§ 16 Care and Love

To treat something not as a mere means but also to allow it to flourish in the kingdom of ends is to show it love.¹

Love is, above all, the joy of care.² The craft and design of activity expresses love in everyday language like: ‘he crafted the chair lovingly’; ’she loves her work’; ‘it is such a lovely design’, ‘I loved working on that piece’, ‘I love the way it stands there…’

Now we tend to think rather mushily and imprecisely about love, so I would like to introduce the five main kinds of love in ancient Greece, each of which has a peculiar relevance to the design and crafting of intentional activity not as mere means but as ends for human beings. Human beings flourish with good use.

στοργή

Perhaps first on the list is Storge (στοργή, storgē), or natural affection. It is the love parents feel for their offspring.

This is a complex emotion, as love for children is both the strongest and one of the most complex. Let’s face it, children are not always easy to deal with; they can be resistant, stubborn, recalcitrant, resentful, and even unlikable, and yet this does not free most of us from the love we feel for them.

It is a love that expresses itself in persistence and patience. There is nothing like the pride one feels for a child who has done well. There is nothing more profound than when a child makes choices that make you have to rethink the values you have always lived by and perhaps even cherished.

The things we make are, in a manner of speaking, also our children, as such.

Storge is a very relevant kind of love within the world of intentional action and design. The things we make and the tools we use sometimes behave in ways we do not want them to. To make them work properly, we have to educate and train ourselves in their use, to get the best out of them.

Some of the things we make show resistance to our will, and yet we work upon them with persistence, patience, love and understanding. And when an object is finished and released by us to go into the world, much like a child grown up, we wish it well and keep a fondness for it. And there is nothing quite like the pride we feel for a thing we have made, doing well in that world.

φιλία

Next comes Philia (φιλία philía), which is a dispassionate love. Aristotle properly developed the concept and included loyalty to friends, family, and community.

Philia within the area of design might refer to the way one relates what one is making to one’s community, to the client, the user, the stakeholder; it is the love that makes the craftsman/designer feel responsible to that community, and to that environment as such, it makes the designer loyal to the idea of sustainability and fairness.

ξενία

Then there is Xenia (ξενία xenía) or hospitality. Xenia was extremely important in Ancient Greece. It was an almost ritualised friendship formed between a host and his guest.

The host fed and provided quarters for the guest, who was expected to repay only with gratitude. How does this relate to design?

Well, this kind of love is seen in the care with which we accommodate things in our environment, giving everything we design a good place, the right orientation, proper access, the most appropriate routing, etc.

It is also the love of correctness, of making sure we have done right by others. The reward one gets is merely the affirmation that that is so.

ἔρως

Our penultimate form of love is Eros (ἔρως érōs), a passionate love, full of sensual desire and longing. Eros begins as a love for a person; at this stage, it is lustful and erotic.

However, with contemplation, it becomes an appreciation of the beauty within that person, or even of beauty itself.

Eros, according to Plato, helps the soul recall knowledge of beauty and in this way contributes to our understanding of spiritual truth. Lovers and philosophers are all inspired to seek truth through Eros, through a lustful desire for truth.

In design, this love begins with the sheer ecstasy of form, light, colour, detail, structure, etc, the touch of a beautifully crafted detail.

From there, it moves to the reasons why that delights us, to the discovery of how what we have designed fits into the greater scheme of things as an object of true beauty.

ἀγάπη

Finally, there is Agape (ἀγάπη agápē), which constitutes a ‘pure,’ ideal type of love, a ‘love of the soul.’

Within the area of design, such love is necessary for the love of the idea, for the love of what you are doing it all for, life, the greater purpose, that is to make our environment flourish, so that we may flourish.

It is a love that connects what you are doing to your sense of yourself as a person and to what you want to become.

Every design decision is a response to a particular concern. The desire to design well is an expression of love, a form of care.

In the name of love, we can, with the help of reason and accurate knowledge, transform our built environment from one that is merely instrumental and, as such, doomed to collapse, to one that is truly sustainable and a joy to sustain.

But the condition for that is that we do not see just our own life as an end in itself, but our extended phenotype as a whole. Love is joy in care. To love is to care about things and to make them flourish. Like politeness, its poorest sibling, love is the joy of bestowing thought in doing.

© 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). For love I consulted André Comte-Sponville, A short Treatise on the Great Virtues. The uses of philosophy in everyday life, Catherine Temerson, transl., (William Heinemann, Londen 2002) pp. 222-290 and Robert G. Hazo, The idea of love, (Frederick A Praeger, New York, 1967) ↩︎
On the ethics of care see Carol Gilligan, In a different voice, Psychological theory and Women’s development. (Cambridge Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1982) and Gilligan, Carol. “Moral Orientation and Moral Development”. In Alison Bailey and Chris J. Cuomo (eds.). The Feminist Philosophy Reader, (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008) ↩︎