Entelechy is Goethe's name, adopted by Steiner, for the immortal individuality a human being actively forms through earthly life and carries beyond death.
Entelechy in Anthroposophy is the immortal individuality of a human being, understood not as a kernel that merely survives death but as a result actively worked out during earthly life. Rudolf Steiner took the word from Goethe, who wrote of Faust's Entelechie in the closing scene of Faust, and expounded it in the lecture cycle Faust, the Aspiring Human (GA 272), given at Dornach on 10 September 1916. In Steiner's reading, the angels who carry Faust's entelechy upward wrest it from Mephistopheles, and they can only do so because they have received the roses from the hands of loving, holy penitents. Had the same entelechy been drawn instead into the Luciferic sphere, it would have dissolved into the All, which Steiner names as annihilation rather than bliss. Outside Anthroposophy the word carries a second life in biology, where Hans Driesch revived it in 1908 to name whatever governs an embryo toward its finished form.
The word entelechy comes from Aristotle, but its Anthroposophical sense comes through Goethe. When Goethe let the angels carry Faust's Entelechie past Mephistopheles, he named something Steiner spent a full Dornach lecture unfolding: the part of a person that is not given at birth but achieved, the individuality that earthly striving actually makes and that death cannot undo.
In Steiner's Own Words
Thus the angels do not raise the entelechy, the soul of Faust, through their own nature, but by receiving the roses from the loving and holy penitents, they raise it out of the human sphere, or rather out of the sphere of people who have gone through human life on earth, who have truly developed out of earthly life. Goethe derives the whole evolution from Mephisto, from the angels, to the human evolution, in that the angels do not only save the entelechy through their own power, but they save it by having received the roses from the hands of loving, holy penitent women. That is the infinitely profound thought.
What it Means Today
The word did not stay inside Anthroposophy. Hans Driesch, working at the Naples Zoological Station in the 1890s, split a sea urchin embryo at the two-cell stage and found that each half grew into a whole small larva rather than half a larva. A machine cut in two does not produce two working machines. Driesch concluded that development is governed by something that is not a spatial part of the embryo, and in his Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen, published in 1908 as The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, he borrowed Aristotle's word and called it entelechy. Biology later rejected Driesch's vitalism, but the problem he named survived him: how a system that has lost half its material still knows its whole.
Steiner's entelechy answers a different question, and the difference is the point. Driesch's entelechy is prior to the organism, steering matter toward a form fixed in advance. Goethe's and Steiner's entelechy is posterior, the individuality that the biography itself produces, which is why the angels have to wrest it from Mephistopheles rather than simply collect it. Thalira synthesis: read the two together and entelechy stops being one idea and becomes a question about direction, whether the completed human is a plan being executed or a result being earned, and Steiner's Faust lecture is unambiguous that it is the second. That is also why he insists the angels cannot lift it by their own nature. Only what has passed through earthly life, the roses from human hands, is strong enough to raise what earthly life has made.
Where to Read More
- Faust, the Aspiring Human, GA 272
- Find at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]