The article is devoted to the epistemology of values. Drawing from the phenomenology of experiencing value, the semiotics of values and the Kantian ethics of duty, the contradictory ontological status of values and approaches to their objectification are analyzed. In reliance to M.M. Bakhtin’s philosophy of the act, two radical theoretical positions on values are critically examined: Platonism and evolutionary-biological reductionism. A conclusion is made about the practically significant transcendence of values that do not exist as facts or ideas, but are experienced as an opportunity to overcome the current state of man. It is substantiated that values represent a form of human’s constructive experience of his own finitude. Therefore, they are opposed to the needs rooted in the biological nature of man and aimed at maintaining his animal existence. Blending of values and needs as two types of human existence’s vectors — centrifugal, overcoming the current state, and centripetal, maintaining the current state — in practice makes the full realization of value impossible, and in theory leads to involutionary models of development that encourage egocentric practices and replace the universal duty of overcoming oneself with particularistic forms of self-care. At the same time, cultural history preserves examples of the productive conjugation of needs with values — theoretical and practical interpretations of values that are compatible with the necessary practices of self-care (satisfaction of needs), but allow one to go beyond them to a responsible life of a being not predetermined by his own limitations.
