Act/Power

See also: Power, Act

The distinction between act and power , as well as the concept of entéléchie , go back to Aristote.

History of these concepts

Aristote

The power (in Greek dunamis ) at Aristote is associated with the Matière, whereas the act concerns the formal and final causes rather (see the 4 causes). The example of which Aristote is useful more is that of the Statue: it is in power contained in the stone or bronze, and it is the sculptor who brings up to date it.

The power thus represents the unspecified one: a block of marble conceals in power an infinity of statues, but only one will emerge from it.

The act , and in particular the human act, are what gives form to the world: work is extracted from the Matière. The growth of an embryo, for example, is seen by Aristote like the emergence of a being starting from the Matière given by egg or the menses.

As for the Entéléchie , it is often difficult to distinguish from the act in the texts of Aristote. It is not therefore completely synonymous with the act: it is at the same time the process which leads power to actualization, and actualization with its more high degree of completion, when it does not contain any more any indetermination resulting from the matter. The heart, which gives its form to the bodies of all the living beings, is never indicated like an actualization, but always like a Entéléchie, sign of the perfection and achievement of a Nature perfectly completed in its forms and its ends: “there is much more finality and of beauty in works of the Nature that in those of Article” ( Parties the Animals )

Let us hear the power like the dealing, in that it approaches the design aristotelician. The Greek thinker the analysis in his immaterial form, it would be the force (active power) present in the matter (passive power, which firstly awaits the act), which is the manifestation of the work of the man, (of God) to emerge, to become material form. The power is the idea eidos which waits until it is carried out, materializes morphé . Do the idealism and the power make good household? The idea is the perfect form of the " chose" real, whose copy is the fact of the man, who unceasingly seeks to produce it: it is the object of the Art. However can the power, whose gasoline resides in the act, be an idea? Does the heart which contemplates the perfect forms of the concepts have in mémoire_gage réminiscence_ the idea of power? The latter lends itself more to science empirist, fruit of the experiment. The question remains outstanding.

Driesch and Carnap

The concept of entéléchie was re-used by Hans Driesch, like forces immanente with the living beings, making it possible to explain the vital phenomena better than the simple mechanism does it. It illustrated this theory by its own research on the sea urchin S.

Carnap criticized the reactualization of the concept of entéléchie by Driesch, by saying that one cannot observe it.

Driesch answered that the magnetic Force was hardly observable, and that did not constitute an obstacle with its use in physics.

What Carnap counteracted in its turn that:

  • if the magnetic force were not observable, it was at least measurable, which is not the case of the vital force or entéléchie;
  • the concept of force magnetic advanced science, whereas the concept of entéléchie well rather blocked it while placing it in front of the unknowable one.

See too

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