Potentiality-for-Being (Sein-können) stands as one of the architectonic concepts of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology in Being and Time, designating not a latent property awaiting actualization but the very mode of Dasein’s existence as always already projecting itself upon its own possibilities. Unlike the Aristotelian dualism of dynamis and energeia—in which potentiality is a deficient form awaiting completion in actuality—Heidegger’s formulation insists that Dasein is never more than its factical potentiality-for-Being, nor ever less than it existentially is in its thrownness. The corpus surrounding this term reveals a productive tension between the Heideggerian reading, where authentic potentiality-for-Being is attested through conscience and realized through anticipatory resoluteness toward death, and the Aristotelian–Ricoeurian tradition, where act and potentiality constitute irreducible metacategories for understanding the analogical unity of human action. Plotinus complicates the trajectory further by identifying the highest principles with pure actuality, arguing that genuine potentiality requires an external intervention and thus cannot characterize the Intellectual realm. Simondon displaces the question altogether, treating potentiality as distributed across a pre-individual field rather than lodged in the individual subject. The concept matters for depth psychology because it grounds any theory of becoming, individuation, and the self’s relation to its own unrealized possibilities—whether the frame is phenomenological, Neoplatonic, or process-ontological.
choosing to make this choice, Dasein makes possible, first and foremost, its authentic potentiality-for-Being. But because Dasein is lost in the ‘they’, it must first find itself.
This passage identifies the choice to choose as the originary act through which Dasein wrests its authentic potentiality-for-Being from lostness in das Man, and locates conscience as the attestation of that potentiality.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
When one has an understanding Being-towards-death towards death as one’s ownmost possibility—one’s potentiality-for-Being becomes authentic and wholly transparent.
Anticipatory resoluteness toward death is here shown to be the condition under which Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being achieves full authenticity and self-transparency.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility. Being towards this possibility discloses to Dasein its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, in which its very Being is the issue.
Being-toward-death is constituted as the privileged site where Dasein’s ownmost, non-relational potentiality-for-Being becomes manifest as an existential claim.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
In Being-ahead-of-oneself as Being towards one’s ownmost potentiality-for-Being, lies the existential-ontological condition for the possibility of Being-free for authentic existentiell possibilities.
The structure of care—specifically its ‘ahead-of-itself’ moment—is identified as the ontological ground enabling freedom for authentic potentiality-for-Being.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
“Existence” means a potentiality-for-Being—that which belongs to the potentiality-for-Being that is to say, to existence limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein.
Heidegger equates existence itself with potentiality-for-Being, arguing that death, as the end belonging to this structure, determines and limits the totality available to Dasein.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
in having a potentiality-for-Being it always stands in one possibility or another: it constantly is not other possibilities, and it has waived these in its existentiell projection.
Potentiality-for-Being is here shown to entail a structural exclusivity: Dasein’s factical projection always selects some possibilities while relinquishing others, underscoring the finite, thrown character of its Being.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
Resoluteness brings the Being of the ‘there’ into the existence of its Situation. In resoluteness the issue for Dasein is its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, which, as something thrown, can project itself only upon definite factical possibilities.
Resoluteness is characterized as the mode in which potentiality-for-Being is concretely individualized, binding the general ontological structure to specific, factically available possibilities.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
Dasein is never more than it factically is, for to its facticity its potentiality-for-Being belongs essentially. Yet as Being-possible, moreover, Dasein is never anything less.
This formulation establishes the double boundary of Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being: it can neither transcend its facticity nor fall short of the possibilities that structurally belong to its existence.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
existentially surrendered to thrownness, Dasein has in every case already gone astray and failed to recognize itself. In its potentiality-for-Being it always has understood itself and always will understand itself in terms of possibilities.
Thrownness is shown to condition potentiality-for-Being such that self-understanding is always already a projective interpretation of possibility, yet one prone to inauthenticity.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
in which Dasein, in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, comes towards itself. Anticipation makes Dasein authentically futural.
Temporality is linked to potentiality-for-Being through the concept of futurity: authentic coming-toward-oneself in anticipation is the temporal meaning of ownmost potentiality-for-Being.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
neither the whole of Dasein nor its authentic potentiality-for-Being has ever been made a theme. The structure of care, however, seems to be precisely where the attempt to [interpret Dasein] satisfies the requirements.
Care is proposed as the structural totality capable of thematizing what prior analyses left incomplete—namely, the authentic potentiality-for-Being of Dasein as a whole.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
the authenticity of its potentiality-for-Being must be wrested from Dasein in spite of this tendency of its Being—from what point of view is this spoken?
Heidegger raises the self-critical question of whether the concept of authentic potentiality-for-Being is itself grounded in a presupposed, potentially circular idea of existence.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
in the face of a factical potentiality-for-Being which is resolute, one clings to those possibilities of self-preservation and evasion which one has already discovered circumspectively beforehand.
Fear and anxiety are distinguished by their respective relations to potentiality-for-Being: fearful Dasein flees into circumspectly discovered possibilities, while resolute Dasein holds its potentiality open.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
whether the great polysemy of the term ‘being,’ according to Aristotle, can permit us to give new value to the meaning of being as act and potentiality, securing in this way the analogical unity of acting on a stable ontological meaning.
Ricoeur proposes to rehabilitate the Aristotelian dyad of act and potentiality as the ontological ground for a unified yet polysemic account of human action and selfhood.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
Does not this unity belong to the metacategory of being as act and as power? And does not the ontological significance of this metacategory preserve what we have already termed on several occasions the analogical unity of action.
Ricoeur argues that the act/potentiality metacategory in Aristotle is uniquely suited to preserving the analogical unity of action against reductive substantialist readings of the self.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
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 identifies a tension within Aristotle’s ontology whereby the category of substance threatens to subordinate and thereby diminish the philosophical gains made by the act/potentiality distinction.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
‘rational’ potentiality alone is a potentiality of contraries, namely realization or its privation; the passage from potentiality to act in production takes place without encountering any obstacle.
Following Aristotle, Ricoeur distinguishes rational from non-rational potentiality, noting that only rational potentiality is inherently oriented toward contraries, which has consequences for theories of human agency.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
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 defines potentiality as a constitutive excess beyond a thing’s present character, requiring an external intervention for actualization—a view that sharply contrasts with Heidegger’s immanent, existential reading.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
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.
Plotinus argues that the highest ontological principles are pure actualization precisely because they require no external completion, thereby excluding potentiality from the Intellectual realm entirely.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
Even when one is without Illusions and ‘is ready for anything’, here too the ‘ahead-of-itself’ lies hidden.
Heidegger notes that even states such as hopelessness or resigned preparedness do not dissolve the ‘ahead-of-itself’ structure constitutive of Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being.
, Being and Time, 1962aside
Being-guilty belongs to Dasein’s Being, and signifies the null Being-the-basis of a nullity.
The discussion of Being-guilty contextualizes the limits within which Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being operates, showing that resoluteness does not overcome but owns the nullity at the basis of existence.
, Being and Time, 1962aside
I doubt that facticity is the best key for reinterpreting Aristotle’s energeia and entelekheia.
Ricoeur registers a critical reservation about Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotelian energeia through facticity, suggesting that the Heideggerian frame may distort the Aristotelian resources available for an ontology of potentiality and act.
, Oneself as Another, 1992aside
his business is to make the best advantage of them to realise, rationally or intuitionally, inwardly or in the dynamism of life, its potentialities in himself or for himself or in or for the race.
Aurobindo invokes potentiality in a broadly evolutionary and teleological register, situating the realization of latent capacities within a cosmic scheme of progressive self-manifestation rather than an existential-ontological one.
, The Life Divine, 1939aside