GIORGIO AGAMBEN - Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

PART THREE
Potentiality


§ 11 On Potentiality
The concept of potentiality has a long history in Western philosophy, in which it has occupied a central position at least since Aristotle.In both his metaphysics and his physics, Aristotle opposed potentiality to actuality, dynamis to energeia, and bequeathed this opposition to Western philosophy and science.
My concern here is not simply historiographical. I do not intend simply to restore currency to philosophical categories that are no longer in use. On the contrary, I think that the concept of potentiality has never ceased to function in the life and history of humanity, most notably in that part of humanity that has grown and developed its potency [potenza] to the point of imposing its power over the whole planet.
Following Wittgenstein's suggestion, according to which philosophical problems become clearer if they are formulated as questions concerning the meaning of words, I could state the subject of my work as an attempt to understand the meaning of the verb "can" [potere]. What do I mean when I say: "I can, I cannot"?
In an exergue to the collection of poems she entitled Requiem, Anna Akhmatova recounts how her poems were born. It was in the 1930s, and for months and months she joined the line outside the prison of Leningrad, trying to hear news of her son, who had been arrested on political grounds. There were dozens of other women in line with her. One day, one of these women recognized her and, turning to her, addressed her with the following simple question: "Can you speak of this?" Akhmatova was silent for a moment and then, without knowing how or why, found an answer to the question: "Yes," she said, "I can."
Did she perhaps mean by these words that she was such a gifted poet that she knew how to handle language skillfully enough to describe the atrocious things of which it is so difficult to write? I do not think so. This is not what she meant to say.
For everyone a moment comes in which she or he must utter this "I can," which does not refer to any certainty or specific capacity but is, nevertheless, absolutely demanding. Beyond all faculties, this "I can" does not mean anything--yet it marks what is, for each of us, perhaps the hardest and bitterest experience possible: the experience of potentiality.
What Is a Faculty?
"There is an aporia," we read in the second book of Aristotle De anima,
as to why there is no sensation of the senses themselves. Why is it that, in the absence of external objects, the senses do not give any sensation, although they contain fire, earth, water, and the other elements of which there is sensation? This happens because sensibility is not actual but only potential. This is why it does not give sensation, just as the combustible does not burn by itself, without a principle of combustion; otherwise it would burn itself and would not need any actual fire. 1
We are so accustomed to representing sensibility as a "faculty of the soul" that for us this passage of De anima does not seem to pose any problems. The vocabulary of potentiality has penetrated so deeply into us that we do not notice that what appears for the first time in these lines is a fundamental problem that has only rarely come to light as such in the course of Western thought. This problem--which is the originary problem of potentiality--is: what does it mean "to have a faculty"? In what way can something like a "faculty" exist?
Archaic Greece did not conceive of sensibility and intelligence as "faculties" of the soul. The very word aisthēsis, which means "sensation," ends in -sis, which means that it expresses an activity. How, then, can a sensation exist in the absence of sensation? How can an aisthēsis exist in the state of anesthesia?
These questions immediately bring us to the problem of potentiality. When we tell ourselves that human beings have the "faculty" of vision, the "faculty" of speech (or, as Hegel says, the faculty of death)--or even simply that something is or is not "in one's power"--we are already in the domain of potentiality.
What does this passage from De anima teach us about potentiality? What is essential is that potentiality is not simply non-Being, simple privation, but rather the existence of non-Being, the presence of an absence; this is what we call "faculty" or "power." "To have a faculty" means to have a privation. And potentiality is not a logical hypostasis but the mode of existence of this privation.
But how can an absence be present, how can a sensation exist as anesthesia? This is the problem that interests Aristotle.
(It is often said that philosophers are concerned with essence, that, confronted with a thing, they ask "What is it?" But this is not exact. Philosophers are above all concerned with existence, with the mode [or rather, the modes] of existence. If they consider essence, it is to exhaust it in existence, to make it exist.)
Two Potentialities
This is why Aristotle begins by distinguishing two kinds of potentiality. There is a generic potentiality, and this is the one that is meant when we say, for example, that a child has the potential to know, or that he or she can potentially become the head of State. This generic sense is not the one that interests Aristotle.
The potentiality that interests him is the one that belongs to someone who, for example, has knowledge or an ability. In this sense, we say of the architect that he or she has the potential to build, of the poet that he or she has the potential to write poems. It is clear that this existing potentiality differs from the generic potentiality of the child. The child, Aristotle says, is potential in the sense that he must suffer an alteration (a becoming other) through learning. Whoever already possesses knowledge, by contrast, is not obliged to suffer an alteration; he is instead potential, Aristotle says, thanks to a hexis, a "having," on the basis of which he can also not bring his knowledge into actuality (mē energein) by not making a work, for example. Thus the architect is potential insofar as he has the potential to not-build, the poet the potential to notwrite poems.
Existence of Potentiality
Here we already discern what, for Aristotle, will be the key figure of potentiality, the mode of its existence as potentiality. It is a potentiality that is not simply the potential to do this or that thing but potential to not-do, potential not to pass into actuality.
This is why Aristotle criticizes the position of the Megarians, who maintain that all potentiality exists only in actuality. What Aristotle wants to posit is the existence of potentiality: that there is a presence and a face of potentiality. He literally states as much in a passage in the Physics. "privation [sterēsis] is like a face, a form [eidos]" (193 b 19-20).
Before passing to the determination of this "face" of potentiality that Aristotle develops in Book Theta of the Metaphysics, I would like to pause on a figure of potentiality that seems to me to be particularly significant and that appears in De anima. I refer to darkness, to shadows.
Here Aristotle is concerned with the problem of vision (418 b-419 e I). The object of sight, he says, is color; in addition, it is something for which we have no word but which is usually translated as "transparency," diaphanes. Diaphanes refers here not to transparent bodies (such as air and water) but to a "nature," as Aristotle writes, which is in every body and is what is truly visible in every body. Aristotle does not tell us what this "nature" is; he says only "there is diaphanes,"esti ti diaphanes. But he does tells us that the actuality (energeia) of this nature is light, and that darkness (skotos) is its potentiality. Light, he adds, is so to speak the color of diaphanes in act; darkness, we may therefore say, is in some way the color of potentiality. What is sometimes darkness and sometimes light is one in nature (hē autē physis hote men skotos hote de phōs estin).
A few pages later, Aristotle returns to the problem of skotos, "darkness." He asks himself how it can be that we feel ourselves seeing. For this to be the case it is necessary that we feel ourselves seeing either with our vision or with another sense. Aristotle's answer is that we feel ourselves seeing with vision itself. But then, he adds, an aporia arises:
For to feel by vision can only be to see, and what is seen is color and what has color [that is, diaphanes]. If what we see is seeing itself, it follows that the principle of sight in turn possesses color. Therefore "to feel by vision" does not have merely one meaning, since even when we do not see we distinguish darkness from light. Hence the principle of vision must in some way possess color. 2
In this passage, Aristotle answers the question we posed above, namely: "Why is there no sensation of the senses themselves"? Earlier we answered the question by saying that it is so "because sensation is only potential." Now we are in a position to understand what this means. When we do not see (that is, when our vision is potential), we nevertheless distinguish darkness from light; we see darkness. The principle of sight "in some way possesses color," and its colors are light and darkness, actuality and potentiality, presence and privation.
Potentiality for Darkness
The following essential point should be noted: if potentiality were, for example, only the potentiality for vision and if it existed only as such in the actuality of light, we could never experience darkness (nor hear silence, in the case of the potentiality to hear). But human beings can, instead, see shadows (to skotos), they can experience darkness: they have the potential not to see, the possibility of privation.
In his commentary on De anima, Themistius writes:
If sensation did not have the potentiality both for actuality and for not-Beingactual and if it were always actual, it would never be able to perceive darkness [skotos], nor could it ever hear silence. In the same way, if thought were not capable both of thought and of the absence of thought [anoia, thoughtlessness], it would never be able to know the formless [amorphon], evil, the without-figure [aneidon]. If the intellect did not have a community [koinonein] with potentiality, it would not know privation.
The greatness--and also the abyss--of human potentiality is that it is first of all potential not to act, potential for darkness. (In Homer, skotos is the darkness that overcomes human beings at the moment of their death. Human beings are capable of experiencing this skotos.)
What is at issue here is nothing abstract. What, for example, is boredom, if not the experience of the potentiality-not-to-act? This is why it is such a terrible experience, which borders on both good and evil.
To be capable of good and evil is not simply to be capable of doing this or that good or bad action (every particular good or bad action is, in this sense, banal). Radical evil is not this or that bad deed but the potentiality for darkness. And yet this potentiality is also the potentiality for light.
All Potentiality Is Impotentiality
It is in Book Theta of the Metaphysics that Aristotle seeks to grasp the "face" of this privation, the figure of this original potentiality. Aristotle makes two statements that will lead our inquiry here. "Impotentiality [adynamia]," we read in the first, "is a privation contrary to potentiality. Thus all potentiality is impotentiality of the same and with respect to the same" (tou autou kai kata to auto pasa dynamis adynamia) (1046 e 25-32).
What does this sentence mean? It means that in its originary structure, dynamis, potentiality, maintains itself in relation to its own privation, its own sterēsis, its own non-Being. This relation constitutes the essence of potentiality. To be potential means: to be one's own lack, to be in relation to one's own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential. They can be because they are in relation to their own nonBeing. In potentiality, sensation is in relation to anesthesia, knowledge to ignorance, vision to darkness.
The second statement that we will consider here reads as follows: "What is potential [dynatos] is capable [endekhetai] of not being in actuality. What is potential can both be and not be, for the same is potential both to be and not to be [to auto ara dynaton kai einai kai mē einai]" (1050 b 10).
In this extraordinary passage, Aristotle offers the most explicit consideration of the originary figure of potentiality, which we may now define with his own words as the potential not to be. What is potential is capable (endekhetai), Aristotle says, both of being and of not being. Dekhomai means "I welcome, receive, admit." The potential welcomes non-Being, and this welcoming of non-Being is potentiality, fundamental passivity. It is passive potentiality, but not a passive potentiality that undergoes something other than itself, rather, it undergoes and suffers its own non-Being.
If we recall that Aristotle always draws his examples of this potentiality of non-Being from the domain of the arts and human knowledge, then we may say that human beings, insofar as they know and produce, are those beings who, more than any other, exist in the mode of potentiality. Every human power is adynamia, impotentiality; every human potentiality is in relation to its own privation. This is the origin (and the abyss) of human power, which is so violent and limitless with respect to other living beings. Other living beings are capable only of their specific potentiality; they can only do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentialiiy. The greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality.
Here it is possible to see how the root of freedom is to be found in the abyss of potentiality. To be free is not simply to have the power to do this or that thing, nor is it simply to have the power to refuse to do this or that thing. To be free is, in the sense we have seen, to be capable of one's own impotentiality, to be in relation to one's own privation. This is why freedom is freedom for both good and evil.
The Act of Impotentiality
But what is the relation between impotentiality and potentiality, between the potentiality to not-be and the potentiality to be? And how can there be potentiality, if all potentiality is always already impotentiality? How is it possible to consider the actuality of the potentiality to not-be? The actuality of the potentiality to play the piano is the performance of a piece for the piano; but what is the actuality of the potentiality to not-play? The actuality of the potentiality to think is the thinking of this or that thought; but what is the actuality of the potentiality to not-think?
The answer Aristotle gives to this question is contained in two fines that, in their brevity, constitute an extraordinary testament to Aristotle's genius. In the philosophical tradition, however, Aristotle's statement has gone almost entirely unnoticed. Aristotle writes: "A thing is said to be potential if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing impotential" (esti de dynaton touto, hoi ean hyparxei hē energeia ou legetai ekhein tēn dynamēn, ouden estai adynaton) ( Metaphysics, 1047 a 24-26). Usually this sentence is interpreted as if Aristotle had wanted to say, "What is possible (or potential) is that with respect to which nothing is impossible (or impotential). If there is no impossibility, then there is possibility." Aristotle would then have uttered a banality or a tautology.
Let us instead seek to understand the text in all its difficulty. What is the potentiality of which, in the moment of actuality, there will be nothing impotential? It can be nothing other than adynamia, which, as we have seen, belongs to all dynamis: the potentiality to not-be. What Aristotle then says is: if a potentiality to not-be originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is truly potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it as such. This does not mean that it disappears in actuality; on the contrary, it preserves itself as such in actuality. What is truly potential is thus what has exhausted all its impotentiality in bringing it wholly into the act as such.
Salvation and Gift
We may now conclude with a passage of De anima that is truly one of the vertices of Aristotle's thought and that fully authorizes the medieval image of a mystical Aristotle. "To suffer is not a simple term," Aristotle writes.
In one sense it is a certain destruction through the opposite principle, and in another sense the preservation [sōtēria, salvation] of what is in potentiality by what is in actuality and what is similar to it. . . . For he who possesses science [in potentiality] becomes someone who contemplates in actuality, and either this is not an alteration--since here there is the gift of the self to itself and to actuality [epidosis eis auto]--or this is an alteration of a different kind. 3
Contrary to the traditional idea of potentiality that is annulled in actuality, here we are confronted with a potentiality that conserves itself and saves itself in actuality. Here potentiality, so to speak, survives actuality and, in this way, gives itself to itself.

Notes:
1.
Aristotle, De anima, 417 a 2-5; the Greek text is in Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes, vol. 8: On the Soul Parva Naturalia, On Breath, trans. W S. Hett ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 94.

2.
Ibid., 425 b 15-25; p. 146.


3.
Ibid., 417 b 2-16; p. 98.