Can we distinguish between Actuality (an absolute, abstract Principle) and the state of being-in-act? And if there is such an Actuality, is this itself in Act, or are the two quite distinct so that this actually existent thing need not be, itself, an Act? It is indubitable that POTENTIALITY exists in the Realm of Sense: but does the Intellectual Realm similarly include the potential or only the actual? and if the potential exists there, does it remain merely potential for ever? And, if so, is this resistance to actualization due to its being precluded (as a member of the Divine or Intellectual world) from time-processes? First we must make clear what potentiality is. Enneads II,5,1
But if this be the significance of potentiality, may we describe it as a Power towards the thing that is to be? Is the Bronze a power towards a statue? Not in the sense of an effectively productive force: such a power could not be called a potentiality. Of course POTENTIALITY may be a power, as, for instance, when we are referring not merely to a thing which may be brought into actualization but to Actuality itself (the Principle or Abstract in which potentiality and the power of realizing potentiality may be thought of as identical): but it is better, as more conducive to clarity, to use “POTENTIALITY” in regard to the process of Actualization and “Power” in regard to the Principle, Actuality. Enneads II,5,1
POTENTIALITY may be thought of as a Substratum to states and shapes – and forms which are to be received, which it welcomes by its nature and even strives for – sometimes in gain but sometimes, also, to loss, to the annulling of some distinctive manner of Being already actually achieved. Enneads II,5,1
The actualized entity is not the Matter (the POTENTIALITY, merely) but a combination, including the Form-Idea upon the Matter. Enneads II,5,2
This is certainly the case when a quite different thing results from the actualization-statue, for example, the combination, is distinctly different from the bronze, the base; where the resultant is something quite new, the POTENTIALITY has clearly not, itself, become what is now actualized. But take the case where a person with a capacity for education becomes in fact educated: is not potentiality, here, identical with actualization? Is not the potentially wise Socrates the same man as the Socrates actually wise? But is an ignorant man a being of knowledge because he is so potentially? Is he, in virtue of his non-essential ignorance, potentially an instructed being? It is not because of his accidental ignorance that he is a being of Knowledge: it is because, ignorant though he be by accident, his mind, apt to knowledge, is the potentiality through which he may become so. Thus, in the case of the potentially instructed who have become so in fact, the potentiality is taken up into the actual; or, if we prefer to put it so, there is on the one side the potentiality while, on the other, there is the power in actual possession of the form. Enneads II,5,2
If, then, the POTENTIALITY is the Substratum while the thing in actualization – the Statue for example a combination, how are we to describe the form that has entered the bronze? There will be nothing unsound in describing this shape, this Form which has brought the entity from potentiality to actuality, as the actualization; but of course as the actualization of the definite particular entity, not as Actuality the abstract: we must not confuse it with the other actualization, strictly so called, that which is contrasted with the power producing actualization. The potential is led out into realization by something other than itself; power accomplishes, of itself, what is within its scope, but by virtue of Actuality (the abstract): the relation is that existing between a temperament and its expression in act, between courage and courageous conduct. So far so good: Enneads II,5,2
We come now to the purpose of all this discussion; to make clear in what sense or to what degree Actualization is predicable in the Intellectual Realm and whether all is in Actualization there, each and every member of that realm being an Act, or whether POTENTIALITY also has place there. Enneads II,5,3
But surely POTENTIALITY exists in the Soul? Surely the Soul is potentially the living-being of this world before it has become so? Is it not potentially musical, and everything else that it has not been and becomes? Does not this imply potentiality even in the Intellectual Existences? No: the Soul is not potentially these things; it is a Power towards them. Enneads II,5,3
There is in the Intellectual Principle no progression from some power capable of intellection to the Actuality of intellection: such a progression would send us in search of a Prior Principle not progressing from Power to Act; there all stands ever realized. 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: all the Firsts then are actualizations, simply because eternally and of themselves they possess all that is necessary to their completion. Enneads II,5,3
How can we talk of it? How can it be the Matter of real things? It is talked of, and it serves, precisely, as a POTENTIALITY. Enneads II,5,5
And, as being a POTENTIALITY, it is not of the order of the thing it is to become: its existence is no more than an announcement of a future, as it were a thrust forward to what is to come into existence. Enneads II,5,5
As POTENTIALITY then, it is not any definite thing but the potentiality of everything: being nothing in itself – beyond what being Matter amounts to – it is not in actualization. For if it were actually something, that actualized something would not be Matter, or at least not Matter out and out, but merely Matter in the limited sense in which bronze is the matter of the statue. Enneads II,5,5
Nor are we to imagine that, standing away at the very beginning from the universal circle of Beings, it was thus necessarily an active Something or that it became a Something. It has never been able to annex for itself even a visible outline from all the forms under which it has sought to creep: it has always pursued something other than itself; it was never more than a POTENTIALITY towards its next: where all the circle of Being ends, there only is it manifest; discerned underneath things produced after it, it is remoter (from Real-Being) even than they. Enneads II,5,5
Grasped, then, as an underlie in each order of Being, it can be no actualization of either: all that is allowed to it is to be a POTENTIALITY, a weak and blurred phantasm, a thing incapable of a Shape of its own. Enneads II,5,5
If it is to be present at all, it cannot be an Actualization, for then it would not be the stray from Authentic Being which it is, the thing having its Being in Non-Beingness: for, note, in the case of things whose Being is a falsity, to take away the falsity is to take away what Being they have, and if we introduce actualization into things whose Being and Essence is POTENTIALITY, we destroy the foundation of their nature since their Being is POTENTIALITY. Enneads II,5,5
If Matter is to be kept as the unchanging substratum, we must keep it as Matter: that means – does it not? – that we must define it as a POTENTIALITY and nothing more – or refute these considerations. Enneads II,5,5
They will scarcely urge upon us the doubling of the Principle in Act by a Principle in POTENTIALITY. It is absurd to seek such a plurality by distinguishing between potentiality and actuality in the case of immaterial beings whose existence is in Act – even in lower forms no such division can be made and we cannot conceive a duality in the Intellectual-Principle, one phase in some vague calm, another all astir. Under what form can we think of repose in the Intellectual Principle as contrasted with its movement or utterance? What would the quiescence of the one phase be as against the energy of the others? No: the Intellectual-Principle is continuously itself, unchangeably constituted in stable Act. With movement – towards it or within it – we are in the realm of the Soul’s operation: such act is a Reason-Principle emanating from it and entering into Soul, thus made an Intellectual Soul, but in no sense creating an intermediate Principle to stand between the two. Enneads II,9,1