Potentiality

Potentiality, as theorized in the McCormick source, names the ontological dimension that underlies Heidegger's account of authenticity and inauthenticity as modal counter-possibilities rather than mutually exclusive states. The operative mechanism is Modus/modification: authenticity is not a separate region of existence cordoned off from fallenness, nor is inauthenticity a simple privation of authentic being. Instead, each is structurally available to Dasein as the possible reversal of the other, held together by the concept of potentiality — Dasein's being-as-ability-to-be (Seinkönnen). What makes potentiality theoretically decisive is that it forestalls any moralistic or simply hierarchical reading of the discourse-scale from babble (Geschwätz) to silence: Dasein is always already in potential transit between these poles, and neither pole is ever definitively reached or lost.

The theoretical move in the source links this Heideggerian structure to Lacan's parallel theorization of alienation and authentic existence. Where Heidegger's Gerede is the constitutive medium of das Man — the inauthentic but structurally necessary condition from which any existentiell modification toward authenticity must be wrested — Lacan's alienation names the analogous structural capture of the subject in the field of the Other. In both frameworks, the "authentic" or the "non-alienated" is not a recovered origin but a modification of the very structure that produces inauthenticity/alienation. Potentiality is thus the name for the spacing — the modal gap — that keeps both poles from collapsing into each other and that makes transformation conceivable without guaranteeing it.

This concept appears once, in samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive (p. 220), at a moment where the source is reading Heidegger's modal ontology — specifically the Modus/modification structure — against and alongside Lacanian theory. Within the source's argument, potentiality functions as the hinge that holds the book's central discourse-spectrum (from Gerede/babble to authentic silence) together as a dynamic rather than static schema. It is not a separate chapter-concept but the ontological motor that drives the trajectory the entire text traces.

In relation to the cross-referenced canonicals, potentiality operates as a specification and deepening of the Gerede/Authenticity pair. Gerede, as the corpus defines it, is not mere contingent failing but the "indigenous condition of possibility" for authentic speech — authenticity is an "existentiell modification" of the everyday structure Gerede constitutes. Potentiality names why this modification is always available: because Dasein's being is constitutively being-able-to-be, neither Gerede nor authentic discourse can lock Dasein in place. The Lacanian resonance runs through Alienation: just as alienation is a permanent structural condition that cannot be sublated but only "complicated" by separation, Heidegger's potentiality means that authentic existence cannot simply cancel inauthenticity — it can only inflect or modify it. Both frameworks resist the fantasy of a clean passage from fallen/alienated existence to some recovered fullness, insisting instead on a modal co-implication of the two poles. The concept thus sits at the intersection of Heidegger's existential analytic and Lacan's theory of the subject, serving as a bridge term that allows the source to argue for the structural — rather than merely contingent — nature of everyday discourse and its possible transformations.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.220)

it was potentiality that most intrigued Heidegger. If authentic existence is a 'modification' of average everydayness, and vice versa... it is because each way of living serves as the other's counter-possibility.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it places potentiality in direct definitional relation to modification and counter-possibility: these three terms together dismantle any binary logic of authenticity vs. inauthenticity and replace it with a modal ontology in which each state is always already haunted by its reversibility into the other — precisely the structure that makes Dasein's being irreducibly dynamic rather than positionally fixed.