Potentiality and Probability

Potentiality and Probability names the way a thing’s meaning extends beyond what it presently is, while its projected future possibilities remain external to the thing itself. A table can appear as enduringly a table, a crescent moon as tending toward a full moon, and an inkwell as breakable; yet none of these future meanings is an intrinsic becoming that the thing must undergo. Human reality makes such possibilities appear through its own projection beyond the present, revealing a world whose objects are meaningful without being altered in their self-identity by that disclosure.

The thing disclosed through a future

A thing is not first presented as an isolated, complete this and only afterward assigned a future. The for-itself’s negation already reaches beyond present determination: to deny something is to disclose it against a meaning that comes toward the present from the future. Even the simple judgment that a chair is not a table places the two things in an exterior relation, whether the distinction is considered now or provisionally. In either case, the negation’s sense depends on a future dimension; negation is ecstatic rather than sealed within the instant.

The first potentiality disclosed in this way is permanence. A table appears as a table because its continued identity comes to it from the future, not because an indefinitely long duration has been established as a fact. The time involved is neither finite nor infinite: potentiality itself opens the dimension of futurity. The table’s permanence is thus not an independently completed property waiting to be observed. It is a meaning that the for-itself projects and that the table receives as the correlate of that engagement.

This structure also explains how qualities acquire an essence. A particular green is never simply the pure essence of green made present; the pure green remains an absent meaning toward which the concrete green is understood. The essence haunts the existent as what it lacks in order to be fully and identically what it is. Abstraction, on this account, is not a later psychological act in which a mind selects a quality from an already constituted thing. It is an original structure through which the for-itself discloses a meaningful world, making concrete things intelligible by projecting what they are not yet as a present, finished essence.

Potentiality, past experience, and lack

Potentialities include more than endurance or essence. A crescent moon can appear in relation to a future full moon, just as a bud can appear in relation to a future flower. These connections are discovered through the past: the for-itself’s empirical knowledge carries the learned relation between crescent and full moon, bud and flower. Yet this knowledge is not merely an inert store of facts. The past operates behind the for-itself, largely out of reach as thematic knowledge, while helping disclose what something may be in the future.

The crescent is consequently constituted in relation to what it lacks. The full moon returns toward it as the meaning of a possible completion, and this relation makes the crescent appear as a crescent rather than as an undifferentiated mark in the sky. The for-itself likewise surpasses what it has been toward what it is not yet; through this surpassing, lack comes into the world in forms such as potency, incompletion, suspension, and potentiality. These are not simply hidden properties of objects. They arise with the for-itself’s capacity to project a beyond.

But the thing itself does not live its future as the for-itself does. The in-itself is what it is, without having to become its permanence, essence, or possible completion. A crescent moon may be disclosed as lacking the full moon, yet it is also fully what it is as a concrete sign in the sky. A bud and a match display the same double aspect: the bud may be understood toward the flower, and the match may be expected to ignite, but the match presently remains a piece of white wood with a black tip. Its meaning as a match does not become an inward project belonging to the wood.

Probabilities and equivalent possibilities

Potentialities are fixed in the very act through which they arise, and the relation between an in-itself and its potentiality is external. An inkwell may be shattered against the marble of a fireplace, but its breakability is not a power it possesses in itself; it is the transcendent correlate of the for-itself’s possibility of throwing it. In itself the inkwell is neither breakable nor unbreakable. It is. The object does not have to become the possibility projected upon it.

Nor does apprehending the inkwell in one way strip it of every other potentiality. The same inkwell may be put in a drawer or shattered. The crescent may be taken as an open curve in the sky or as a disk held in suspense. Because the for-itself’s freedom makes its possibilities non-necessary, the opposite possibility remains available as well. These equivalent possibilities refer to the thing without being produced by it or required of it. The text calls them probabilities: they exist in the mode of the in-itself, each as a fixed possibility, rather than as an action the for-itself has already made possible.

This distinction separates the being of the object from its projected significance. The inkwell exists, while its being-an-inkwell is a probable meaning founded on an external relation. Its essence, like its possible breakage, is made-to-be as a correlate of the for-itself’s possible negation; it is neither the object itself nor another being inside it. Potentialities and probabilities are therefore in-itself beyond being: they are nothingness-shaped meanings through which the world is articulated, not additional constituents that knowledge inserts into objects.

Perception and the limits of scientific explanation

The for-itself reveals the inkwell as an inkwell by surpassing its being toward a future that is not. In doing so, knowledge neither adds a quality to the inkwell nor removes one from it. It causes being to appear there by relating it, through negative exteriority, to meanings beyond its present being. Potentialities are thus neither arbitrary decorations nor secret powers lodged within things. They are necessary structures of perception, even though the things disclosed through them remain indifferent to those projected meanings.

Science may attempt to establish relations of simple exteriority and to suppress the potential, including essence and powers. Yet scientific knowledge cannot overcome or eliminate the potentializing structure of perception; it must presuppose it. To study an object as an object already involves disclosing what it is, what it may do, or how it may persist. Potentiality and probability therefore mark a limit within scientific explanation: science can investigate relations among things, but its investigation begins within a world already rendered intelligible through projected meanings.

The account’s sequence—from the this and spatiality through permanence, essence, and potentiality—is a clarification of structures, not a ranking of stages that actually occur one after another. The for-itself’s upsurge discloses the thing with its structures together. The this cannot be detached from essence, and essence is always the essence of a this; neither can be isolated from the world in which things appear. Potentiality and Probability accordingly describes not a special class of objects, but the relational condition under which objects show up as enduring, significant, and capable of change while remaining what they are.