Aristotle’s example of the acorn and the oak from Gendlin’s point of view

Gendlin (1991) discusses that there are aspects of Aristotle’s example of the acorn and the oak with which he can and cannot agree:

Aristotle had a concept for something changing, not into something else but — into itself. Such a change was into the thing’s pre-determined nature. The famous example is the acorn becoming an oak. So also, therapy does not change people into other people, but into more truly the persons they were. But carrying forward is not predetermined, like Aristotle’s oak. Even a little next step is not predetermined, and can change what it seemed that the previous step was. So this concept “retroactive revision” is not Aristotle’s. And yet, like him, I do assert that not all change is into something else. (Gendlin, 1991, p. 85)

I can understand what Gendlin is trying to say through this discussion. In keeping with Gendlin's terminology, he probably meant to say that Aristotle had adequately argued that a living process “differs from arbitrariness” (Tanaka, 2024, October) but had not adequately argued that it “differs from logic” (Tanaka, 2024, October). Moreover, what is meant by “not predetermined” above has to do with “differs from logic” and “non-Laplacian,” and the idea of “retroactive revision” is definitely involved (Tanaka, 2024, June).

However, whether this discussion is a valid criticism of Aristotle’s counter-concepts of “potentiality (dynamis)” and “activity (energeia)” or not is another matter. So, it needs to be verified by third persons other than Gendlin.

References

Gendlin, E. T. (1991). Thinking beyond patterns: body, language and situations. In B. den Ouden, & M. Moen (Eds.), The Presence of Feeling in Thought (pp. 21–151). Peter Lang.

Tanaka, H. (2024, June). Gendlin’s position against the “unit model” or the “content paradigm”: retroactive time in terms of G. H. Mead’s theory of time.

Tanaka, H. (2024, October). Neither arbitrary nor logical.