Chinese historiography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_historiography

 

Chinese historiography is the study of the techniques and sources used by historians to develop the recorded history of China.

Overview of Chinese history

The recording of Chinese history dates back to the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BC). Although they are not literature as such, many written examples survive of ceremonial inscriptions, divinations and records of family names, which were carved or painted onto tortoise shell or bones. The oldest surviving history texts of China were compiled in the Book of Documents (Shujing). The Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu), the official chronicle of the State of Lu, cover the period from 722 to 481 BC, and are among the earliest surviving Chinese historical texts to be arranged as annals. The compilations of both of these works are traditionally ascribed to Confucius. The Zuo zhuan, attributed to Zuo Qiuming in the 5th century BC, is the earliest Chinese work of narrative history and covers the period from 722 to 468 BC. The anonymous Zhan Guo Ce was a renowned ancient Chinese historical work composed of sporadic materials on the Warring States period between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC.

The first systematic Chinese historical text, the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), was written by Sima Qian (c. 145 or 135–86 BC) based on work by his father, Sima Tan. It covers the period from the time of the Yellow Emperor until the author's own lifetime. Because of this highly praised and frequently copied work, Sima Qian is often regarded as the father of Chinese historiography. The Twenty-Four Histories, the official histories of the dynasties considered legitimate by imperial Chinese historians, all copied Sima Qian's format. Typically, rulers initiating a new dynasty would employ scholars to compile a final history from the annals and records of the previous one. 

The Shitong was the first Chinese work about historiography. It was compiled by Liu Zhiji between 708 and 710 AD. The book describes the general pattern of the official dynastic histories with regard to the structure, method, arrangement, sequence, caption, and commentary dating back to the Warring States period.

The Zizhi Tongjian was a pioneering reference work of Chinese historiography. Emperor Yingzong of Song ordered Sima Guang and other scholars to begin compiling this universal history of China in 1065, and they presented it to his successor Shenzong in 1084. It contains 294 volumes and about three million characters, and it narrates the history of China from 403 BC to the beginning of the Song dynasty in 959. This style broke the nearly thousand-year tradition of Sima Qian, which employed annals for imperial reigns but biographies or treatises for other topics. The more consistent style of the Zizhi Tongjian was not followed by later official histories. In the mid 13th century, Ouyang Xiu was heavily influenced by the work of Xue Juzheng. This led to the creation of the New History of the Five Dynasties, which covered five dynasties in over 70 chapters.

Toward the end of the Qing dynasty in the early 20th century, scholars looked to Japan and the West for models. In the late 1890s, although deeply learned in the traditional forms, Liang Qichao began to publish extensive and influential studies and polemics that converted young readers to a new type of historiography that Liang regarded as more scientific. Liu Yizheng published several specialized history works including History of Chinese Culture. This next generation became professional historians, training and teaching in universities. They included Chang Chi-yun, Gu Jiegang, Fu Sinian, and Tsiang Tingfu, who were PhDs from Columbia University; and Chen Yinke, who conducted his investigations into medieval Chinese history in both Europe and the United States. Other historians, such as Qian Mu, who was trained largely through independent study, were more conservative but remained innovative in their response to world trends. In the 1920s, wide-ranging scholars, such as Guo Moruo, adapted Marxism in order to portray China as a nation among nations, rather than having an exotic and isolated history. The ensuing years saw historians such as Wu Han master both Western theories, including Marxism, and Chinese learning.

Key organizing concepts

Dynastic cycle

Like the three ages of the Greek poet Hesiod, the oldest Chinese historiography viewed mankind as living in a fallen age of depravity, cut off from the virtues of the past, as Confucius and his disciples revered the sage kings Emperor Yao and Emperor Shun. 

Unlike Hesiod's system, however, the Duke of Zhou's idea of the Mandate of Heaven as a rationale for dethroning the supposedly divine Zi clan led subsequent historians to see man's fall as a cyclical pattern. In this view, a new dynasty is founded by a morally upright founder, but his successors cannot help but become increasingly corrupt and dissolute. This immorality removes the dynasty's divine favor and is manifested by natural disasters (particularly floods), rebellions, and foreign invasions. Eventually, the dynasty becomes weak enough to be replaced by a new one, whose founder is able to rectify many of society's problems and begin the cycle anew. Over time, many people felt a full correction was not possible, and that the golden age of Yao and Shun could not be attained.

This teleological theory implies that there can be only one rightful sovereign under heaven at a time. Thus, despite the fact that Chinese history has had many lengthy and contentious periods of disunity, a great effort was made by official historians to establish a legitimate precursor whose fall allowed a new dynasty to acquire its mandate. Similarly, regardless of the particular merits of individual emperors, founders would be portrayed in more laudatory terms, and the last ruler of a dynasty would always be castigated as depraved and unworthy, even when that was not the case. Such a narrative was employed after the fall of the empire, by those compiling the history of the Qing and by those who justified the attempted restorations of the imperial system by Yuan Shikai and Zhang Xun.

Multi-ethnic history

As early as the 1930s, the American scholar Owen Lattimore argued that China was the product of the interaction of farming and pastoral societies, rather than simply the expansion of the Han Chinese people. Lattimore did not accept the more extreme Sino-Babylonian theories that the essential elements of early Chinese technology and religion had come from Western Asia, but he was among the scholars to argue against the assumption they had all been indigenous.

Nationalist and Communist China both held the view that Chinese history should include all the ethnic groups of the lands held by the Qing Empire (Zhonghua Minzu), and not just the history of the Han Chinese in so-called China Proper, the Han chauvinism of the Qing-era Tongmenghui. This expanded view encompassed internal and external tributary lands and conquest dynasties in the history of a China seen as a coherent multi-ethnic nation from time immemorial, incorporating the contributions of non-Han to Chinese history, including dynasties once considered foreign, such as the Mongol Yuan and the Manchu Qing, as well as the Khitan Liao and Jurchen Jin dynasties. 

The acceptance of this view by ethnic minorities sometimes depends on their views on present-day issues. The 14th Dalai Lama, long insistent on Tibet's history being separate from that of China, conceded in 2005 that Tibet "is a part of" China's "5,000-year history" as part of a new proposal for Tibetan autonomy. Korean nationalists have virulently reacted against China's application to UNESCO for recognition of the Goguryeo tombs in Chinese territory. The absolute independence of Goguryeo is a central aspect of Korean identity, because, according to Korean legend, Goguryeo was independent of China and Japan, compared to subordinate states such as the Joseon Dynasty and the Korean Empire. The legacy of Genghis Khan has been contested between China, Mongolia, and Russia, all three states having significant numbers of ethnic Mongols within their borders and holding territory that was conquered by the Khan.

The Jin Dynasty tradition of an incoming dynasty writing the official history for the one immediately preceding has been seen to foster an ethnically inclusive interpretation of history. The compilation of official histories usually involved monumental intellectual labor. The Yuan and Qing Dynasties, which might be thought foreign, faithfully carried out this practice, writing the official Chinese-language histories of the Han-ruled Song and Ming Dynasties, respectively. Had these two non-Han imperial families not thought of themselves as continuing the Mandate of Heaven of the Middle Kingdom, it would be hard to explain why they retained the costly tradition. Thus, every non-Han dynasty saw itself as the legitimate holder of the Mandate of Heaven, which legitimized the dynastic cycle regardless of social or ethnic background.

Recent Western scholars have reacted against the ethnically inclusive narrative in Communist-sponsored history, by writing revisionist histories of China that feature, according to James A. Millward, "a degree of 'partisanship' for the indigenous underdogs of frontier history". Scholarly interest in writing about Chinese minorities from non-Chinese perspectives is growing.

Marxism

Most Chinese history that is published in the People's Republic of China is based on a Marxist interpretation of history. These theories were first applied in the 1920s by Chinese scholars such as Guo Moruo, and became orthodoxy in academic study after 1949. The Marxist view of history is that history is governed by universal laws and that according to these laws, a society moves through a series of stages, with the transition between stages being driven by class struggle. These stages are:

• Slave society
• Feudal society
• Capitalist society
• Socialist society
• The world communist society

The official historical view within the People's Republic of China associates each of these stages with a particular era in Chinese history.

• Slave society – Xia to Shang
• Feudal society (decentralized) – Zhou to Sui
• Feudal society (bureaucratic) – Tang to the First Opium War
• Feudal society (semi-colonial) – First Opium War to end of Qing dynasty
• Capitalist society – Republican era
• Socialist society – PRC 1949 to present

Because of the strength of the Communist Party of China and the importance of the Marxist interpretation of history in legitimizing its rule, it was for many years difficult for historians within the PRC to actively argue in favor of non-Marxist and anti-Marxist interpretations of history. However, this political restriction is less confining than it may first appear in that the Marxist historical framework is surprisingly flexible, and it is a rather simple matter to modify an alternative historical theory to use language that at least does not challenge the Marxist interpretation of history.

Partly because of the interest of Mao Zedong, historians in the 1950s took a special interest in the role of peasant rebellions in Chinese history and compiled documentary histories to examine them.

There are several problems associated with imposing Marx's European-based framework on Chinese history. First, slavery existed throughout China's history but never as the primary form of labor. While the Zhou and earlier dynasties may be labeled as feudal, later dynasties were much more centralized than how Marx analyzed their European counterparts as being. To account for the discrepancy, Chinese Marxists invented the term "bureaucratic feudalism". The placement of the Tang as the beginning of the bureaucratic phase rests largely on the replacement of patronage networks with the imperial examination. Some world-systems analysts, such as Janet Abu-Lughod, claim that analysis of Kondratiev waves shows that capitalism first arose in Song dynasty China, although widespread trade was subsequently disrupted and then curtailed.

The Japanese scholar Tanigawa Michio, writing in the 1970s and 1980s, set out to revise the generally Marxist views of China prevalent in post-war Japan. Tanigawa writes that historians in Japan fell into two schools. One held that China followed the set European pattern which Marxists thought to be universal; that is, from ancient slavery to medieval feudalism to modern capitalism; while another group argued that "Chinese society was extraordinarily saturated with stagnancy, as compared to the West" and assumed that China existed in a "qualitatively different historical world from Western society". That is, there is an argument between those who see "unilinear, monistic world history" and those who conceive of a "two-tracked or multi-tracked world history". Tanigawa reviewed the applications of these theories in Japanese writings about Chinese history and then tested them by analyzing the Six Dynasties 220–589 CE period, which Marxist historians saw as feudal. His conclusion was that China did not have feudalism in the sense that Marxists use, that Chinese military governments did not lead to a European-style military aristocracy. The period established social and political patterns which shaped China's history from that point on.

There was a gradual relaxation of Marxist interpretation after the death of Mao in 1976, which was accelerated after the Tian'anmen Square protest and other revolutions in 1989, which damaged Marxism's ideological legitimacy in the eyes of Chinese academics.

Modernization

This view of Chinese history sees Chinese society as a traditional society needing to become modern, usually with the implicit assumption of Western society as the model. Such a view was common among British and French scholars during the 19th and early 20th centuries but is now typically dismissed as eurocentrism, since such a view permits an implicit justification for breaking the society from its static past and bringing it into the modern world under European direction.

By the mid-20th century, it was increasingly clear to historians that the notion of "changeless China" was untenable. A new concept, popularized by John Fairbank, was the notion of "change within tradition", which argued that China did change in the pre-modern period but that this change existed within certain cultural traditions. This notion has also been subject to the criticism that to say "China has not changed fundamentally" is tautological, since it requires that one look for things that have not changed and then arbitrarily define those as fundamental.

Nonetheless, studies seeing China's interaction with Europe as the driving force behind its recent history are still common. Such studies may consider the First Opium War as the starting point for China's modern period. Examples include the works of H.B. Morse, who wrote chronicles of China's international relations such as Trade and Relations of the Chinese Empire.

In the 1950s, several of Fairbank's students argued that Confucianism was incompatible with modernity. Joseph Levenson and Mary C. Wright, and Albert Feuerwerker argued in effect that traditional Chinese values were a barrier to modernity and would have to be abandoned before China could make progress. Wright concluded, "The failure of the T'ung-chih [Tongzhi] Restoration demonstrated with a rare clarity that even in the most favorable circumstances there is no way in which an effective modern state can be grafted onto a Confucian society. Yet in the decades that followed, the political ideas that had been tested and, for all their grandeur, found wanting, were never given a decent burial."

In a different view of modernization, the Japanese historian Naito Torajiro argued that China reached modernity during its mid-Imperial period, centuries before Europe. He believed that the reform of the civil service into a meritocratic system and the disappearance of the ancient Chinese nobility from the bureaucracy constituted a modern society. The problem associated with this approach is the subjective meaning of modernity. The Chinese nobility had been in decline since the Qin dynasty, and while the exams were largely meritocratic, performance required time and resources that meant examinees were still typically from the gentry. Moreover, expertise in the Confucian classics did not guarantee competent bureaucrats when it came to managing public works or preparing a budget. Confucian hostility to commerce placed merchants at the bottom of the four occupations, itself an archaism maintained by devotion to classic texts. The social goal continued to be to invest in land and enter the gentry, ideas more like those of the physiocrats than those of Adam Smith.

Hydraulic despotism

With ideas derived from Marx and Max Weber, Karl August Wittfogel argued that bureaucracy arose to manage irrigation systems. Despotism was needed to force the people into building canals, dikes, and waterways to increase agriculture. Yu the Great, one of China's legendary founders, is known for his control of the floods of the Yellow River. The hydraulic empire produces wealth from its stability; while dynasties may change, the structure remains intact until destroyed by modern powers. In Europe abundant rainfall meant less dependence on irrigation. In the Orient natural conditions were such that the bulk of the land could not be cultivated without large-scale irrigation works. As only a centralized administration could organize the building and maintenance of large-scale systems of irrigation, the need for such systems made bureaucratic despotism inevitable in Oriental lands.

When Wittfogel published his Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, critics pointed out that water management was given the high status China accorded to officials concerned with taxes, rituals, or fighting off bandits. The theory also has a strong orientalist bent, regarding all Asian states as generally the same while finding reasons for European polities not fitting the pattern.

While Wittfogel's theories were not popular among Marxist historians in China, the economist Chi Ch'ao-ting used them in his influential 1936 book, Key Economic Areas in Chinese History, as Revealed in the Development of Public Works for Water-Control. The book identified key areas of grain production which, when controlled by a strong political power, permitted that power to dominate the rest of the country and enforce periods of stability.

Convergence

Convergence theory, including Hu Shih and Ray Huang's involution theory, holds that the past 150 years have been a period in which Chinese and Western civilization have been in the process of converging into a world civilization. Such a view is heavily influenced by modernization theory but, in China's case, it is also strongly influenced by indigenous sources such as the notion of Shijie Datong or "Great Unity". It has tended to be less popular among more recent historians, as postmodern Western historians discount overarching narratives, and nationalist Chinese historians feel similar about narratives failing to account for some special or unique characteristics of Chinese culture.

Anti-imperialism

Closely related are colonial and anti-imperialist narratives. These often merge or are part of Marxist critiques from within China or the former Soviet Union, or are postmodern critiques such as Edward Said's Orientalism, which fault traditional scholarship for trying to fit West, South, and East Asia's histories into European categories unsuited to them. With regard to China particularly, T.F. Tsiang and John Fairbank used newly opened archives in the 1930s to write modern history from a Chinese point of view. Fairbank and Teng Ssu-yu then edited the influential volume China's Response to the West (1953). This approach was attacked for ascribing the change in China to outside forces. In the 1980s, Paul Cohen, a student of Fairbank's, issued a call for a more "China-Centered history of China".

Republican

The schools of thought on the 1911 Revolution have evolved from the early years of the Republic. The Marxist view saw the events of 1911 as a bourgeois revolution. In the 1920s, the Nationalist Party issued a theory of three political stages based on Sun Yatsen's writings:

• Military unification – 1923 to 1928 (Northern Expedition)
• Political tutelage – 1928 to 1947
• Constitutional democracy – 1947 onward

The most obvious criticism is the near-identical nature of "political tutelage" and of a "constitutional democracy" consisting only of the one-party rule until the 1990s. Against this, Chen Shui-bian proposed his own four-stage theory.

Postmodernism

Postmodern interpretations of Chinese history tend to reject narrative history and instead focus on a small subset of Chinese history, particularly the daily lives of ordinary people in particular locations or settings.

Recent trends

From the beginning of Communist rule in 1949 until the 1980s, Chinese historical scholarship focused largely on the officially sanctioned Marxist theory of class struggle. From the time of Deng Xiaoping (1978–1992) on, there has been a drift towards a Marxist-inspired nationalist perspective, and consideration of China's contemporary international status has become of paramount importance in historical studies. The current focus tends to be on specifics of civilization in ancient China, and the general paradigm of how China has responded to the dual challenges of interactions with the outside world and modernization in the post-1700 era. Long abandoned as a research focus among most Western scholars due to postmodernism's influence, this remains the primary interest for most historians inside China.

The late 20th century and early 21st century have seen numerous studies of Chinese history that challenge traditional paradigms. The field is rapidly evolving, with much new scholarship, often based on the realization that there is much about Chinese history that is unknown or controversial. For example, an active topic concerns whether the typical Chinese peasant in 1900 was seeing his life improve. In addition to the realization that there are major gaps in our knowledge of Chinese history is the equal realization that there are tremendous quantities of primary source material that have not yet been analyzed. Scholars are using previously overlooked documentary evidence, such as masses of government and family archives, and economic records such as census tax rolls, price records, and land surveys. In addition, artifacts such as vernacular novels, how-to manuals, and children's books are analyzed for clues about day-to-day life.

Recent Western scholarship of China has been heavily influenced by postmodernism, and has questioned modernist narratives of China's backwardness and lack of development. The desire to challenge the preconception that 19th-century China was weak, for instance, has led to a scholarly interest in Qing expansion into Central Asia. Postmodern scholarship largely rejects grand narratives altogether, preferring to publish empirical studies on the socioeconomics, and political or cultural dynamics, of smaller communities within China.

Nationalism

In China historical scholarship remains largely nationalist and modernist or even traditionalist. The legacies of the modernist school (such as Lo Hsiang-lin) and the traditionalist school (such as Chien Mu) remain strong in Chinese circles. The more modernist works focus on imperial systems in China and employ the scientific method to analyze epochs of Chinese dynasties from geographical, genealogical, and cultural artifacts: for example, using Carbon-14 dating and geographical records to correlate climates with cycles of calm and calamity in Chinese history. The traditionalist school of scholarship resorts to official imperial records and colloquial historical works, and analyzes the rise and fall of different dynasties using Confucian philosophy, albeit modified by an institutional administration perspective

Florian Schneider argues that, nationalism in China is largely a product of the digital revolution, in which a very large fraction of the population participates as readers and commentators And relators of ideas to their friends. After 1911, writers, historians and scholars in China and abroad generally deprecated the failures of the late imperial system. However, in the 21st century, a highly favorable revisionism has emerged in the popular culture, in both the media and social media. Building pride in Chinese history, nationalists have portray Imperial China as benevolent, strong and more advanced than the West. They blame ugly wars and diplomatic controversies on imperialist exploitation by Western nations and Japan. Although officially still communist and Maoist, in practice China's rulers have used this grassroots settlement to proclaim their current policies are restoring China's historical glory. General Secretary Xi Jinping has, "sought nothing less than parity between Beijing and Washington--and promised to restore China to its historical glory."

Potentiality and actuality

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiality_and_actuality

In philosophy, potentiality and actuality are a pair of closely connected principles which Aristotle used to analyze motion, causality, ethics, and physiology in his Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics and De Anima, which is about the human psyche.

The concept of potentiality, in this context, generally refers to any "possibility" that a thing can be said to have. Aristotle did not consider all possibilities the same, and emphasized the importance of those that become real of their own accord when conditions are right and nothing stops them. Actuality, in contrast to potentiality, is the motion, change or activity that represents an exercise or fulfillment of a possibility, when a possibility becomes real in the fullest sense.

These concepts, in modified forms, remained very important into the Middle Ages, influencing the development of medieval theology in several ways. Going further into modern times, while the understanding of nature, and according to some interpretations deity, implied by the dichotomy lost importance, the terminology has found new uses, developing indirectly from the old. This is most obvious in words like "energy" and "dynamic" - words first used in modern physics by the German scientist and philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Another example is the highly controversial biological concept of an "entelechy".

Potentiality

Potentiality and potency are translations of the Ancient Greek word dunamis (δύναμις) as it is used by Aristotle as a concept contrasting with actuality. Its Latin translation is "potentia", root of the English word potential, and used by some scholars instead of the Greek or English variants.

Dunamis is an ordinary Greek word for possibility or capability. Depending on context, it could be translated "potency", "potential", "capacity", "ability", "power", "capability", "strength", "possibility", "force" and is the root of modern English words "dynamic", "dynamite", and "dynamo". In early modern philosophy, English authors like Hobbes and Locke used the English word "power" as their translation of Latin potentia.

In his philosophy, Aristotle distinguished two meanings of the word dunamis. According to his understanding of nature there was both a weak sense of potential, meaning simply that something "might chance to happen or not to happen", and a stronger sense, to indicate how something could be done well. For example, "sometimes we say that those who can merely take a walk, or speak, without doing it as well as they intended, cannot speak or walk". This stronger sense is mainly said of the potentials of living things, although it is also sometimes used for things like musical instruments.

Throughout his works, Aristotle clearly distinguishes things that are stable or persistent, with their own strong natural tendency to a specific type of change, from things that appear to occur by chance. He treats these as having a different and more real existence. "Natures which persist" are said by him to be one of the causes of all things, while natures that do not persist, "might often be slandered as not being at all by one who fixes his thinking sternly upon it as upon a criminal". The potencies which persist in a particular material are one way of describing "the nature itself" of that material, an innate source of motion and rest within that material. In terms of Aristotle's theory of four causes, a material's non-accidental potential, is the material cause of the things that can come to be from that material, and one part of how we can understand the substance (ousia, sometimes translated as "thinghood") of any separate thing. (As emphasized by Aristotle, this requires his distinction between accidental causes and natural causes.) According to Aristotle, when we refer to the nature of a thing, we are referring to the form, shape or look of a thing, which was already present as a potential, an innate tendency to change, in that material before it achieved that form, but things show what they are more fully, as a real thing, when they are "fully at work".

Actuality

Actuality is often used to translate both energeia (ενέργεια) and entelecheia (ἐντελέχεια) (sometimes rendered in English as "entelechy"). "Actuality" comes from Latin actualitas and is a traditional translation, but its normal meaning in Latin is "anything which is currently happening".

The two words energeia and entelecheia were coined by Aristotle, and he stated that their meanings were intended to converge. In practice, most commentators and translators consider the two words to be interchangeable. They both refer to something being in its own type of action or at work, as all things are when they are real in the fullest sense, and not just potentially real. For example, "to be a rock is to strain to be at the center of the universe, and thus to be in motion unless constrained otherwise".

Energeia

Energeia is a word based upon ἔργον (ergon), meaning "work". It is the source of the modern word "energy" but the term has evolved so much over the course of the history of science that reference to the modern term is not very helpful in understanding the original as used by Aristotle. It is difficult to translate his use of energeia into English with consistency. Joe Sachs renders it with the phrase "being–at–work" and says that "we might construct the word is-at-work-ness from Anglo-Saxon roots to translate energeia into English". Aristotle says the word can be made clear by looking at examples rather than trying to find a definition.

Two examples of energeiai in Aristotle's works are pleasure and happiness (eudaimonia). Pleasure is an energeia of the human body and mind whereas happiness is more simply the energeia of a human being a human.

Kinesis, translated as movement, motion, or in some contexts change, is also explained by Aristotle as a particular type of energeia. See below.

Entelechy (entelechia)

Entelechy, in Greek entelécheia, was coined by Aristotle and transliterated in Latin as entelechia. According to Sachs (1995, p. 245):

Aristotle invents the word by combining entelēs (ἐντελής, "complete, full-grown") with echein (= hexis, to be a certain way by the continuing effort of holding on in that condition), while at the same time punning on endelecheia (ἐνδελέχεια, "persistence") by inserting "telos" (τέλος, "completion"). This is a three-ring circus of a word, at the heart of everything in Aristotle's thinking, including the definition of motion.

Sachs therefore proposed a complex neologism of his own, "being-at-work-staying-the-same". Another translation in recent years is "being-at-an-end" (which Sachs has also used).

Entelecheia, as can be seen by its derivation, is a kind of completeness, whereas "the end and completion of any genuine being is its being-at-work" (energeia). The entelecheia is a continuous being-at-work (energeia) when something is doing its complete "work". For this reason, the meanings of the two words converge, and they both depend upon the idea that every thing's "thinghood" is a kind of work, or in other words a specific way of being in motion. All things that exist now, and not just potentially, are beings-at-work, and all of them have a tendency towards being-at-work in a particular way that would be their proper and "complete" way.

Sachs explains the convergence of energeia and entelecheia as follows, and uses the word actuality to describe the overlap between them:

Just as energeia extends to entelecheia because it is the activity which makes a thing what it is, entelecheia extends to energeia because it is the end or perfection which has being only in, through, and during activity.

Motion

Aristotle discusses motion (kinēsis) in his Physics quite differently from modern science. Aristotle's definition of motion is closely connected to his actuality-potentiality distinction. Taken literally, Aristotle defines motion as the actuality (entelecheia) of a "potentiality as such". What Aristotle meant however is the subject of several different interpretations. A major difficulty comes from the fact that the terms actuality and potentiality, linked in this definition, are normally understood within Aristotle as opposed to each other. On the other hand, the "as such" is important and is explained at length by Aristotle, giving examples of "potentiality as such". For example, the motion of building is the energeia of the dunamis of the building materials as building materials as opposed to anything else they might become, and this potential in the unbuilt materials is referred to by Aristotle as "the buildable". So the motion of building is the actualization of "the buildable" and not the actualization of a house as such, nor the actualization of any other possibility which the building materials might have had.

Building materials have different potentials. One is that they can be built with.

Building is one motion that had been a potential in the building material. So it is the energeia or putting into action, of the building materials as building materials

A house is built, and no longer moving

In an influential 1969 paper Aryeh Kosman divided up previous attempts to explain Aristotle's definition into two types, criticised them, and then gave his own third interpretation. While this has not become a consensus, it has been described as having become "orthodox". This and similar more recent publications are the basis of the following summary.

1. The "process" interpretation

Kosman (1969) and Coope (2009) associate this approach with W.D. Ross. Sachs (2005) points out that it was also the interpretation of Averroes and Maimonides.

This interpretation is, to use the words of Ross that "it is the passage to actuality that is kinesis” as opposed to any potentiality being an actuality.

The argument of Ross for this interpretation requires him to assert that Aristotle actually used his own word entelecheia wrongly, or inconsistently, only within his definition, making it mean "actualization", which is in conflict with Aristotle's normal use of words. According to Sachs (2005) this explanation also can not account for the "as such" in Aristotle's definition.

2. The "product" interpretation

Sachs (2005) associates this interpretation with St Thomas of Aquinas and explains that by this explanation "the apparent contradiction between potentiality and actuality in Aristotle’s definition of motion" is resolved "by arguing that in every motion actuality and potentiality are mixed or blended". Motion is therefore "the actuality of any potentiality insofar as it is still a potentiality". Or in other words:

The Thomistic blend of actuality and potentiality has the characteristic that, to the extent that it is actual it is not potential and to the extent that it is potential it is not actual; the hotter the water is, the less is it potentially hot, and the cooler it is, the less is it actually, the more potentially, hot.

As with the first interpretation however, Sachs (2005) objects that:

One implication of this interpretation is that whatever happens to be the case right now is an entelechia, as though something that is intrinsically unstable as the instantaneous position of an arrow in flight deserved to be described by the word that everywhere else Aristotle reserves for complex organized states that persist, that hold out against internal and external causes that try to destroy them.

In a more recent paper on this subject, Kosman associates the view of Aquinas with those of his own critics, David Charles, Jonathan Beere, and Robert Heineman.

3. The interpretation of Kosman, Coope, Sachs and others

Sachs (2005), amongst other authors (such as Aryeh Kosman and Ursula Coope), proposes that the solution to problems interpreting Aristotle's definition must be found in the distinction Aristotle makes between two different types of potentiality, with only one of those corresponding to the "potentiality as such" appearing in the definition of motion. He writes:

The man with sight, but with his eyes closed, differs from the blind man, although neither is seeing. The first man has the capacity to see, which the second man lacks. There are then potentialities as well as actualities in the world. But when the first man opens his eyes, has he lost the capacity to see? Obviously not; while he is seeing, his capacity to see is no longer merely a potentiality, but is a potentiality which has been put to work. The potentiality to see exists sometimes as active or at-work, and sometimes as inactive or latent.

Coming to motion, Sachs gives the example of a man walking across the room and says that...

• "Once he has reached the other side of the room, his potentiality to be there has been actualized in Ross’ sense of the term". This is a type of energeia. However it is not a motion, and not relevant to the definition of motion.
• While a man is walking his potentiality to be on the other side of the room is actual just as a potentiality, or in other words the potential as such is an actuality. "The actuality of the potentiality to be on the other side of the room, as just that potentiality, is neither more nor less than the walking across the room."

Sachs (1995, pp. 78–79), in his commentary of Aristotle's Physics book III gives the following results from his understanding of Aristotle's definition of motion:

The genus of which motion is a species is being-at-work-staying-itself (entelecheia), of which the only other species is thinghood. The being-at-work-staying-itself of a potency (dunamis), as material, is thinghood. The being-at-work-staying-the-same of a potency as a potency is motion.

The importance of actuality in Aristotle's philosophy

The actuality-potentiality distinction in Aristotle is a key element linked to everything in his physics and metaphysics.

A marble block in Carrara. Could there be a particular sculpture already existing in it as a potentiality? Aristotle wrote approvingly of such ways of talking, and felt it reflected a type of causation in nature which is often ignored in scientific discussion.

Aristotle describes potentiality and actuality, or potency and action, as one of several distinctions between things that exist or do not exist. In a sense, a thing that exists potentially does not exist, but the potential does exist. And this type of distinction is expressed for several different types of being within Aristotle's categories of being. For example, from Aristotle's Metaphysics, 1017a:

• We speak of an entity being a "seeing" thing whether it is currently seeing or just able to see.
• We speak of someone having understanding, whether they are using that understanding or not.
• We speak of corn existing in a field even when it is not yet ripe.
• People sometimes speak of a figure being already present in a rock which could be sculpted to represent that figure.

Within the works of Aristotle the terms energeia and entelecheia, often translated as actuality, differ from what is merely actual because they specifically presuppose that all things have a proper kind of activity or work which, if achieved, would be their proper end. Greek for end in this sense is telos, a component word in entelecheia (a work that is the proper end of a thing) and also teleology. This is an aspect of Aristotle's theory of four causes and specifically of formal cause (eidos, which Aristotle says is energeia) and final cause (telos).

In essence this means that Aristotle did not see things as matter in motion only, but also proposed that all things have their own aims or ends. In other words, for Aristotle (unlike modern science) there is a distinction between things with a natural cause in the strongest sense, and things that truly happen by accident. He also distinguishes non-rational from rational potentialities (e.g. the capacity to heat and the capacity to play the flute, respectively), pointing out that the latter require desire or deliberate choice for their actualization. Because of this style of reasoning, Aristotle is often referred to as having a teleology, and sometimes as having a theory of forms.

While actuality is linked by Aristotle to his concept of a formal cause, potentiality (or potency) on the other hand, is linked by Aristotle to his concepts of hylomorphic matter and material cause. Aristotle wrote for example that "matter exists potentially, because it may attain to the form; but when it exists actually, it is then in the form".

The active intellect

The active intellect was a concept Aristotle described that requires an understanding of the actuality-potentiality dichotomy. Aristotle described this in his De Anima (book 3, ch. 5, 430a10-25) and covered similar ground in his Metaphysics (book 12, ch.7-10). The following is from the De Anima, translated by Joe Sachs, with some parenthetic notes about the Greek. The passage tries to explain "how the human intellect passes from its original state, in which it does not think, to a subsequent state, in which it does." He inferred that the energeia/dunamis distinction must also exist in the soul itself:

...since in nature one thing is the material [hulē] for each kind [genos] (this is what is in potency all the particular things of that kind) but it is something else that is the causal and productive thing by which all of them are formed, as is the case with an art in relation to its material, it is necessary in the soul [psuchē] too that these distinct aspects be present;

the one sort is intellect [nous] by becoming all things, the other sort by forming all things, in the way an active condition [hexis] like light too makes the colors that are in potency be at work as colors [to phōs poiei ta dunamei onta chrōmata energeiai chrōmata].

This sort of intellect is separate, as well as being without attributes and unmixed, since it is by its thinghood a being-at-work, for what acts is always distinguished in stature above what is acted upon, as a governing source is above the material it works on.

Knowledge [epistēmē], in its being-at-work, is the same as the thing it knows, and while knowledge in potency comes first in time in any one knower, in the whole of things it does not take precedence even in time.

This does not mean that at one time it thinks but at another time it does not think, but when separated it is just exactly what it is, and this alone is deathless and everlasting (though we have no memory, because this sort of intellect is not acted upon, while the sort that is acted upon is destructible), and without this nothing thinks.

This has been referred to as one of "the most intensely studied sentences in the history of philosophy". In the Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote at more length on a similar subject and is often understood to have equated the active intellect with being the "unmoved mover" and God. Nevertheless, as Davidson remarks:

Just what Aristotle meant by potential intellect and active intellect – terms not even explicit in the De anima and at best implied – and just how he understood the interaction between them remains moot to this day. Students of the history of philosophy continue to debate Aristotle's intent, particularly the question whether he considered the active intellect to be an aspect of the human soul or an entity existing independently of man.

Post-Aristotelian usage

New meanings of energeia or energy

Already in Aristotle's own works, the concept of a distinction between energeia and dunamis was used in many ways, for example to describe the way striking metaphors work, or human happiness. Polybius about 150 BC, in his work the Histories uses Aristotle's word energeia in both an Aristotelian way and also to describe the "clarity and vividness" of things. Diodorus Siculus in 60-30 BC used the term in a very similar way to Polybius. However Diodorus uses the term to denote qualities unique to individuals. Using the term in ways that could translated as "vigor" or "energy" (in a more modern sense); for society, "practice" or "custom"; for a thing, "operation" or "working"; like vigor in action.

Platonism and neoplatonism

Already in Plato it is found implicitly the notion of potency and act in his cosmological presentation of becoming (kinēsis) and forces (dunamis), linked to the ordering intellect, mainly in the description of the Demiurge and the "Receptacle" in his Timaeus. It has also been associated to the dyad of Plato's unwritten doctrines, and is involved in the question of being and non-being since from the pre-socratics, as in Heraclitus's mobilism and Parmenides' immobilism. The mythological concept of primordial Chaos is also classically associated with a disordered prime matter (see also prima materia), which, being passive and full of potentialities, would be ordered in actual forms, as can be seen in Neoplatonism, especially in Plutarch, Plotinus, and among the Church Fathers, and the subsequent medieval and Renaissance philosophy, as in Ramon Lllull's Book of Chaos and John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Plotinus was a late classical pagan philosopher and theologian whose monotheistic re-workings of Plato and Aristotle were influential amongst early Christian theologians. In his Enneads he sought to reconcile ideas of Aristotle and Plato together with a form of monotheism, that used three fundamental metaphysical principles, which were conceived of in terms consistent with Aristotle's energeia/dunamis dichotomy, and one interpretation of his concept of the Active Intellect (discussed above):-

• The Monad or "the One" sometimes also described as "the Good". This is the dunamis or possibility of existence.
• The Intellect, or Intelligence, or, to use the Greek term, Nous, which is described as God, or a Demiurge. It thinks its own contents, which are thoughts, equated to the Platonic ideas or forms (eide). The thinking of this Intellect is the highest activity of life. The actualization of this thinking is the being of the forms. This Intellect is the first principle or foundation of existence. The One is prior to it, but not in the sense that a normal cause is prior to an effect, but instead Intellect is called an emanation of the One. The One is the possibility of this foundation of existence.
• Soul or, to use the Greek term, psyche. The soul is also an energeia: it acts upon or actualizes its own thoughts and creates "a separate, material cosmos that is the living image of the spiritual or noetic Cosmos contained as a unified thought within the Intelligence".

This was based largely upon Plotinus' reading of Plato, but also incorporated many Aristotelian concepts, including the unmoved mover as energeia.

Essence-energies debate in medieval Christian theology

In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, St Gregory Palamas wrote about the "energies" (actualities; singular energeia in Greek, or actus in Latin) of God in contrast to God's "essence" (ousia). These are two distinct types of existence, with God's energy being the type of existence which people can perceive, while the essence of God is outside of normal existence or non-existence or human understanding, i. e. transcendental, in that it is not caused or created by anything else. 

Palamas gave this explanation as part of his defense of the Eastern Orthodox ascetic practice of hesychasm. Palamism became a standard part of Orthodox dogma after 1351.

In contrast, the position of Western Medieval (or Catholic) Christianity, can be found for example in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, who relied on Aristotle's concept of entelechy, when he defined God as actus purus, pure act, actuality unmixed with potentiality. The existence of a truly distinct essence of God which is not actuality, is not generally accepted in Catholic Theology.

Influence on modal logic

The notion of possibility was greatly analyzed by medieval and modern philosophers. Aristotle's logical work in this area is considered by some to be an anticipation of modal logic and its treatment of potentiality and time. Indeed, many philosophical interpretations of possibility are related to a famous passage on Aristotle's On Interpretation, concerning the truth of the statement: "There will be a sea battle tomorrow".

Contemporary philosophy regards possibility, as studied by modal metaphysics, to be an aspect of modal logic. Modal logic as a named subject owes much to the writings of the Scholastics, in particular William of Ockham and John Duns Scotus, who reasoned informally in a modal manner, mainly to analyze statements about essence and accident.

Influence on modern physics

Aristotle's metaphysics, his account of nature and causality, was for the most part rejected by the early modern philosophers. Francis Bacon in his Novum Organon in one explanation of the case for rejecting the concept of a formal cause or "nature" for each type of thing, argued for example that philosophers must still look for formal causes but only in the sense of "simple natures" such as colour, and weight, which exist in many gradations and modes in very different types of individual bodies. In the works of Thomas Hobbes then, the traditional Aristotelian terms, "potentia et actus", are discussed, but he equates them simply to "cause and effect".

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, the source of the modern adaptations of Aristotle's concepts of potentiality and actuality.

There was an adaptation of at least one aspect of Aristotle's potentiality and actuality distinction, which has become part of modern physics, although as per Bacon's approach it is a generalized form of energy, not one connected to specific forms for specific things. The definition of energy in modern physics as the product of mass and the square of velocity, was derived by Leibniz, as a correction of Descartes, based upon Galileo's investigation of falling bodies. He preferred to refer to it as an entelecheia or "living force" (Latin vis viva), but what he defined is today called "kinetic energy", and was seen by Leibniz as a modification of Aristotle's energeia, and his concept of the potential for movement which is in things. Instead of each type of physical thing having its own specific tendency to a way of moving or changing, as in Aristotle, Leibniz said that instead, force, power, or motion itself could be transferred between things of different types, in such a way that there is a general conservation of this energy. In other words, Leibniz's modern version of entelechy or energy obeys its own laws of nature, whereas different types of things do not have their own separate laws of nature. Leibniz wrote:

...the entelechy of Aristotle, which has made so much noise, is nothing else but force or activity ; that is, a state from which action naturally flows if nothing hinders it. But matter, primary and pure, taken without the souls or lives which are united to it, is purely passive ; properly speaking also it is not a substance, but something incomplete.

Leibniz's study of the "entelechy" now known as energy was a part of what he called his new science of "dynamics", based on the Greek word dunamis and his understanding that he was making a modern version of Aristotle's old dichotomy. He also referred to it as the "new science of power and action", (Latin "potentia et effectu" and "potentia et actione"). And it is from him that the modern distinction between statics and dynamics in physics stems. The emphasis on dunamis in the name of this new science comes from the importance of his discovery of potential energy which is not active, but which conserves energy nevertheless. "As 'a science of power and action', dynamics arises when Leibniz proposes an adequate architectonic of laws for constrained, as well as unconstrained, motions."

For Leibniz, like Aristotle, this law of nature concerning entelechies was also understood as a metaphysical law, important not only for physics, but also for understanding life and the soul. A soul, or spirit, according to Leibniz, can be understood as a type of entelechy (or living monad) which has distinct perceptions and memory.

Entelecheia in modern philosophy and biology

As discussed above, terms derived from dunamis and energeia have become parts of modern scientific vocabulary with a very different meaning from Aristotle's. The original meanings are not used by modern philosophers unless they are commenting on classical or medieval philosophy. In contrast, entelecheia, in the form of "entelechy" is a word used much less in technical senses in recent times. 

As mentioned above, the concept had occupied a central position in the metaphysics of Leibniz, and is closely related to his monad in the sense that each sentient entity contains its own entire universe within it. But Leibniz' use of this concept influenced more than just the development of the vocabulary of modern physics. Leibniz was also one of the main inspirations for the important movement in philosophy known as German Idealism, and within this movement and schools influenced by it entelechy may denote a force propelling one to self-fulfillment. 

In the biological vitalism of Hans Driesch, living things develop by entelechy, a common purposive and organising field. Leading vitalists like Driesch argued that many of the basic problems of biology cannot be solved by a philosophy in which the organism is simply considered a machine. Vitalism and its concepts like entelechy have since been discarded as without value for scientific practice by the overwhelming majority of professional biologists. 

However, in philosophy aspects and applications of the concept of entelechy have been explored by scientifically interested philosophers and philosophically inclined scientists alike. One example was the American critic and philosopher Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) whose concept of the "terministic screens" illustrates his thought on the subject. Most prominent was perhaps the German quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg. He looked to the notions of potentiality and actuality in order to better understand the relationship of quantum theory to the world.

Prof Denis Noble argues that, just as teleological causation is necessary to the social sciences, a specific teleological causation in biology, expressing functional purpose, should be restored and that it is already implicit in neo-Darwinism (e.g. "selfish gene"). Teleological analysis proves parsimonious when the level of analysis is appropriate to the complexity of the required 'level' of explanation (e.g. whole body or organ rather than cell mechanism).