The English word theory derives from a Greek root meaning either contemplation or being a spectator or onlooker, as in the theater. In purely theoretical science, one takes on the role of spectator rather than actor, so that he is not “trying to prove” his own idea.
The scientific man is eager to submit himself, his ideas, and his purpose, to the Great Power which, no doubt, penetrates his own being, but is yet all but wholly external to him and beyond anything that his poor present notion could ever, of itself, develope unfructified. The Absolute Knowledge of Hegel is nothing but G.W.F. Hegel’s idea of himself; and it has not taught him the very first true lesson in philosophy, that “whoever shall choose to seek his own purpose and idea shall miss it, and whoever shall abandon his own purpose and idea to adopt the purpose and idea of the Author of nature shall accomplish that, and his own long-abandoned purpose and idea along with it.”
— Peirce, CP 8.118 (1902)
Einstein remarked that ‘the true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.’ According to Gadamer (1960, 124), to abandon of one’s own purpose in contemplation is to participate in that ‘sacral communion that lies behind the original Greek concept of theoria.’
Greek metaphysics still conceives the essence of theoria and of nous as being purely present to what is truly real, and for us too the ability to act theoretically is defined by the fact that in attending to something one is able to forget one’s own purposes.
Like Peirce, Gadamer affirms that losing oneself in this way, either in theoretical concemplation or in the theater, leads to a higher self-development. ‘A spectator’s ecstatic self-forgetfulness corresponds to his continuity with himself’ (Gadamer 1960, 128).