This article examines the essential role that Rollo May ascribes to values in giving people ("the ethical animal") their "sense of being" or ontology. Values, he argues, result from a courageous process of commitment to self-chosen centers of valuation. This process requires self-consciousness, responsibility, confrontation with anxiety, and presupposes freedom. Although the product of subjective valuation, values are embedded in the collective levels of human civilization and symbolically represented in myths.
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