Prompt Challenge: Heterotelic

heterotelic, adj. Having the purpose of its existence apart from itself

Here it is only the second of my weekly prompt challenges and I got a word that isn’t visual and its definition is, to say the least, opaque! The usage examples that dictionary.com gave didn’t shed much light on the meaning and a Google search wasn’t much help either. I eventually found the dictionary of difficult words which had this definition: adj. not autotelic. Then, from Wikipedia:

A thing which is autotelic is described as “having a purpose in and not apart from itself”. It is a broad term that can be applied to missionaries, scientists, systems, and so forth…. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes people who are internally driven, and as such may exhibit a sense of purpose and curiosity as autotelic. This determination is an exclusive difference from being externally driven, where things such as comfort, money, power, or fame are the motivating force.

My friend Lisa came to my rescue and we had a long conversation over lunch, puzzling out both words and the examples I had found. After more research, it seems that heterotelic/autotelic always go together, much like yin and yang. And while they are opposites, one is neither all good or all bad. Heterotelic is about external forces or pressures, autotelic is the internal ones. One looks outward, one looks inward. And as I thought about what sort of visual representation I would make, I kept coming back to the idea of balance between opposites. I found this quote from Euripides:

The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us.

That balance is often hard to achieve, and my response to this week’s word is to express the struggle for balance with an animation encapsulated in a flipbook. Here’s a video of what I came up with:


[youtube fV2QrfdxZqU]

The word for this week is, happily, less obscure: perspicacious, adj; Having keen mental perception and understanding; discerning.

One thought on “Prompt Challenge: Heterotelic”

  1. Hi, After repeatedly insisting that my thought processes should not try to take a subjective adjective (heterotelic or the opposite) to the netherlands of absolutism, i still could not in confidence use these words in a sentence. BUT…after watching the expressions on the face in the video i am quite sure i truly get it. Gracias for the visual…a few simple lines and the inevitable zen wins the day. Thanks. In any case, after so much brain workout my spellcheck still does not recognize heterotelic!

Comments are closed.