What is Potentiality?

‘Being’ is used in 2 senses:

1. As an individual thing, quality, and quantity
2. As potency and complete reality, and of function

But what is potency and complete reality?

Potentiality and actuality extend beyond motion.

• There other kinds of potency.

‘Potentiality’ and the word ‘can’ have several senses.

There are potentialities that are based on an equivocation or analogy.

• For example in geometry, we say one thing is or is not a ‘power’ of another because of the presence or absence of some relation between them.

• I avoid such potentialities.

I accept all the potentialies that conform to originative sources of some kind.

These are called “potencies in reference to one primary kind of potency”.

• This primary potency is an originative source of change in another thing or in the thing itself qua other.

Such potencies are of different kinds:

1. A potentiality of being acted on

This is when the source passively changes when it is acted on.

2. A potentiality of being not susceptibile to change for the worse

This is when the source resists destruction by another thing or by itself.

These imply the formula of potentialities in the primary sense.

These so-called potentialities are potentialities either of:

• passively acting or
• passively being acted on, or
• actively acting or
• actively being acted on

In the formulae of the “active”, the formulae of the “passive” kinds of potency are implied.

A thing may be ‘capable’ either because:

• it can itself be acted on or
• something else can be acted on by it

And so, the potentiality of acting and of being acted on is the same but different.

The potentiality of being acted on is in the thing acted on.

• This thing has a certain originative source

The matter is an originative source. This is why:

• the thing acted on is acted on
• one thing is acted on by one thing
• another thing is acted on by another

An oily thing can be burnt. A yielding thing can be crushed.

But the other potentiality is in the agent. For example:

• heat is present in a thing which can produce heat
• the art of building is present in the man who can build

In terms of a thing being an organic unity, it cannot be acted on by itself.

• This is because it is one and not 2 different things.

Privation

‘Impotence’ and ‘impotent’ are the privation which is contrary to potency of this sort, so that every potency belongs to the same subject and refers to the same process as a corresponding impotence.

Privation has several senses. It means:

1. that which has not a certain quality
2. that which might naturally have it but has not it, either

• in general or
• when it might naturally have it, and either
  • in some particular way, e.g. when it has not it completely, or
  • when it has not it at all. And in certain cases if things which naturally have a quality lose it by violence, we say they have suffered privation.