actuality and potentiality
The polarity of actuality and potentiality constitutes one of the most generative metaphysical axes in the depth-psychology library, running from Aristotle's foundational formulations through Plotinus, Ricoeur, Heidegger, and into contemporary figures such as McGilchrist and Rudhyar. Aristotle supplies the canonical grammar: the soul is the 'first actuality' of a naturally organised body, while potentiality names the capacity not yet exercised — a distinction that ramifies into his account of sensation, intellection, and the soul's nutritive, perceptive, and rational powers. Plotinus radicalises this inheritance by identifying the Intellectual Sphere with pure actuality, a 'Sleepless' domain in which nothing remains merely potential. Ricoeur, reading Aristotle through the lens of selfhood, argues that the metacategory of being-as-act-and-power subtends the analogical unity of human action, cautioning that the ontology of substance must not be permitted to dissolve the harder-won insight of energeia and entelechia. Heidegger shadows the discussion throughout, particularly in the question of whether Aristotelian energeia is best glossed as Heideggerian presence-and-facticity — a move Ricoeur explicitly resists. McGilchrist introduces a Bergsonian inflection, distinguishing two irreducibly different concepts of potential, one deterministic and one genuinely open. Across the corpus the tension is consistent: is the actual simply the telos at which potential aims, or does the passage from potency to act generate irreducible novelty?
Potentiality requires an intervention from outside itself to bring it to the actualization which otherwise cannot be; but what possesses, of itself, identity unchangeable for ever is an actualization: all the Firsts then are actualizations
Plotinus argues that the highest principles are pure actuality requiring no external cause, while potentiality by definition depends on something outside itself — making actuality ontologically prior and supreme.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
the soul is the actuality of a body as above characterized. Now the word actuality has two senses corresponding respectively to the possession of knowledge and the actual exercise of knowledge.
Aristotle establishes the soul as the body's actuality in its first-order sense (possessed knowledge), distinguishing this from active exercise, thereby grounding the potentiality-actuality dyad in psychology.
, On the Soul (De Anima), -350thesis
soul is substance as the form of a natural body which potentially has life, and since this substance is actuality, soul will be the actuality of such a body. But there are two ways in which actuality is spoken of
Aristotle's De Anima commentary formalises the hylomorphic identification of soul with actuality, then differentiates two modes of actuality — possessed versus exercised — that structure all subsequent discussion.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350thesis
the intersecting of these two primitive significations of being, that of being appropriate to the categories and that of being as actuality and potentiality, leads, it seems, to weakening the ever so precious conquest of the idea of potency and actuality.
Ricoeur diagnoses a structural risk in Aristotle's system: the category of substance tends to erode the independent philosophical force of the actuality-potentiality distinction.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
this path connects the investigation of the being of the self to the reappropriation of one of the four primordial acceptations of being, which Aristotle places under the distinction of act and of power.
Ricoeur grounds his ontology of selfhood in the Aristotelian metacategory of act and power, arguing that the unity of human action is best understood through this distinction.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
Entelecheia is usually taken to mean realization or actuality, a condition in which a potentiality becomes an actuality, in keeping with its basic root in the Greek word telos, meaning
Edinger explicates Aristotle's entelecheia as the psychologically crucial moment of potentiality becoming actuality, orienting the concept toward telos and psychological realisation.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis
Whatsoever has a potentiality must first have a character of its own; and its potentiality will consist in its having a reach beyond that character to some other.
Plotinus analyses potentiality as a constitutive reach beyond a thing's already-defined character, distinguishing it from mere productive force and clarifying the bronze-statue analogy.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
we must now distinguish not only between what is potential and what is actual but also different senses in which things can be said to be potential or actual
Aristotle distinguishes multiple strata of potentiality and actuality — generic, dispositional, and active — providing the fine-grained conceptual machinery used throughout De Anima.
, On the Soul (De Anima), -350thesis
the 'rational' potentiality alone is a potentiality of contraries, namely realization or its privation; the passage from potentiality to act in production, however, takes place without encountering any obstacle
Ricoeur elaborates the Aristotelian distinction between rational and non-rational potentialities, noting that rational potentiality uniquely admits of contrary outcomes — realisation or privation.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
energeia, which was translated in Latin by actualitas, denotes in a global manner what in which we actually exist. But by placing the main emphasis on the 'always al-'
Ricoeur questions Heidegger's reinterpretation of Aristotelian energeia as factical presence, arguing that this translates the concept in a direction that obscures its original sense of living actuality.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
Each seed is a dynamic and structural potentiality of being... influences, which either help or hinder the process of their development from potentiality to actuality, from seed to fulfilled and blossoming plant.
Rudhyar transposes the potentiality-actuality framework into an astrological-vitalist key, presenting the monad's developmental arc as the organic unfolding of seed-potency into realised selfhood.
, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting
Arendt peremptorily denies the claim of any agent to be a full embodiment, always already actualized, of human potentiality. In so doing, she also tacitly rejects the reading of Aristotle on which Dante relies.
Via Arendt's critique of Dante's Aristotle, the passage argues against a fully actualised sovereign self, insisting that human potentiality remains irreducibly incomplete and relational.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
In a crucial insight, Bergson distinguishes between two ideas of potential. In one, whatever it is that comes
McGilchrist invokes Bergson's bifurcation of the concept of potential to contest deterministic models, aligning genuine potentiality with creativity, uncertainty, and temporal openness.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
by walking we do not mean the feet but the activity springing from a potentiality in the feet... where does Motion reside, when there is one thing that moves and another that passes from an inherent potentiality to actuality?
Plotinus examines the ontological location of motion in terms of the passage from inherent potentiality to actuality, using locomotion as the paradigm case.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
while in actuality the sense-object exists in the subject, it exists in potentiality outside in the world. It cannot, then, be a hallmark of the sense-object as such, as Brentano needs it to be, that it exists only in the individual.
The commentary corrects Brentano's appropriation of Aristotle by insisting on the actuality-in-subject versus potentiality-in-world distinction as the correct reading of Aristotelian perception.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350supporting
in the case of plants which when divided are observed to continue to live though removed to a distance from one another (thus showing that in their case the soul of each individual plant before division was actually one, potentially many)
Aristotle uses the example of divided plants to illustrate how a single actuality can harbour multiple potentialities, demonstrating the flexibility of the potentiality-actuality schema across biological kinds.
, On the Soul (De Anima), -350supporting
foreignness is thought as accident, virtuality, potentiality, incompletion of the circle, weak presence, etc. The enigma of the now is dominated in the difference between it and potentiality, essence and accident
Derrida identifies potentiality as one of the foundational oppositional terms through which metaphysics organises the enigma of the 'now', situating it within a system of presence, accident, and essence.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
they clearly have within themselves a potentiality and principle of the right kind, through which they take growth and decay in opposite directions
Aristotle grounds plant life in an immanent potentiality for growth and decay, establishing nutritive soul as the minimal actualisation of biological potency.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350supporting
even that which has been actualized is still characterized in terms of some involvements — indeed this is precisely what characterizes its Being. Even though actualized, it remains, as actual, something pos-
Heidegger argues that even what has been actualized retains the structure of possibility within Dasein's concernful Being, preventing any clean separation of actuality from potentiality.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
these constructions start from an illegitimate extension of actualities, catch at unpermitted possibilities, or turn truths to an application which is not applicable.
Aurobindo distinguishes the limits of mental creation — which can only rework actualities and possibilities — from the original creative power that operates beyond both.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
actuality, employment: energeia. This literally means a 'putting into use', an 'employment', but is often translated as 'actuality'. It usually contrasts with dunamis (capacity) or some cognate word
The glossary clarifies the Greek terminology underlying the actuality-potentiality pair, noting that energeia connotes active employment rather than a static state and contrasts specifically with dunamis.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350aside