Actuality — rendered in Greek as energeia and contrasted with dynamis (potentiality) — enters the depth-psychology corpus above all through its Aristotelian inheritance, where it designates the fulfilled, operative state of a capacity as opposed to its merely latent condition. The foundational locus is Aristotle’s De Anima, which defines soul as ‘the first actuality of a natural body having life potentially in it,’ distinguishing the actuality of possessed knowledge from that of its active exercise. Plotinus inherits this framework but presses it toward a hierarchical metaphysics in which Act and Actuality become attributes of the hypostatic intellect, not merely of embodied form. Ricoeur, in Oneself as Another, complicates the Aristotelian inheritance by interrogating whether an ontology of actuality can simply be opposed to an ontology of substance, arguing that the two primitive significations of being — categorical and potentiality/actuality — remain irreducibly entangled. Vernant illuminates the political and productive stakes: Aristotle reserves energeia for praxis (action complete in itself) and withholds it from kinesis (mere productive movement), a distinction that encodes the social hierarchy of ancient Greek life. Across these positions, the term serves as a pivot between ontology, psychology, and ethics — marking the difference between latent capacity and living enactment, between what a being is in potency and what it genuinely is.
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 definitive formulation identifies soul with actuality in the sense of first-grade operative form, distinguishing the actuality of possessed capacity from its active exercise.
, 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.
This passage restates the hylomorphic definition of soul as actuality-of-form, reinforcing the two-fold distinction between actuality as knowledge held and actuality as knowledge exercised.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350thesis
pursuing an end that is beyond it, it does not possess energeia (actuality) in itself. Actuality is seen in the realized ‘form,’ in the product itself, not in the effort of work.
Vernant shows that Aristotle confines actuality (energeia) to completed praxis, withholding it from productive labor (kinesis), thereby encoding a social and ethical hierarchy in the ontological distinction.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
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 argues that the Aristotelian ontology of actuality is destabilized by its entanglement with substance-theory, questioning whether an ontology of actuality can be cleanly opposed to an ontology of substance.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
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 Aristotle’s differential features of rational versus non-rational potentiality, tracing the precise conditions under which potentiality passes into actuality across different domains.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
after it has turned its potentiality into actuality it will remain what it was; sometimes it will sink itself to the fullest extent in the new form and itself disappear.
Plotinus distinguishes two modes of the potentiality-to-actuality transition — conservation of original form versus dissolution into the new — illustrating the metaphysical range of the concept.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
light is the activity of this thing, of the transparent as transparent… But light is as the colour of the transparent, when it is rendered transparent in actuality by fire or something of the same kind.
Aristotle deploys actuality in the perceptual domain to explain light as the fulfilled state of the transparent medium, extending the potentiality/actuality schema into sense-theory.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350supporting
if ‘nothing’ means the same as not existing in actuality, this ‘kind of being’ is certainly nothing, because it does not exist in actuality, and therefore it comes from nothing, that is, it comes from no cause.
Descartes’s scholastic interlocutor imports the Aristotelian distinction between objective and actual existence into the proof-of-God debate, showing the term’s persistence in early modern metaphysics.
, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008supporting
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 invokes the actual/potential distinction to argue that soul’s incorporeality is demonstrated by its capacity for a mode of interpenetration that no body, constrained by actual infinities, can achieve.
, The Six Enneads, 270aside
in the form determined by its actuality, its triviality, its inner historical laws, he takes it seriously and even tragically.
Auerbach uses ‘actuality’ in a colloquial-historicist sense to designate the concrete, historically determined givenness of everyday life that Balzac treats with tragic seriousness.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside