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
Book: Cymatic Florathe botany of sound
Phylum: Pathimage schema
Class: Kernelits seed
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 X. 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: seed · view: cross section

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: epidermis · view: pressed

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: root · view: detached

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: stem · view: pinned

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: bloom · view: series

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: pollen · view: microscope

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: compost · view: series

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, Music, Silence, Vertigo, The Common Lung, Shared Breath

same kind in Wilkins Self-Fulfilling Alarm

same kind in WordNet Breath, Entropy, Erosion, Fire, Metamorphosis, The Common Lung, Self-Fulfilling Alarm, Shared Breath, Self-Ending Order, Tongue Horizon, Witnessed Relief, Witnessed Relief (Mycelia), Commemorative Revision, Fear's Breath

same kind in Llull Breath, Metamorphosis

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

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

Genome

actuality
potential
purpose
growth
form also in Commemorative Revision, Metamorphosis, 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	flora
symmetry	fractal
organization	chained
silhouette	star
scale	immense
proportion	graded
growth	intercalary
articulation	jointed latent
openness	solid latent
skeleton	woody
locomotion	walking latent
pattern	reticulate latent
coloration	plain latent
substance	slime
surface	frosted
palette	obsidian
luminosity	sheen
transparency	translucent latent
gesture	turns
unity	integral latent
modality	necessary latent
causation	formal latent
determinacy	dissolving latent
fusion	becoming
anomaly	false shadow
graft	wax
technique	crayon
viewpoint	motion
value	low key latent
balance	grounded
density	sparse latent
rhythm	unmarked latent
saturation	unmarked latent
appendages	antennae
anchor (body)	a diatom, a glass shell in two halves perforated with ordered pores
anchor (detail)	a pine cone, scales arranged in interlocking spirals

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)

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