§ 29 Θεωρία
It takes an earnest philosopher a whole life to ascend the staircase proposed by Diotima in the Symposium.1
For Aristotle, in his Ethica Nicomachea, the top of that staircase holds the reward of theoria (Θεωρία), a rapturous contemplation in which the philosopher is quietly and pleasantly at work in his metaphysical garden, tinkering with concepts and their inferential relations, weeding out inconsistencies, pruning contradictions for the sake of greater coherence, greater beauty.2
And even then, the enterprise is full of traps. The garden changes through our work on it. Most of us are not as thorough as Plato, Aristotle, and their heirs. We treat our conceptual framework rather offhandedly and carelessly. Learning concepts is hard work, acquiring their riches in terms of legitimate implications takes a life of learning. Who has the time? To make things easier, we specialise, and then, to make things a bit too easy, we discourage interaction between specialisations.
But all this is only a problem when you choose to live under the delusion that the end is more important than the means to it, that arrival is what travelling is all about.
According to Aristotle, and I am happy to follow him in this, there is just one end, that is itself not a means to a further end. To achieve that end, all other ends are means that ought to work in concert. That end that is itself not a means, he calls eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία). It is often translated as ‘happiness’, just as Jowett did in Plato‘s Symposium, but perhaps it can be better translated as good-spiritedness or, as is the fashion now, as flourishing.
The funny thing is that flourishing is an activity. As such, it is, at heart, a means. So, the great end of our lives, the end to which all other ends are mere means, is itself a means to get through life well, to accommodate ourselves well in our environment.
To flourish is to be doing things happily with a sense of the worthiness of things. Perhaps to feel safe, recognised and appreciated, autonomous and free and yet part of something bigger, to feel that you are doing something that has meaning.
Gardening and crafting, then, is what life is all about: making beautiful things, making an effort to find beauty in those things that can help us and our environment flourish, and doing so in an environment that has space for all that. That is a great good. But what is necessary for it?
There then lies the next challenge: when do we know what makes people and their environment flourish? Humans are so adaptable; that is the nature of their intelligence.
We have not fully explored our humanity. Just as the value of truth and accuracy is to set up the reliable, the use of beauty is to set up the admirable, the attractive, the joyful, and get it ready to nudge it towards the desirable, the wantable.
But there is so much we do not know. There lies the danger.
© jacob voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
- A slightly older version of this paragraph was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, TU/e (2024) ↩︎
- Arthur W.H. Adkins, “Theoria versus Praxis in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Republic”, Classical Philology 73, no. 4 (1978): 297–313. ↩︎