autotelic

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   having its purpose within itself; done for its own sake rather than for any reward that lies outside it

   Reading for pleasure is autotelic — the activity is its own payment.

2. 2
   adj

   (psychology) describing a person who readily finds absorbing reward in difficult activity, as in the theory of flow

   Csikszentmihalyi described autotelic personalities as people who slip into flow almost anywhere.

From Ancient Greek αὐτός (autós, "self") + τέλος (télos, "end, goal, completion") — literally "self-ended". Coined in twentieth-century literary aesthetics for a work that justifies itself rather than serving some outside purpose, and later carried into psychology by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose autotelic experience is one pursued for the doing of it. The télos element also gives English teleology and entelechy.

Topics

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