Outline of the Phenomenology of Everyday Experience of Valuation

The experience of broadly understood valuation seems to be one of those experiences that we deal with daily and to which we tend to attribute special importance regarding our human existence in the world. I analyze two types of such experiences in this study: those I call calculative valuations and evaluative valuations. The first type includes valuations that assess and assign worth to things, characterized, in Scheler’s sense, by the sensual intuition of what is valued, with results typically expressed in the form of some usefulness of the things valued, or their determined price, or the value accorded to them. However, by evaluative values, I mean those characterized by both the spiritual intuition of what is valuable and the spiritual nature of values that become visible. Specifically, these are values that — as Scheler claimed — “Already in the way they are given […] have a special separation and independence in relation to the entire sphere of the body and the environment,” and whose “Acts and functions in which we perceive them are functions of spiritual intuition and acts of spiritual preference, loving, and hating” (M. Scheler, Materialne apriori w etyce, „Znak” 19 (1967) no. 162, p. 1538). Our way of being toward them, in my understanding, is essentially receptive, not creative, as it is with what is valuable in things valued calculatively. Insights into the world of calculatively valued things and our multi-faceted, causative existence within it show us both the nature of what is valuable in things endowed with value, as well as the crucial, causative role of our intentionally endowed actions in enabling these values to occur. The insight into the world of evaluative judgments proposed in this study, on the one hand, highlights our ontic, axiologically understood openness to spiritual values, both positive and negative, that is typical of us as people. This openness is axiologically defined and oriented in the spiritual acts of free preference. On the other hand, this insight suggests that the purpose of this “determination” and “direction” seems to be not so much the values themselves but rather ourselves and the internal and interpersonal worlds they evoke in their unique ways.