The past few months for me have been marked by a bad bout of writers’ block. Ethics, as always, dominates my thoughts— and in attempt to clear the miscarriages of my mind, I feel compelled to jot down a few timely thoughts on reaching ‘human potential’.

Aristotle wrote on concepts of potentiality and actuality, or ‘dunamis‘ and ‘entelecheia‘ respectively. Aristotle’s conceptions and understanding of these processes and states of being are, in the peripatetic tradition, well thought out and follow a logical course of development that works to unravel difficult ontological problems. The idea of a human ‘actuality’, or ‘enetelecheia’, has been a topic that has interested me for quite some time, and is, in my opinion, the most fundamental part of any enquiry in to ‘character’ or ‘ethos‘. Aristotle argued that a human’s entelecheia (which some argue is interchangeable with the concept of energeia) was in seen in achieving a state of eudaimonia, or human-flourishing… as academic, Martha Nussbaum describes the concept:

“To flourish is to live a complete good life, lacking in nothing that would make that life better or more complete. That’s Aristotle’s basic notion, and the things that are constituent parts of a person’s eudaimonia are just those things without which life would not be complete, the most important things or activities in the life.”. (source)

This brings me to what motivated me to write this– the recent tragedies in Japan. The devastating earthquake that caused a ravaging tsunami has clearly worked against this process of striving towards reaching potential.  But ironically, in this destruction we are given a fleeting glimpse in to the potentiality of the human species through the ways we work towards overcoming hopelessness and despair, and in how we help others in their time of need.

Unfortunately, a third tragedy is brewing with the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, which currently hangs in the balance between being a major disaster and an Earth shattering nuclear catastrophe. But, in perhaps an incongruous way, the object that threatens the destruction of the ways of life for many, the nuclear reactor, has also been a device that has fuelled the dunamis of the people of the region.

Regrettably, upon witnessing this disaster, people around the world have been stricken with fear of nuclear energy— some fears perhaps justifiable (in terms of poorly designed plants, or plants that have been in operation outside their life-cycle), but others are tragically irrational. Nuclear energy is, for better or for worse, the cleanest energy source and most productive of energy sources currently under the control of humankind… to think that nuclear energy needs to go away is naïve and misguided.

The lives of the Japanese people living in the region of Fukushima prefecture and beyond have been spent in the shadow of the Dai-Ichi plant… people were born and nourished by the electricity the plant generated, with their entelecheia carved and shaped by the same fuel rods that now threaten disaster.  It is a difficult and tragic situation, perhaps one that could have been minimized through prudential and forward-thinking actions by TEPCO.  In their defense, they came to decisions based on many constraints and economic compromises, and like any group of people working on a singular task, are prone to make mistakes. By no means do I wish to excuse them, but I believe it is only right to take the effort and understand the events, decisions, and limitations involved in the life of the Dai-Ichi plant– and do so with an application of ethics.

With entelecheia in mind, it seems clear that we cannot merely abandon nuclear energy based on rare tragedies.  Disaster is not a convention of a nuclear plant, but is rather a reflection of the state of the dunamis of the human species. We are in a process of reaching our actualized potentiality and in the process we will stumble and make mistakes, but ultimately I believe we will succeed if we strive forward with the right combination of virtue… especially with the right kind of courage. We, as a species, will never be perfect… after all, we are mere mortals, but there is still an opportunity for us– and that is in our efforts in working towards realizing our entelecheia.