Now That You’ve Found the Others What Are You Going to Do?

I suggest we should begin with our experience of vitality, our capacity for love and with our attraction to beauty, and through them, see what kinds of worlds we might together imagine into being.

When I say ‘the future within us’ is our entelechy I mean a mixture of things, some quite metaphysical. But I’m thinking more generally of the untapped potential of the world’s people as a source of beauty that might yet enchant us.

if the future is not beautiful I’m not sure people will be drawn to it, or indeed fight for it…I would also suggest that we see beauty in the dignity of humanity insisting on the best of itself, the beauty of becoming wiser, of emancipation, and not just in nature or in artistic artefacts.

These future-making questions may not have solid answers, but we have responsibility to make intelligent guesses. Our role as a species is not just to inhabit the world but to reconstitute and reimagine it.

Entelechy is a Latinised form of the Greek entelekheia, meaning actuality, and the etymology is ‘in telos’. Aristotle used entelechy to refer to “the condition in which the potentiality has become the actuality”.