We often come to value someone or something through experience of that person or thing.  Call such an experience direct appreciation of the person or thing.  When you appreciate something directly, you may come to embrace a value that you did not grasp prior to the experience in question.  Moreover, it seems that in a large and important subset of cases you could not have fully appreciated that value absent some such experience: you could not have come to value the thing as you do merely by considering a report of the reasons or arguments that purport to justify such a commitment.  By the same token, even in the wake of the experience, you will remain incapable of fully communicating to someone who lacks the experience the reasons grounding your own affirmation of value.  Despite its ubiquity, this phenomenon goes missing in a great deal of contemporary work in ethics and political philosophy.  In this paper I further specify the phenomenon of interest by developing a series of examples.  Then I support the claim that philosophers routinely overlook it by surveying several significant philosophical positions that do so.  If this much is right then we will have established that the phenomena of direct appreciation is both commonplace and philosophically puzzling.  To make sense of it we need an account of the standards governing normative commitments that explains how we can have reasons for them without requiring articulacy about these reasons.