Tonight I'm going to talk about something that people think that philosophers talk about all the time,

but which philosophers actually don't talk about very much, at least not nowadays.

That's the question of what life is all about.

I will first sketch out a possible answer to that question

that is very commonly accepted in our society,

even if almost no one formulates it explicitly.

Second, I will sketch out a key competitor to that view.

This competitor is roughly the view

proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

Third, I will complicate things a bit by drawing on the Catholic theological and spiritual tradition

to raise questions about the Aristotelian answer.

In the end, I won't claim to have settled the question of what life is all about.

That's way too much for a 40-minute talk.

But perhaps I will have made it clearer what some of the issues are and what a good solution might look like.

First then, there's a certain attitude towards life that I think is now quite common in our society.

I call it feelings management. According to feelings management, the task of living consists in managing your feelings, so that on balance, there is as positive as they can be.

I have chosen the word feelings on purpose to cover not only emotions, but also physical sensations.

Feelings management is concerned with both.

In fact, figuring out how they are related is a crucial

task for feelings management. For example, running a marathon is pretty unpleasant. But having run a

marathon gives you a sense of accomplishment, bragging rights, and so on.

For some people, the negative sensations of pain and fatigue involved in running the race

...