ABSTRACT
Jane Howarth discusses the contrast between valuing things for the use we can make of them and valuing them for themselves. * She describes the cherishing of special things as an example of the latter and draws an analogy between cherishing, and the concept of care used by the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger to characterize a basic human relationship to the non-human world. Phenomenology is a method of philosophical investigation. It aims to describe the ‘lived-world’; the world as we act in it prior to any theorising about it. A central thesis of phenomenology is that subjects and objects are essentially inter-related. In exploring ‘value’ – or, to emphasize the relatedness, ‘valuing’ – phenomenologically, one should look for the activities (of the subject) involved in valuing and the features (of the object) which valuing brings to light.
