–Jun. 2026 – Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (EPTC) meeting, Victoria, BC
Philosophical and psychological accounts of well-being both describe it as an autotelic experience (an experience that is its own reward). However, in spite of the normative weight attached to autotelicity in both literatures, neither can resolve what I call “the puzzle of autotelic experience”: autotelic experience appears as both intrinsically valuable, such that undergoing the experience is its own reward, and as valuable only insofar as it orients the subject to a self-transcendent source of value. Drawing on Strasser’s Husserl-inspired phenomenology of happiness and on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of time, I give a phenomenological account of autotelic experience that dissolves this puzzle.