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In philosophy, Potentiality and Actuality are principles of an important dichotomy used extensively by Aristotle to analyze time, motion, causality, biological perfections and human faculties in his Physics, Metaphysics and Ethics.

In broad terms, potency is a capacity, and actuality is its fulfillment.

Terminology

The terms actus and potentia were used by the scholastics to translate Aristotle's use of the terms energeia (or also sometimes entelecheia), and dynamis. There is no single word in English that would be an exact rendering of either. Act, action, actuality, perfection, and determination express the various meanings of actus; potency, potentiality, power, and capacity, those of potentia.

Dunamis or Potential

Potentiality (Latin Potentia, Greek δύναμις transcribed as dunamis or dynamis) refers, generally, to the capacity or power of a possibility to come to be in actuality, a non-realized possibility for which there is still an ability or disposition.

Dunamis is an Ancient Greek word which can be translated by such terms as dynamic, force, power, capacity, potential, potency, capability and faculty (ability, skill, or power). It is the root of the English words "dynamic", "dynamite", and "dynamo". The word "dunamis" is sometimes seen untranslated in English texts because of its importance in philosophy, and the difficulty of translation. In Latin the word is translated as potentia which is the root of the word potential.

Actuality or being at work

Actuality (Latin actus, Greek ἐνέργεια transcribed as energeia literally a "being at work") refers to the realized deed or the acting out of such a potential. The two components of this coinage (en-ergeia) indicate something being "in work". It is the etymological source of the modern word "energy" but the term has evolved so much during Western History that this link is no longer helpful in understanding the original Aristotelian term. They include, but extend beyond, the notion of physical energy (potential energy vs. work), for example also referring to psychological or spiritual potential.

Another word Aristotle used in connection to this concept was entelecheia.

Many translators into English make no effort to find one single English word for energeia in their translations. One American scholar, Joe Sachs, attempts to translate it literally as a "being at work," although most frequently terms derived from Latin translations like activity and actuality are used, attempting to give the sense of something which is more than just potentially existent.

The term actus, therefore, has a much greater extension than act or operation. Every operation is an actus, because it is the complement of a power; but all other perfections and determinations, whatever their nature is, are also actus. However, the being in potentia is not to be identified with a future being. This is because unlike the future, potential are real now.

The distinction

In general, potentia means an aptitude to change, to act or to be acted upon, to give or to receive some new determination. Actus means the fulfillment of such a capacity. So, potentia always refers to something in the future, which at present exists only as a germ to be evolved; actus denotes the corresponding complete reality. In a word, potentia is the determinable being, actus the determined being. But potentia is more than a mere statement about a future reality; it implies a positive aptitude which exists now, which can be realized in the future.

The Aristotelian "energy" (actus), considered as actuality, can never be potential, as these two terms are opposed to each other. Actuality and potentiality are mutually exclusive, since one means the presence, and the other the absence, of the same determination. Yet, in all beings except God (see actus purus) there is a combination of actuality and potentiality; they possess some determinations and are capable of acquiring others. Moreover, the same reality may be considered as actuality or potentiality. In man, skill and science are actualities if compared to human nature, which they presuppose. But compared to the actions themselves or to the actual recall of acquired knowledge to consciousness, they are powers, or potentiae. If the same point of view is kept, it is impossible for the same thing to be at the same time in actu and in potentia with regard to the same determination.

Aristotle and St. Thomas explain this theory by many illustrations. One such example is that a statue exists potentially in the block of marble, because marble has an aptitude to receive the shape of a statue. This aptitude is something real in the marble, since many other substances are deprived of it. It is a receptive potentiality. With regard to the same statue, the sculptor has the power, by his action, to carve the marble into the form of a statue. His is an active power, a real skill or ability which is lacking in many other persons. In order to have the actual statue (actus), it is necessary for the sculptor to exercise (actus) his real skill (potentia) on a substance which is not yet a statue, but which has a real aptitude (potentia) to become one. In general, potentia has no meaning, and cannot be defined except through the corresponding actus.

Potency and actuality as a real distinction

Aristotle argues against those who claim that potency is only a mental concept (that is, not a real sense of being). In Metaphysics IX, 3-4, he argues against Megarics, who claimed that potency could only be had by a subject when the subject was actually performing a specific action. Aristotle claims this is not logical, because then one would only possess a potency when one was excerting its corresponding act. A man who is sitting, for example, would not have the potency to stand. He would only have the potency of standing while actually standing. Aristotle believes this to be paradoxical. He, therefore, believes:

That potency is a real sense of being.^[c]
That potency is always "ordained" to an act.

Act is, therefore, the primal sense. Potency is always said in reference to it. Accordingly, the different senses of act, which Aristotle also recognizes, must correspond to different senses of potency.

Applications of the distinction

Aristotelian Ethics

At Nicomachean Ethics I.viii.1098b33 the relative importance of activity or being at work is made clear, and the matter is also discussed in Metaphysics VIII-IX. Aristotle claims that pleasure, as opposed to the popular view of an emptiness that needs to be fulfilled, actually consists in energeia of the human body and mind (Book X). Thus, he would claim that eating is pleasurable in the sense that it allows the human digestive system to fully function, sex is pleasurable for the same reason with the reproductive system, and activities such as studying mathematics or admiring art are pleasurable because they are an energeia with respect to the mind.

Aristotle also contrasts energeia and ergon with dunamis and hexis, in various places. See Eudemian Ethics II.i.1218b and Nicomachean EthicsI.viii.1098b33 where concerning virtue, hexis is equated to possession (κτῆσις) and energeia is equated to use (χρῆσις). In that passage, Aristotle argues that virtue must be an energeia, and more than just a hexis or potential for happiness. However the two are closely related. The translator Joe Sachs (2002), using "being-at-work" for energeia, writes:

In the Nicomachean Ethics, everything depends upon the idea of an active condition (hexis) that can be formed by a deliberately repeated way of being-at-work, and that can in turn set free the being-at-work of all the human powers for the act of choice

Energeia is also sometimes compared to kinesis (movement or perhaps sometimes change). See Metaphysics IX.iii.1047a.

Neoplatonism

Plotinus sought to reconcile the dialectical position of Aristotle with the one of Plato and Socrates in his Enneads. Plotinus taught that The One, or Monad was force (in its emmunation of the demiurge or nous was called energeia) as that which is motionless but sets all (as force or dunamis) in motion. This reconciled Plato's good and beautiful, with Aristotle's Unmoved Mover as energy.^{[citation needed]}

Christianity

In Christian theology "Dynamis" is sometimes used in conjunction with the Holy Spirit.[1] It describes the activities of the Holy Spirit as believers receive Him (Acts 1:8, 10:38).

St Gregory Palamas wrote about the energies of God (in contrast to God's essence) in his defense of the Eastern Orthodox ascetic practice of hesychasm. Gregory and the time that he wrote his defense do not represent the expression of God and his various manifestations of energy as being a new or innovative ideology or theology, rather St Gregory is according to tradition the one who gave the traditions a defense and established these teachings as Orthodox theological dogma. Gregory wrote that God has realities Father, Son and Holy Spirit and these realities effect the created world as does the energies of God. All being in essence uncreated.

Scholasticism

The distinction between potentia and actus is at the basis of, and pervades, the whole scholastic system of philosophy and theology. Whatever is determinable is considered as potential with regard to the actual determination. Genus and species, subject and predicate, quantity and shape, child and adult, matter and form of the sacraments, etc., are examples of potentiality and actuality. This view must be confined to the fundamental applications in metaphysics and in psychology.

In metaphysics, the distinction runs through the ten Aristotelian categories. All being, whether substance or accident, is either in actu or in potentia. The essence of creatures is a potentiality with regard to their existence. Material substances are composed of primary matter and substantial form (see matter and form), matter being a pure potentiality, i.e., wholly undetermined, and form being the first determination given to matter. Efficient causality is also an application of potentiality and actuality; the cause, when at rest, remains able to act. Change is a transition from the state of potentiality to that of actuality. Generation, growth, and evolution suppose a capacity which becomes fulfilled.
In psychology, special emphasis is laid on the reality of the potentiae, or faculties, and their distinction both from the soul and from their operations. External senses are determined or actualized by an external stimulus (see species), which gives them the determination necessary to the act of perception. The internal senses (sensus communis, phantasia, memoria, aestimativa) depend on external sensations for their exercise. Memory and imagination preserve in potentia traces of past impressions, and when the proper conditions are verified the image becomes actual. We have no innate ideas, but in the beginning human intelligence is simply a power to acquire ideas. By its operation, the active power of the intellect (intellectus agens) forms the species intelligibilis or the determination necessary to the intelligence (intellectus possibilis) for its cognitive act. All tendency and desire is actualized by some good which one strives to acquire. In rational psychology man is conceived as one substantial being, composed of body and soul, or matter and form, united as potentia and actus.

Senses of act

According to Aristotle, there are three great senses of act: movement (kinesis), form, and knowledge. Other senses, like nature (phusis), habit (hexis), etc., may be reduced to these three. Movement is defined by Aristotle in his book on Physics as "The fulfillment of what exists potentially, insofar as it exists potentially, is motion".^[e] This is known as a transitive act. Transitivity is the expression of an act in which something changes for something else. Movement can therefore be understood under the more general term of metabolé, that is, change. The corresponding potency is, thus, a transitive potency, or kinetic potency.

Now, substance is a formal act. Moreover, a formal act is always the end of a transitive movement. Substance can also then be understood as metabolé. Indeed, as Aristotle explains movement, it always implies: a cause from which it takes place, a subject in which it takes place, and a form (end, péras) it which knowledge takes place.^[f] In all these cases, movement is always found within the categories (the second sense of being mentioned above) and is always a causal act.^[g]

To these two senses of act corresponds what Aristotle calls transitive potency, or simply potency. This kind of potency is described in Metaphysics V, 12 and IX, 1-5. The two passages are similar and, in the end, Aristotle reaches a general notion of potency: a principle of movement, that is, the capacity of something to move something. The mover (which is called active potency) moves what is moved (called passive potency). Their union constitutes an act: both are different potencies that join in one and the same act.^[h]

The central characteristic of both these potencies (and acts) is that, when acquiring a new form, the old form is lost. When painting a blue wall white, the form blue is lost just as the form white is acquired. That is the concept of transitivity.

There is, however, a different sense of act, that in a way transcends categories. This act is knowledge, or energeia. Aristotle describes it in order to show the difference it has with movement and form:

Since no action which has a limit is an end, but only a means to the end, as, e.g., the process of thinning; and since the parts of the body themselves, when one is thinning them, are in motion in the sense that they are not already that which it is the object of the motion to make them, this process is not an action, or at least not a complete one, since it is not an end; it is the process which includes the end that is an action. E.g., at the same time we see and have seen, understand and have understood, think and have thought; but we cannot at the same time learn and have learnt, or become healthy and be healthy. We are living well and have lived well, we are happy and have been happy, at the same time; otherwise the process would have had to cease at some time, like the thinning-process; but it has not ceased at the present moment; we both are living and have lived.
Now of these processes we should call the one type motions, and the other actualizations. Every motion is incomplete--the processes of thinning, learning, walking, building--these are motions, and incomplete at that. For it is not the same thing which at the same time is walking and has walked, or is building and has built, or is becoming and has become, or is being moved and has been moved, but two different things; and that which is causing motion is different from that which has caused motion. But the same thing at the same time is seeing and has seen, is thinking and has thought. The latter kind of process, then, is what I mean by actualization, and the former what I mean by motion.^[i]

In the Metaphysics Aristotle gives extraordinary examples: we see and we have seen, we think and have thought; but we don’t build and have built. Building is a transitive action, an imperfect action. In the perfect action, praxis, the object (the end of the action) is immediately possessed, at the same time, simultaneously. Knowledge is not a change of a form, a change of quality, because a form is not corrupted by the acquisition of a new one; rather, both forms co-exist in one act.^[j] That is why knowledge is not only the possession of a form: it is the possession of another being’s form. And not only that: knowledge is the possession of another’s form as another’s form. When knowing a stone, we do not become the stone, even as we do have its form as one in act with the act of knowledge. Movement does not possess its object. Movement does not exist at once with its object, for possessing the object would mean the end of movement. Movement is not co-actual with its end, as knowledge is.^[k]

Potency and possibility

According to what we have said, if knowledge is not a transitive action, its correspondent potency should also be intransitive. Indeed, it is possible in some texts to find an account of possibility which suggests that Aristotle has in mind a different form of potency. However, the texts are not clear enough, and many interpretations have been given to them. One could, for example, read the following passages: Metaphysics IX, 3, Bk 1047a 24;IX, 6, Bk 1048a 28-30; De Interpretatione 23a 8-16. In this last text Aristotle states that this potency corresponds not only to mobile being, but also to eternal beings (that is, beings outside the range of kinesis).

What follows is only a possible way of accounting for the different meanings of potency in Aristotle. The distinction is made according to the Greek terms:

Potency in the order of reality: dynatón.
- dynatòn katà dýnamin: everything that is possible;
- ón dynámei: the being that simply has a potency (which can be active or passive);
- dynatòn katà tò télos: the same real potency according to its goal.
Potency in the logical order: dynatà oú katà dýnamin.

Later, the notion of possibility will be greatly analyzed by modern philosophers. Indeed, many philosophical interpretations of possibility are related to a famous passage on Aristotle's On Interpretation, concerning the truth of the statement: "There will be a sea battle tomorrow".^[l]
Current versions of the notion of possibility are studied by modal metaphysics and modal logic.
Some philosophers claim that actuality refers to the act of knowledge (the third sense of act); the transitive act would not be an actuality but, rather, an activity.

Mathematics

The word "dunamis" was translated from Euclid as "power", giving the modern terminology for exponentiation.^[1]

Other

Energeia (energy) was invoked as the protector of the ephemeral Free State of Fiume (Croatia, 1920–1924) by Italian poet and war hero Gabriele D'Annunzio, who also called it "the tenth Muse" in the constitution he drafted for it.^[2]

Bibliography

Energeia And Entelecheia: "Act" in Aristotle by George Alfred Blair University of Ottawa Press ISBN 978-0776603643
Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon by Francis Peters NYU Press ISBN 978-0814765524

Notes

^a: For example: Metaphysics V, 7; VI, 2, etc.
^b: Metaphysics V, 7, Bk 1017a 19 ff. (Normally, Bekker numbers are used to identify passages in Aristotle's texts. This system was established by August Immanuel Bekker's edition of Aristotle.)
^c: Some illuminating passages: Physics III, 1, Bk 201a 10; III, 6, Bk 206a 14; Metaphysics VI, 2, Bk 1026b 1; 1071a 18s; IX, 3, 1047a 18-20, etc.
^d: Aristotle uses many different words and notions that signify different aspects of the formal act. For example: tode ti, to ti en einai, eidos, morphe, ti esti, sxema, etc. Normally, morphe is understood as the generic name of the form; if a particular morphe is the one that most determines a substance (ousía), it may be understood as essence (tode ti, to ti en einai). The word eidos seems to refer to the intellectual apprehension of the form. The term is taken from Plato's forms (eide).
^e: See Physics III, 1, Bk 201b 6. And further on he writes: "Examples will elucidate this definition of motion. When the buildable, insofar as it is just that, is fully real, it is being built, and this is building". Clearly, a building that is being built is not a complete building. A complete (actual) building is one that does not need to be built. But knowledge is different: we see, writes Aristotle, and we have seen, and we keep seeing.
^f: See Physics V, 1, Bk 224a 34ff.
^g: See Physics III, 1, Bk 200b 26ff, and Metaphysics XI, 6, Bk 1063a 17ff.
^h: See Metaphysics IX, 1, 1046a 15-19.
^i: This is Hugh Tredennik's edition.
^j: See De anima II, 5, Bk 417b 14ff.
^k: See Metaphysics XI, 5, Bk 1065b 34ff.
^l: See On Interpretation Bk 17a 2.

References

^ Advanced Modern Algebra, Joseph Rotman, pg 55.
^ October 27th, 1920 Issue of The Nation

Category:Aristotle Category:Modal logic Category:Possibility

[1] Advanced Modern Algebra, Joseph Rotman, pg 55.

[2] October 27th, 1920 Issue of The Nation

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