feels that nothing but helping people counts, then he is narrowing his life into a single moral devotion. The people this series writes about take others as ends, and take themselves as ends too; keep only the first half, and the second half has been cancelled.
D29 Science, craft, creation, understanding and relationships can all be fields in which value unfolds; they are not career recommendations, and they are not ranked.
§4 Inward and Outward
A young man who had just started his first job moved in downstairs. One day the young man saw him at work on the balcony and asked if he could come and learn. He said yes.
A person who takes others as ends too will go on to cultivate others: to help another person's own law unfold, without putting his own ends in its place (Paper 3, §6). With this young man, that means letting him choose for himself what to make, and make it the way he himself wants it, not making him into a copy of himself.
This, and his own thing, sometimes help each other. Explaining to the young man why a joint can take the load, he found that he had only ever known how to make it, and did not really know why; as he explained, he worked it out himself. Once the young man wanted to make a chair that could fold up, something he himself had never thought of; later he made one too.
Sometimes they hold each other back. A weekend is only two days. The young man wanted to come every Saturday; a table he was making for his mother went untouched for half a year. On a few Saturdays he said no.
Several things here cannot be settled in advance. His own thing counts without first proving that it is useful to the young man: it did not come into being for the sake of teaching. Cultivating the young man does not come at the price of cancelling his own thing either: for the sake of cultivating, he need not leave that table sitting there indefinitely. The two may support each other, and may also hold each other back over a limited stretch of days. It cannot be declared in advance that they will always conflict, nor guaranteed in advance that they will always be reconciled. How a given Saturday is arranged is the judgment of that particular time (Paper 1, D6).
The Moral Law calls self-preservation in mixed reality the foundation of all other postures (Moral Law P6 §5.2). This paper adds one more thing on top of that: one's own share is not only kept from being drained; it can still unfold as well. Cultivation is a direction, not a task that calls for handing one's own share over (Paper 6, D33). On a few Saturdays he said no. That he did not give this time does not by itself show that the direction of cultivation was cancelled; and this judgment can also be questioned (Paper 6, D35).
D30 One's own development does not first need proof that it is useful to others; cultivating others does not come at the price of cancelling one's own development; the two may support each other, and may also hold each other back in limited circumstances; they are neither declared in advance to conflict forever nor guaranteed in advance to be always reconciled.
§5 Where It Lands
There is a reading that runs the other way, and it is headed off first here. It is as if development were a new command: "Everyone has to keep moving forward all the time; to stop and rest is to stagnate."
No. Value Theory has said that a person with a bridge before him, leading to a new kind of caring, may choose not to cross it, and suffers no loss whatever in value for that; a person may live all along within the few kinds of caring he now has, and this is entirely self-consistent (Value Theory P4 V59). After listing so many conditions, Value Theory expressly adds a sentence: these conditions read as though they were pointing the way, and they are not (Value Theory P4 V59). Meaning Theory, in its own place, also writes a sentence running the same way: rest is not stagnation (Meaning Theory P2 Y20).
So development is not a new cannot-not. What cannot be cancelled in this series lies at the layer of how people are regarded: standing in the position of taking oneself and others as ends, one cannot cancel certain ways of regarding people (Paper 1, D5). That one is also an end cannot be cancelled. But in which matter he unfolds, how fast, when he rests and when he changes are his judgment, and can go either way.
This year he is working on that table for his mother again. He is making it slowly.
Conclusion
This paper has set out five propositions. Taken together they say this. A person's own value unfolds in time. It does not rest on proving itself outwardly, and it does not take an outside measure as the only measure. It can deepen, can revise, can rest. Where it unfolds is not ranked. It and the side that faces others may help each other and may hold each other back; this is not settled in advance.
What this paper has not said is also recorded here. It gives development no readings: readings of the dynamics of value are the business of Value Theory P4, and are not worked out again here. It recommends no career, and no way of life. It does not say that a person is required to develop: not crossing that bridge is not a loss. How cultivating others is done belongs to Paper 6. That a person's development need not first prove itself useful to the larger whole is a point Paper 9 will come back to.
The Five Propositions of This Paper
D26 Developing one's own value is not proving outwardly that one is useful, nor processing oneself into a better tool for future contribution; one is also an end.
D27 Outside recognition can enter consideration as material; but output, rank, reputation or some fixed image is not taken as the sole measure of development, and what has been gained is not taken as a final draft to be only repeated from then on.
D28 Development can deepen, can revise, and can stop to rest awhile; it does not mean keeping the same particular pursuit forever, nor that the busier, more tired or more visible one is, the fuller it is.
D29 Science, craft, creation, understanding and relationships can all be fields in which value unfolds; they are not career recommendations, and they are not ranked.
D30 One's own development does not first need proof that it is useful to others; cultivating others does not come at the price of cancelling one's own development; the two may support each other, and may also hold each other back in limited circumstances; they are neither declared in advance to conflict forever nor guaranteed in advance to be always reconciled.
Acknowledgments
This paper is the fifth in the Action Theory branch of the SAE (Self-as-an-End) philosophical system, and is signed by Han Qin alone. All philosophical argument and all decisions between alternatives were finally adjudicated by the author, who bears sole responsibility for the final text.
Drafting assistance and review were carried out with the help of large language models. Drafting and the internal precision audit were undertaken by Claude (Anthropic), and structural gatekeeping with pre-publication signature by ChatGPT (OpenAI); the first two review rounds of the series outline also included ontological-limit and contradiction detection and boundary testing, undertaken by Gemini (Google DeepMind) and Grok (xAI) respectively. The ten texts of the series received final review from the internal precision audit and the structural gate, followed by a check of every revised sentence. Thanks are due to these systems and to the research and engineering teams behind them. Their comments were adjudicated by the author item by item, and both what was adopted and what was rejected are on record.
This paper continues the standing product of an upstream-paraphrase audit table, comparing item by item what the paper says of upstream texts against their published wording. The record of revisions and withdrawals across the rounds of review is kept in the series outline and the review returns, and is not reproduced here. This English edition is an independent rewrite of the Chinese final text; a separate parity audit compared it with the Chinese paragraph by paragraph. The review markedly improved the precision and consistency of this paper, and thanks are due for it.
References
All works below are archived on Zenodo, with Chinese and English versions under the same record. The DOIs cited are concept DOIs, always pointing to the latest version; version numbers and access dates are therefore not given separately. All works are single-authored (Han Qin). Drafting and review assistance is described in the Acknowledgments.
The text restates upstream work in plain words, with the paper and proposition number, or the title of an unnumbered section, noted in parentheses at the place of use. Concept DOIs always point to the latest version, so proposition numbers may drift as upstream is renumbered. This paper's restatements are compared item by item with the upstream originals in its transcription audit table.
I · Works actually called upon in this text
Qin, H. (2026). On the Dynamics of Value (SAE Value Theory, Paper 4) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22050204
Qin, H. (2026). The Finite Bearer's Carrying-Forward (SAE Meaning Theory, Paper 2) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22713651
Qin, H. (2026). SAE Judgment and Aesthetics (SAE Foundations) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19296710
Qin, H. (2026). Mixed Reality — The Intermediate State of 14DD Growing toward 15DD (SAE Moral Law, Paper 6) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20108658
II · This series
Qin, H. (2026). Not Doing and Cannot-Not-Doing (SAE Action Theory, Paper 1) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22970752
Qin, H. (2026). Anti-Colonization (SAE Action Theory, Paper 2) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22970758
Qin, H. (2026). Is It Mine? (SAE Action Theory, Paper 3) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22970762
Qin, H. (2026). Can and Cannot (SAE Action Theory, Paper 4) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22970769
Qin, H. (2026). Not Legislating for Others (SAE Action Theory, Paper 6) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22970777
Qin, H. (2026). One's Own Share of Strength, and Guarding (SAE Action Theory, Paper 9) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22970787