actuality and potentiality
The dyad of actuality and potentiality stands as one of the most generative conceptual structures traversing the depth-psychology corpus, reaching from Aristotle’s foundational formulations through Plotinus, medieval theology, early modern philosophy, and into twentieth-century existential and process thought. Aristotle’s De Anima establishes the architecture: soul is the ‘first actuality’ of a body that possesses life potentially, and the distinction between possessing knowledge and exercising it models the two grades of actualization. Plotinus radicalises this: the Intellectual realm is pure actuality, sleepless and self-sufficient, while matter is potentiality evacuated of all intrinsic drive toward realization. Ricoeur, reading Aristotle through Heidegger and against him, argues that being as act and power constitutes a metacategory capable of grounding the analogical unity of human action and selfhood — a resource neither a pure ontology of substance nor Heideggerian facticity can furnish alone. Edinger’s psychological reading of entelecheia as the telos-driven movement from potentiality to actuality anchors individuation in this same Aristotelian grammar. McGilchrist, following Bergson, distinguishes two radically different conceptions of potential — one retroactive and determined, one genuinely open — and locates creativity in the latter. The central tension throughout: whether actuality is the telos that redeems potentiality, or whether potentiality retains an irreducible ontological dignity of its own.
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’s foundational definition of soul as actuality introduces the canonical two-grade distinction — possessed but unexercised versus actively employed — that structures virtually all subsequent depth-psychological uses of the dyad.
, 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, on the one hand as knowledge, on the other as contemplation.
This passage precisely reiterates Aristotle’s core claim that soul is the first actuality of the living body, establishing the terminological foundation from which Plotinus, Ricoeur, and Edinger all depart.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350thesis
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 radicalises Aristotle by arguing that the highest principles are pure actuality requiring no external cause, thereby inverting the primacy of potentiality and locating the summit of being beyond any unrealised capacity.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
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 proposes that the Aristotelian metacategory of act and power is the proper ontological ground for the unity of human action, placing selfhood within the actuality-potentiality dyad rather than within a static substance ontology.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
the actual has priority over the potential ‘both in formula and in substantiality’ … the intersecting of these two primitive significations of being … leads, it seems, to weakening the ever so precious conquest of the idea of potency and actuality.
Ricoeur cautions that the theory of substance threatens to absorb and diminish the independent ontological yield of the actuality-potentiality distinction, arguing for preserving the dyad’s philosophical autonomy.
, 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 connects entelecheia to teleological movement from potentiality to actuality, reading the term as the key to understanding the soul’s self-realising drive, and situating individuation within this Aristotelian framework.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis
bronze is the potentiality of a statue … its potentiality will consist in its having a reach beyond that character to some other … may we describe it as a Power towards the thing that is to be?
Plotinus interrogates the Aristotelian bronze-statue analogy to test whether potentiality is best understood as passive receptivity or as directed power, probing the ontological status of unrealised capacity.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
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-‘ … the examples upon which Aristotle bases the key distinction between actuality and movement lead back.
Ricoeur, via Brague, examines Aristotle’s energeia as the Latin actualitas, distinguishing actuality from mere movement and questioning whether Heideggerian facticity is an adequate re-interpretation of this concept.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
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 draws on Metaphysics Book 9 to distinguish rational from non-rational potentialities, noting that only rational capacity admits of contrary outcomes — realisation or privation — linking this to the ethics of human agency.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
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 … one who is already realizing his knowledge — he is a knower in actuality and in the most proper sense.
Aristotle differentiates three levels of epistemic potentiality and actuality, establishing a graduated ontology of capacity and realisation that underpins both his psychology of intellect and subsequent depth-psychological uses of the terms.
, On the Soul (De Anima), -350supporting
Each seed is a dynamic and structural potentiality of being … All these seeds are acted upon by a multitude of influences, which either help or hinder the process of their development from potentiality to actuality.
Rudhyar transposes the actuality-potentiality schema into an astrological-psychological framework of individuation, treating each monad as a seed-potentiality whose realisation is conditioned by temporal and environmental forces.
, 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 Aristotelian energeia, the passage argues against treating any individual agent as the complete actualisation of human potentiality, insisting on the irreducible gap between potency and act.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
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 deploys the potentiality-to-actuality transition to analyse the ontological location of motion, arguing that movement is neither reducible to the mover nor entirely resident in the moved but passes between them.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
In a crucial insight, Bergson distinguishes between two ideas of potential. In one, whatever it is that comes … Creativity is predicated on uncertainty. Strive for certainty and you kill creativity.
McGilchrist, following Bergson, distinguishes a retroactively determined potential from an open, genuinely creative one, arguing that only the latter preserves the novelty necessary for authentic becoming.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
In a crucial insight, Bergson distinguishes between two ideas of potential. In one, whatever it is that comes … a stream of unpredictable information constantly enters the stream of definite information, a source of novelty, creativity, vitality.
This parallel passage reinforces Bergson’s distinction between closed and open conceptions of potential, grounding genuine creativity in irreducible ontological indeterminacy rather than latent actuality.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
even that which has been actualized is still characterized in terms of some involvements — indeed this is precisely what characterizes its Being … it remains, as actual, something pos-
Heidegger argues that even actualized equipment retains its character through relational involvement rather than achieving a final static presence, implicitly challenging the Aristotelian telos-driven resolution of potentiality into completed actuality.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
plants clearly have within themselves a potentiality and principle of the right kind, through which they take growth and decay in opposite directions … this faculty can be separated from the others but the others cannot be separated from this in mortal things.
Aristotle grounds even vegetative life in an irreducible nutritive potentiality, establishing the lowest rung of a hierarchical structure in which different psychic capacities correspond to different grades of actualised being.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350supporting
in the case of plants which when divided are observed to continue to live … the soul of each individual plant before division was actually one, potentially many.
Aristotle’s botanical example demonstrates that a single actual soul may harbour multiple latent potentialities, illustrating the complex internal structure of the actuality-potentiality relation within living organisms.
, On the Soul (De Anima), -350supporting
this foreignness … is comprehended within the system of the founding oppositions of metaphysics: foreignness is thought as accident, virtuality, potentiality, incompletion of the circle, weak presence.
Derrida identifies potentiality as one of the subordinate, privative terms within Aristotle’s metaphysical system of oppositions, arguing that it is consistently demoted to the status of weak presence or accidental incompletion.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
the infinities are not merely potential, they are actual. Therefore body cannot traverse anything as a whole traversing a whole. But soul does this. It is therefore incorporeal.
Plotinus uses the actualisation of mathematical infinities as an argument for the incorporeality of soul, deploying the potential-actual distinction in service of a metaphysical proof rather than a direct analysis of the dyad itself.
, The Six Enneads, 270aside
in dealing with possibilities it may miscompose, miscombine, misapply, misplace … these constructions start from an illegitimate extension of actualities, catch at unpermitted possibilities.
Aurobindo contrasts the limited, error-prone mind with the omnipotent Maya by distinguishing legitimate actualities from misapplied possibilities, invoking the actuality-potentiality dyad within a critique of mental creativity.
, The Life Divine, 1939aside