Theoria (θεωρία) — Intellectual contemplation; the act of “seeing” with the mind the intelligible and necessary realities, as opposed to practical action and production. The Greek term derives from theōrós, the “spectator” — one who travels to attend a festival or the games and contemplates the spectacle without taking part in it. This image of the disinterested observer was carried over into knowledge: theoria is the soul’s gaze upon that which is for its own sake, an end in itself rather than a means to something else. In Plato it denotes the direct contemplation of the Forms or Ideas, the culmination of the ascent described in the allegory of the cave, when the soul turns toward the intelligible and, ultimately, toward the Good. Aristotle gives the concept its most influential formulation: in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics he argues that the contemplative life (bíos theōrētikós) is the highest form of human happiness, superior to the political life and to a life of pleasure, because it exercises the most divine part of us — the intellect (noûs) — and imitates the activity of the Unmoved Mover, thought thinking itself. Hence the decisive distinction, taken up by the whole tradition, between theoretical knowledge (which contemplates what could not be otherwise) and practical knowledge, bound to praxis and to phronēsis (prudence). Over time the word slides toward the modern sense of “theory”: a systematic and abstract explanation of a domain of phenomena, losing the contemplative, almost religious tone it had for the Greeks.
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