Entelechial

And this process “would be ‘entelechial’ or ‘perfectionist’ in the ironic sense of the term, insofar as the sufferer was in effect striving to impose a ‘perfect’ form by using the key terms of his formative wound as a paradigm.”

I am assuming that an entelechial "tendency" […] does exist for human beings – that human beings "tend" to act in accordance with a purpose (or telos) which exists within the mind of the specific human taking the action. […] What would be more entelechial in the Burkean sense than a "single word" which reveals "an underlying pattern of experience"?

Invoking Aristotelian intuition, we will characterize each being as projecting an "entelechial" design. I want to say that the individualization of living beings – and only living beings manifest the characteristics of individualization – is a constructive process that follows a design. This design is "entelechial" because it projects a line of articulations that the process follows from within.

[E]ntelechy, or the entelechial motive, is a function of language and is rooted in history, in a verbal action by a human agent in a specific sociopolitical scene. The entelechial motive is one of the most purely human motives in Burke.

Just as an acorn has the telos or entelechial potential to become an oak, so do ideas contain the seeds of their own transformation. Follow the logical or poetic implications of even the noblest idea and you are likely to find it becoming "rotten with perfection." This is nicely illustrated in "Cat's Cradle [sic: Cat's in the Cradle]," a song written by Burke's grandson, Harry Chapin. It is a song, says Stan Lindsay (1998), about entelechial potential, about a father who has made the idea of career more important than family. But one need not make moral judgments in doing entelechial analysis.

Could we not say that life proceeds in tandem with intrinsic prompting and invigorating entelechial energies, on the one hand, and the operative functional generation of force, on the other?