A previous publication addressed the possibility of a conceptual bridge between Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). From the SDT perspective, oriented toward the motivational domain, we find a rich language for autonomous internalization, the integration of identity commitments, and the conditions under which a person lives more wholly and more authentically. ACT, within its framework of contextual behavioral science, in turn offers a process model of psychological flexibility and a set of clinical practices that help a person unstick from rigid self-descriptions and commit to values-consistent action despite suffering and inner resistance. In this bridge, “values” and “autonomy” appear as a natural common axis: SDT speaks of internally accepted and integrated values; ACT speaks of values-oriented action as a key mechanism of change.
The attentive reader, of course, will have noticed at this point the presence of a substantial theoretical tension. SDT, even when it emphasizes the dynamism of personality and the active, integrative character of the self, at the very least hints at the existence of a certain inner axis relative to which authenticity is oriented: there are ways of living that “fit,” that seem naturally proper to the person, that are aligned with interests and values, and that are experienced as vitality. And there are ways of living that are rather imposed, coercive, and that bring tension, emptiness, or a vulnerable self-esteem. In this discourse, “authenticity” is not a functional label; it points to something subjective, to an inner integrative reality that can be adequate to itself or distanced from itself. We might call this a moderate essentialism: not the positing of a metaphysical substance, but an intuition of subjective centrality, a temporally stable coherence that makes it possible to speak about the “truth” of a choice.
On the other side stands contextual functionalism (CF), the meta-theoretical position within which ACT situates itself. CF is extremely reserved toward any claims about inner essences and grounds that cannot be operationalized as functional relations. Here the “self” is not a center that agentically confers meaning, but a perspective and a function; “self-as-context” is not a metaphysical core, but a way of relating to experience that changes its power over behavior. Values are not ontological principles, but chosen directions that organize committed behavior and can be treated as verbal practices with particular consequences. In this sense, the previous article, although it did not problematize it, contains within itself the tension between one articulation of the self that hints at essentiality (in the SDT register) and one articulation of the human being that deliberately avoids (if not denies) essential commitments (in the CF register). Here I want to unfold this tension further, noting that this is not intended as a critique of contextual functionalism, but as a meeting of CF from the continental tradition (to which the author belongs) at the knot point of ACT. This is an attempt to articulate how ACT and CF appear when we think them through existential questions: questions of meaning-bestowal, temporality, the creation of meanings, rather than the relation to meanings already created. In this sense the text is not psychological but philosophical, and it aims to clarify the perspective from which the practitioner views what they already do, rather than prescribing new techniques. Therefore, what is set out here has no direct implications for practical work in ACT. No different kind of intervention with respect to values is offered, nor is any change recommended in the six processes of flexibility. What would change is the stance: what we think we are doing when we work with values; what we hear when the client speaks about what is “meaningful”; what we take to be primary - context or the horizon of significance; and how this affects our position of presence. This is a change of a different order: a change in the practitioner’s perspective, not in their toolkit or protocol; in other words, a rethinking of function within the same context.
To unfold the tension, we must clarify something that is often lost in popular representations: in contextual functionalism, “context” is not merely an “external situation.” Context includes learning history, adopted social and cultural practices, verbal rules, available reinforcement, as well as the bodily and affective conditions under which behavior occurs. CF is radically anti-substantialist not because it denies inner life, but because it refuses to think of it as a cause of a different ontological order. Inner events (thoughts, emotions, sensations) are part of behavioral reality and can be considered according to their function. The pragmatic criterion here is not “what is this in itself,” but “how does this work in a given context.” From this position it seems natural that values, too, should be thought of as contextual: as verbal orientations that are learned and stabilized within a biography; as rules that can increase resilience and behavioral range; as ways a person organizes choices under inevitable discomfort. This functional perspective has undeniable clinical value. It protects therapy from moralizing or free speculation. It protects it from “values” turning into “shoulds”: “I should have the right values,” “I should act by my values, otherwise I’m a failure.” When values are seen as a choice of directions and as practice, they can be flexible and serve life rather than control it. Paradoxically, it is precisely this anti-essentialist modesty that often makes ACT seem more humane: it does not tell the client what they “should be,” but invites them to choose how they want to live.
It would be difficult to know anything about a person without first knowing their driving forces. On the one hand these are the needs and urges present in them, and on the other hand that toward which they are directed. If we were to identify their directedness with a particular final goal to which they are pushed by needs, we would risk “locking” them into a sequence of chronological segments, which seems implausible from a phenomenological point of view. ACT breaks open such a definition with its concept of values as enduring directions, guiding lines. At the same time, when we speak of values in an existential sense, we are not speaking of preferences or of a selected direction. We are speaking of something that gives density and structure to the world; of a horizon within which things appear as meaningful or meaningless; of the way in which a situation becomes “a situation for me.” In this sense, values are not experienced as a product of context, but as a condition for context to contain meanings. The world is not encountered first as a neutral set of facts, after which we “ascribe” values to it. The world is always already encountered as significant - as affecting us, as demanding, as carrying possibilities and dangers.
Subjectivity from this point of view can be understood not as a collection of properties, but as a mode of unfolding, by analogy with the acorn, which we owe to Aristotle and which is so popular in SDT. In everyday life we often think time chronologically: an order of events, development, a learning history, causes and effects. This is useful and necessary. But there is also another type of time - the time of timeliness, of the “right moment,” of the moment that “ripens,” toward which we are originally directed and which “demands.” This temporality can be called kairotic (from Greek kairos), as distinct from chronological (chronos). Chronos is the time of clock and calendar; kairos is the time of significance, purpose, and the meaning of movement. In the kairotic register, the future is a horizon of possibilities of differing weight. The past is accumulated meaning that shapes possibilities toward the future. The present is a place of call: a moment in which the person takes responsibility. This temporality is not a content of consciousness. It is a structuring principle of experience: the dynamic way in which life is made whole, the way significance is determined, the way particular actions are subordinated to a broader horizon. If we speak of a “meaning-positing subjectivity,” it is not a contentful essence, but precisely such a temporal-organizing aspect.
In this sense, values can be thought of as the directedness of the temporal coherence of subjectivity. They give unity to overall behavior not as an external moral law, but as a co-belonging horizon of significance. They subordinate behavioral fragments to the whole not through a conscious, rational directive, but as a given line on the horizon that organizes the multitude of choices and refusals.
I emphasize the difference between rationalization and meaning-bestowal. Contextual functionalism very accurately notices, even purely phenomenologically, that thinking consciousness most often rationalizes: it creates rules, builds explanations, stories, narratives that are not necessarily in contact with immediate (and not only immediate) reality. The continental perspective would add: meaning-bestowal is not identical with thinking. Thinking consciousness can arrange arguments, but it does not necessarily arrange significance. The ordering of significance - the temporal organization of what carries weight, often occurs before thought, or more precisely: at a level that is not reducible to contentful acts of reflection. It is suffered through by consciousness, but not constructed within it. Only relative to what has been given to it does thinking consciousness produce a translation that may be accurate or defensive: “I act this way because…,” “this means such-and-such,” “this is important because….” This translation is secondary relative to the horizon that has been provided.
This makes it possible to think more nuancedly about the role of context as well. Context is not nothing; it has real weight, because it is precisely consciousness and not a deeper meaning-organizing temporal subjectivity (in this notion we are not dealing with substantiality, but with a phenomenological description of a temporal, pre-given structure of experience), that encounters the world. Consciousness is what “provides” it with the world as it interprets it, and interpretation is influenced by meanings posited up to that point, i.e., there is a bidirectional interdependence in which consciousness co-agents with subjectivity. The world provides images, situations, social scripts, constraints and possibilities. Context is the material that consciousness “brings” into this center. But this participation does not mean that context is the source of the horizon. Self-as-context is not content, but meaning-positing subjectivity is also not content. The difference is that in ACT, self-as-context is formulated as a functional perspective: an observing position that allows thoughts and emotions to be held in awareness as events, rather than as facts or identity definitions. This is a pragmatic formulation that avoids ontological claims. In the continental reading, self-as-context in relation to experience can be thought of as consciousness approaching the temporal-kairotic meaning-positing subjectivity: not as discovering an “inner core,” but as loosening adhesion to contents, which allows the horizon of significance to become more accessible. This approach does not lead to fusion, and it likely cannot: the horizon is not formed within the scope of consciousness, but is provided to it as a condition for the appearing of objects and significances in a way exceptional (as far as we know) to human beings.
From here follows the most delicate point in the conversation about values in ACT. If values are thought only functionally as chosen directions, there is a risk (especially in popular and simplified versions of ACT) that they will be reduced to a kind of rational list: “what is important to me,” “in which areas do I want to develop,” “what kind of person do I want to be.” (An understanding characteristic of classical CBT, from which ACT distances itself.) These exercises are useful, but values are not always “chosen” as a free preference; they are often recognized as a call. They are the articulation of an already-present directedness that is not produced by consciousness as a project, but is temporally experienced as a horizon. This does not cancel choice—on the contrary, choice becomes even more real, because it is no longer a choice among equivalent options, but the taking up of responsibility before temporality. A temporality that is existentially limited, and at the same time kairotically deficient. In this sense ACT can be experienced also as a discipline of responsibility: to distinguish rationalization from horizon, external rule and meaning from essential call, inertia from authenticity. Thus we arrive at the tension between SDT and CF. SDT, when it speaks of authenticity and integration, moves close to this idea of horizon and of an available inner axis. CF, when it speaks of self-as-context and values-as-practice, moves close to the idea of perspective and function. Both can work clinically, but they presuppose different anthropologies. If SDT is read “more continentally,” autonomous internalization becomes a form of self-holding to the horizon of significance. If ACT is read “more continentally,” values work is not merely cognitive clarification, but an articulation of the kairotic. If SDT is read “more CF,” authenticity can be thought of as a functional indicator of integration of regulation and need satisfaction. In classical CBT, the horizon is translated as stable verbal networks that organize behavior.
And here we can ask the question: “Is there tension in the idea of values within contextual functionalism?” Yes, there is: if by “values” we understand not chosen behavioral directions, but a meaning-positing temporal horizon that determines the interpretation of context. Then it seems that values are not contextual in the sense of “determined by context,” but rather are what makes context meaningful. Without directly positing (within the present framework) a separate ontological source of meaning, this brings to light the way significance is experienced before it is verbalized and included in functional relations. Context has real weight because it is the material of encounter and the form of the possible; consciousness participates because it names, narrates, and plans; but the horizon of significance - the temporal-kairotic organizing aspect of subjectivity, agents actively in its organization of weight and direction. And it is precisely in this organization that values are primary not as content, but as structure: a structure of directedness that is later translated into words and actions, and only then becomes accessible to therapeutic work. ACT, viewed from this perspective, is not “refuted” but illuminated: its practices of defusion, presence, and self-as-context can be thought of as conditions for a more accurate grasp of the horizon, and values work as a discipline of relating to timeliness, not only as cognitive clarification of preferences. What do we gain from such a perspective if the overall picture does not change in any way? Only a more precise phenomenology of the experience of values if that matters to us. In addition, an opportunity to pose a broader circle of questions that are, of course, far beyond the scope of the present publication, some of which might be, for example: how do we distinguish the authentic call from pathology; what are the possible modes of kairotic directedness; are autonomy and competence instrumental rather than essential needs; and if so, what does the evidently much freer variability of inner relations to relatedness speak to?
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