As-built drawings: the difference between what was specified and what is at work.
Actuality
Being at work rather than merely being able to - the condition of a thing that is doing what it is for.
- Theme
- Being and reality
- Tradition
- Greek
- Term
- ἐνέργεια · energeia
- Term fixed
- c. 330 BC
In plain terms
Actuality sounds like the dull half of a pair - potentiality is what might happen, actuality is what did. But the Greek word is energeia, being-at-work, and that is closer to the idea.
A sighted person asleep can see; a sighted person looking at something is seeing. Both are real states, and the second is not merely the first plus an event. It is the capacity in operation, which is what the capacity was a capacity for.
That gives actuality a kind of priority. You cannot say what a potential is except by naming what it is a potential for, so the account of the capacity depends on the account of the activity and not the other way round. Building materials are defined by the house; the house is not defined by the pile.
As a philosopher would put it
Aristotle introduces the pair to dissolve the Parmenidean problem about change: what comes to be was already there potentially, so nothing arises from nothing. Actuality is the correlative term, and it is prior in three ways - in account, since potentiality is defined by reference to it; in time, since an actual member of a kind is required to bring a potential one to actuality; and in substance, since the actuality is the end for which the potentiality exists.
He also distinguishes two kinds of activity. Some have their end outside them and are complete only when finished - building a house, losing weight. Others contain their end at every moment: seeing, thinking, living well. One is happening in order to, the other is simply happening, and the second is what entelecheia names.
The scholastic tradition turns this into actus purus, God as pure actuality with no unrealised potential, which is the metaphysical basis of divine immutability. The modern loss of the pair, when mechanism replaced Aristotelian physics, is what leaves the special sciences without a vocabulary for function.
Where you meet it
Every substantial construction project ends with a set of as-built drawings, and they are never the same as the design drawings.
A duct is rerouted around a beam that turned out to be sixty millimetres lower than surveyed. A door is hung the other way after the fire officer's visit. A cable tray is fixed where the fixings would go rather than where the drawing said. None of this is failure - it is what building is - and the record of it is a legal deliverable, because the next person to open a wall has to know what is actually there rather than what was proposed.
The design is not a weaker version of the building. It is a description of a building that does not exist, and it becomes false in a hundred small ways the moment work starts. What the as-built drawings record is the difference between something specified and something at work, which is precisely what the pair was invented to mark - and which the construction industry pays for twice because it cannot be derived from the first set.
What is actually disputed
Whether the pair explains or merely renames.
The standard objection is that saying opium puts you to sleep because it has a dormitive potential explains nothing, and that potentiality and actuality do no work that a description of the actual sequence cannot do. Molière made the joke and the seventeenth century took it seriously: mechanism dispensed with the vocabulary altogether and physics has not needed it since.
The defence, revived in recent work on dispositions and powers, is that the sciences never actually managed without it. Solubility, fragility, charge and enzymatic activity are all capacities that persist when unexercised, and analysing them into conditionals has proved harder than expected. If a disposition is a real feature of a thing rather than shorthand for what would happen, then the Aristotelian pair was tracking something and the mechanists dropped a distinction they still use.
Commonly confused with
- the present Actuality is about being at work, not about being now. A capacity exercised in the past was actual then.
Defined against
- Potentiality The two are strictly correlative and neither can be stated without the other
Philosophers
- Aristotle The pair, and the argument that actuality is prior in every sense
- Thomas Aquinas God as pure actuality, and what follows for immutability
- Duns Scotus The refinements that make the pair carry the weight of the arguments built on it
- Avicenna The pair joined to the essence-existence distinction
Works
- Metaphysics Where energeia is introduced and defended
- Summa Theologiae Pure actuality, and the arguments that rest on it
- The Book of Healing The Arabic transmission and elaboration
- Ordinatio The scholastic refinement of the distinction
Schools
- Peripatetic school (Aristotelianism) Where the pair is the core of the physics
- Thomism Where it becomes theology
- Scotism Where it is refined
- Avicennism Where it meets essence and existence
- Neo-Thomism Where it is defended into the twentieth century
Related concepts
Potentiality c. 330 BC · Becoming c. 500 BC · Change c. 500 BC · Form c. 380 BC · Teleology c. 330 BC
Aristotle coined energeia, being-at-work, apparently for this purpose; the Latin actus and the English actual lose the sense of activity that the Greek carries.