Entelechy
/ɛnˈtɛləki/noun
The condition of a thing that has fully realised what it had it in itself to become.
The Greek roots
Literally: “having its completion within”
The story of the word
Aristotle built the word himself, out of three pieces meaning 'having its end within', and used it for the state in which a potential has been fully actualised; the soul, he says, is the entelechy of a living body. Cicero read the word as endelecheia, continuity, and passed the error to the Latin West. Leibniz revived it for his monads, and around 1900 Hans Driesch made it the name of the vital force he thought organised embryos, which is roughly where biology stopped using it.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
Same family
In a sentence
He talks about the entelechy of the project as though a spreadsheet could have a soul.
Aristotle's entelechy is not a force added to matter but a way matter can be organised.