Potentiality — the ontological condition of being capable of becoming other than what one presently is — occupies a foundational position across several strata of the depth-psychology corpus. The term enters through its Aristotelian matrix (act/power, energeia/dynamis) and is subsequently inflected by Neoplatonic, existential-phenomenological, process-philosophical, and quantum-physical registers. Plotinus inherits the Aristotelian schema and immediately problematizes it: the higher Intellectual Sphere transcends potentiality altogether, subsisting in pure actuality, while matter represents the extreme of unrealized, indeterminate capacity. Heidegger translates the concept into Dasein's existential structure as 'potentiality-for-Being' (Seinkönnen), relocating it from metaphysics of substance to the phenomenology of authentic self-projection toward death and conscience. Ricoeur bridges these two traditions through the metacategory of act and power as the ontological ground of human action. Jung, treating potentiality as the self's generative capacity to stage repeated experiments of becoming, adds a depth-psychological dimension — the self is precisely that potentiality which drives individuation forward. Simondon radicalizes the concept by situating it within thermodynamic metastability, where potential energy is always relative to systemic heterogeneity rather than inherent to substances. McGilchrist, following Bergson, distinguishes two kinds of potential and insists that creativity requires the indeterminate rather than the pre-formed. Across these voices the governing tension is constant: whether potentiality is a weakness requiring external actualization, or the irreducible ground of becoming itself.
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 the constitutive excess of any being beyond its present character, requiring a substrate identity before any further becoming is possible.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
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 potentiality is structurally dependent on an external principle for its actualization, whereas divine and intellectual being subsist as pure actuality beyond all potentiality.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
the self, that potentiality, makes the experiment, and the potentiality does not come to the end by having made it.
Jung identifies the self with a vital potentiality that drives successive experiments of individuation, remaining inexhaustible even after each particular actualization.
, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988thesis
In choosing to make this choice, Dasein makes possible, first and foremost, its authentic potentiality-for-Being.
Heidegger establishes that authentic potentiality-for-Being is not given but must be chosen and attested through the resolute act of self-appropriation.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
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 positions the act/power distinction as the ontological metacategory that grounds the analogical unity of human action and the self's power-to-act.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
the 'rational' potentiality alone is a potentiality of contraries, namely realization or its privation
Ricoeur, following Aristotle, distinguishes rational from non-rational potentiality by the former's unique capacity to encompass contrary outcomes, including the withholding of its own actualization.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
In a crucial insight, Bergson distinguishes between two ideas of potential. In one, whatever it is that comes
McGilchrist, via Bergson, signals a fundamental bifurcation within the concept of potential, connecting it to creativity, uncertainty, and temporal openness as opposed to deterministic pre-formation.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Creativity is predicated on uncertainty. Strive for certainty and you kill creativity.
McGilchrist frames genuine potentiality as inseparable from irreducible uncertainty, arguing that any attempt to foreclose openness destroys the creative ground of becoming.
, 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. Since the potentiality is invisible, we see of necessity only the active feet
Plotinus illustrates the invisibility of potentiality as such, arguing that only its actualized expression — motion — is perceptible, while the underlying capacity remains ontologically prior yet phenomenally hidden.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
anticipatory resoluteness understands the potentiality-for-Being-guilty authentically — and wholly that is to say, primordially.
Heidegger links authentic potentiality-for-Being to anticipatory resoluteness toward death and guilt, showing that wholeness of Dasein's self-understanding requires owning its ownmost nullity.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
Resoluteness brings the Being of the 'there' into the existence of its potentiality-for-Being, which, as something thrown, can project itself only upon definite factical possibilities.
Heidegger specifies that Dasein's potentiality-for-Being is always thrown, limiting authentic projection to the finite range of factical possibilities available within a given situation.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
the authenticity of its potentiality-for-Being must be wrested from Dasein in spite of this tendency of its Being
Heidegger argues that authentic potentiality-for-Being is not naturally available to Dasein but must be actively reclaimed against the levelling tendency of das Man.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
The capacity for an energy to be potential is strictly linked to the presence of a heterogeneity, i.e. of dissymmetry relative to another energetic support
Simondon redefines potentiality in thermodynamic terms as always relational, arising only within systems of dissymmetry rather than residing as an intrinsic property of isolated substances.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
potential energies linked to a structure can only be transformed and unleashed by a modification of the conditions of stability of the system that contains them
Simondon argues that structurally bound potential energies are discontinuous with one another and require systemic destabilization — not mere gradation — for their release and conversion.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
the ETs in the realm of potentiality wouldn't form a coherent whole, the empirical world that is emanating out of the cosmic potentiality would be chaotic.
Ponte and Schafer extend the concept of potentiality to a quantum-cosmological register, arguing that the coherence of the empirical world presupposes an ordered, thoughtlike realm of cosmic potentiality.
, Carl Gustav Jung, Quantum Physics and the Spiritual Mind: A Mystical Vision of the Twenty-First Century, 2013supporting
foreignness is thought as accident, virtuality, potentiality, incompletion of the circle, weak presence
Derrida identifies potentiality as one term within the classical metaphysical system of oppositions that subordinates virtuality and incompletion to the privilege of full, circular presence.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
the notions of potential charge, oriented tensions, supersaturation, and phase-shift, borrowed from thermodynamics, and the notion of the resonance internal to systems, intervene.
Simondon's framework reconceives potentiality through the thermodynamic vocabulary of metastable tension and phase-shift, grounding individuation in a pre-individual field of oriented potential.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
neither the whole of Dasein nor its authentic potentiality-for-Being has ever been made a theme.
Heidegger notes that prior ontological analyses have systematically failed to thematize Dasein's authentic potentiality-for-Being as a whole, making such thematization the central desideratum of fundamental ontology.
, Being and Time, 1962aside
Even though actualized, it remains, as actual, something pos-
Heidegger indicates that actualization does not abolish the modal character of the possible; even what has been realized retains its structure as possibility within Dasein's Being-towards-death.
, Being and Time, 1962aside