International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

A supposed vital force driving a living system toward self-fulfillment.

Originally, for ARISTOTLE, entelechy was the mode of being of the completely realized structure of something, i.e. the result of the actualization of its potentialities.

This quite abstract notion was re-introduced as a kind of conceptual crutch by H. DRIESCH, unable to otherways understand some biological experiments, as for instance that a sea urchin egg, segmented in two parts, was able to produce two perfectly formed urchins.

DRIESCH vitalism was never admitted by many biologists and a protracted debate between vitalists and mechanicists ensued. Finally, it became apparent to L.von BERTALANFFY and J. WOODGER, creators of organismic biology, that the conceptual deficit corresponded to our lack of good models of organized complexity.

Overtones of Aristotle's entelechy seem perceptible also in some very recent physical theories, as D. BOHM's implicate order, and the concept of decoherence in microphysics, and Prigogine's emergence through dissipative structuration.

In metaphorical terms the "real" world is starting to appear somewhat similar to the fading smile of Lewis Carrol's Cheshire cat.

In the same vein, F. CAPRA refers himself to Goethe: "Each creature is but a patterned gradation (Schaffierung) of one great harmonious whole "(1997, p. 21)

Capra also notes further on that the classical aristotelian concept of entelechy "as a process of self-regulation", was "postulated by DRIESCH (as) a separate entity, acting on the physical system without being part of it" (ibid. p.26)

This typically mechanistic view, combined with the need for a "deus ex-machina" was later on rejected by organismic biology, which somehow went back to Aristotle's concept.