a founder of the codex

Entelechy

Telocarpus intrinsecus·the Completing Seed

From Greek telos, end, and karpos, fruit, and Latin intrinsecus, from within, the fruit whose end lies within it.

Level: Conceptorganism
Phylum: Pathimage schema
Class: Kernelits acorn
Niche: Producerraw experience
Mode: Reproductionhow it keeps existing
Stage: Senescentdissolving
Status: Living
Habitat: Ocean

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Organic Matter · Wilkins, 1668: Transcendental General · WordNet, 1990: Process · Llull, 1308: H · Vegetative

Completing Seed, the whole specimen — Plate XVII. Telocarpus intrinsecus, the whole specimen.

A living thing holds within it the form it grows toward, and entelechy is that inner completion at work, the seed already aimed at the plant.

Every living thing already holds the form it is growing into.

behavior Grows slowly toward one shape, and when it is cut in two each piece grows back toward the whole.

provocation

What form are you already growing toward, and what in you is its seed?

Each draw is the being derived afresh by the current laws at another seed (laws §11); the chosen one leads (where they sit in the morphospace).

I Dissection

Each organ answers one question about the idea. The framed one, its kernel, is the dominant organ: the being's class, the one the idea could not lose and stay itself.

Kernel of Entelechy — Fig. 1. Kernel
Acorn
❦ dominant organ
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Entelechy is the state of a thing that holds its end within it, so that it grows by itself toward the form that completes it.¹
drawn as: acorn · view: detached

Boundary of Entelechy — Fig. 2. Boundary
Crystal habit
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It is set apart from mere potential, the wood that could be carved into any figure and moves toward none, by working toward one form from inside.¹
drawn as: crystal habit · view: cast

Intake of Entelechy — Fig. 3. Intake
Imbibition
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on raw potential, matter able to take a form, as an embryo draws in water, salts and food and builds them into its own body.²
drawn as: imbibition · view: transparent

Mechanism of Entelechy — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Epigenetic landscape
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
The form unfolds stage by stage along channelled paths that return to their course when disturbed. Split at the two-cell stage, a sea urchin embryo builds a whole, smaller larva from each half.^{4, 5}
drawn as: epigenetic landscape · view: exploded

Output of Entelechy — Fig. 5. Output
Full-grown oak
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
It yields the realized form, the grown body at work as what it is, which Aristotle named the soul, the first entelechy of a living body.²
drawn as: full-grown oak · view: at work

Dispersal of Entelechy — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Samara
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
It travels in offspring, since the most natural act of a living thing is to make another like itself, and as a word Leibniz gave to every simple substance.^{2, 3}
drawn as: samara · view: series

Decay of Entelechy — Fig. 7. Decay
Etiolation
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
Stunted, it stops short of its form, as a seedling kept in the dark grows pale and spindly and dies before it fruits. Biology abandoned the vital agent Driesch named entelechy, and the word lives on in philosophy.⁴
drawn as: etiolation · view: cross section

II Meaning associations

No relations recorded yet.

descent membership food web resemblance or friction

Lineage

A founder, dissected by hand.

Kin

same kind in Roget Amber, Breath, Chiaroscuro, Chimera, Iridescence, Music, Silence, Tinnitus, Vertigo, Shared Breath

same kind in Wilkins Rushmaker

same kind in WordNet Awakening, Breath, Entropy, Erosion, Fire, Metamorphosis, Petrification, Rushmaker, Shared Breath, Self-Ending Order, Tongue Horizon, Witnessed Relief, Gazeroot (second reading), Commemorative Revision, The Swing Door

same kind in Llull Breath, Metamorphosis, Spring

same phylum Memory, Music, Nostalgia, Prophecy, Ritual, River, Threshold, Wind, Tongue Horizon, Afterlistening

same dominant organ Archipelago, Entanglement, Eternity, Geomancy, Qualia, Salt, Syllable, Symmetry, Vertigo, Volition, Weightlessness, Knowing Trust, Hesychology

Genome

actuality
potential
purpose
growth also in Spring
form also in Commemorative Revision, Metamorphosis, Petrification, Poetry, Ritual

III In the world

Echoes

an acorn growing into an oak
Hans Driesch's divided sea urchin embryos
Leibniz's monads, which he called entelechies
self-actualization in humanistic psychology

IV Record

How it was drawn

its draw 1, a point in the morphospace (laws §8), drawn by flux-2-klein-4b.safetensors.

axis	value
book	mycelia
symmetry	fractal
organization	nested
silhouette	star
scale	immense
proportion	elongated
growth	grafted
articulation	jointed latent
openness	hollow latent
skeleton	endoskeleton latent
locomotion	burrowing latent
pattern	gradient latent
coloration	nuptial latent
substance	bark
surface	pleated
palette	obsidian
luminosity	none
transparency	clouded latent
gesture	turns
unity	fragment latent
modality	possible latent
causation	final
determinacy	doubled
fusion	becoming
anomaly	unfinished
graft	kintsugi
technique	silverpoint
viewpoint	below
value	chiaroscuro latent
balance	unmarked latent
density	graded detail latent
rhythm	clustered latent
saturation	unmarked latent
appendages	comb rows
anchor (body)	a basket star, a disc whose arms branch again and again into a coiling crown
anchor (detail)	an agate slice, concentric bands of colour

Sources

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book IX (Theta), on potentiality and actuality (4th century BCE)
Aristotle, On the Soul, Book II (4th century BCE)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology (1714), section 18
Hans Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism (1908)
C. H. Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes (1957)

❦