Potentiality - Impotentiality

In Heidegger's early Aristotle lectures, as read in McCormick's account, potentiality-impotentiality (dynamis/adynamia) names the constitutive tension internal to any capacity: a genuine potentiality is only real insofar as it also harbors the possibility of not passing into act. The key structural claim is that if every potentiality automatically actualized itself, potentiality would collapse into actuality and lose its distinctive ontological character — it would cease to be potential and become simply what is. The co-presence of impotentiality (the capacity not to) is therefore what keeps potentiality open as potentiality.

Applied to doxa and logos, this dyad generates a specific modal logic for discourse. Falsehood (pseudos) is positioned as doxa's basic potentiality — the default toward which speech most readily falls — while truth (aletheia as unconcealment) functions as its impotentiality: the difficult, always-resistible pull that speech can exercise but need not, and more often does not. This reversal of the ordinary evaluative hierarchy (where truth would seem to be the positive term) is theoretically precise: truth is "impotentiality" not because it is impossible but because it is what dynamis holds in reserve against its own immediate discharge into falsehood, the way in which doxa refrains from simply flowing into pseudos. The result is a structural account of why inauthentic speech (Gerede) predominates: the impotential draw toward uncovering is systematically overpowered by the easier actualization of covering-over.

Within samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, the potentiality/impotentiality dyad functions as a modal hinge that explains the structural predominance of Gerede without reducing it to mere moral failure. Gerede, as synthesized in the corpus, is not a contingent social failing but an ontological tendency of discourse to circulate "das Gesagte" independently of "das Worüber." The dynamis/adynamia schema gives this tendency a precise modal grounding: Gerede and pseudos are the easy actualization of speech's basic potentiality, while the uncovering movement toward aletheia is the impotentiality — present but typically withheld. This positions authentic Rede not as the norm from which idle talk falls away, but as the structurally harder possibility that discourse keeps in reserve without exercising.

The concept also articulates the relationship between the cross-referenced terms doxa, rhetoric, aletheia, and pseudos at a modal rather than a merely evaluative level. Where a simple binary would oppose truth to falsehood, the dynamis/adynamia pairing shows that both poles belong to the same capacity structure: doxa is always already oriented toward aletheia (its impotentiality), yet tends toward pseudos (its basic potentiality). This rehabilitates rhetoric and doxa as ontologically genuine modes of being-in-the-world aimed, however imperfectly, at unconcealment — a move with clear resonance in the Lacanian framework surrounding Language, where language is simultaneously the medium of genuine disclosure and the structural agent of covering-over, and where the subject's alienation in the signifying chain means that "authentic" speech is always a modification of, rather than an escape from, the inauthentic ground.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.177)

every potentiality (dynamis) was not always also an impotentiality (adynamia), 'potentiality would always already have passed into act and be indistinguishable from it.'

The quoted conditional — "would always already have passed into act" — is theoretically loaded because it shows that the identity of potentiality depends on its irreducibility to actuality: impotentiality (adynamia) is not the mere negation of dynamis but its constitutive reserve, the structural gap that keeps any capacity from being identical with its discharge. The phrase "indistinguishable from it" signals an ontological collapse, not just a practical one, making adynamia a condition of possibility for dynamis as such rather than its mere absence.