3 Aristotle and the Taxonomy of Being: From Potential to Actualisation

If Plato abstracted possibility into transcendent universals, Aristotle returned construal to the immanent world. His philosophy did not abolish the Platonic cut but reoriented it: from the eternal perfection of Forms to the ordered diversity of beings. In Aristotle, possibility was no longer defined by transcendence but by the dynamics of actualisation within the world itself.

Aristotle’s Categories offered a systematic taxonomy of being: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and passion. Each category functioned as a construal strategy, carving the manifold of experience into analysable kinds. Where Plato privileged the universal as the ground of possibility, Aristotle grounded construal in the classificatory differentiation of particulars. Being was no longer a transcendent realm but a structured field of categories through which entities could be known, distinguished, and related.

At the heart of this system lay the distinction between potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (energeia). Potential was not a transcendent ideal but an immanent orientation toward becoming. A seed has the potential to grow into a tree; actuality is the fulfilment of this directed capacity. Possibility, in this view, is tied to the inner principle of individuation: to what a thing can become by virtue of what it already is.

Aristotle’s construal therefore fused taxonomy with teleology. To classify a being was also to situate it within its natural trajectory of actualisation. The cosmos was ordered as a hierarchy of substances, each individuated by its form and oriented toward its proper end. Knowledge itself became the act of discerning these structures — to know a thing was to know its category, its essence, and its path from potential to actual.

This Aristotelian framework inaugurated a durable mode of construal: systematic, classificatory, and teleological. It preserved the possibility of universality but grounded it in the organisation of particulars rather than in transcendent ideals. In doing so, Aristotle established philosophy as a science of being-in-the-world, providing the architecture within which both medieval scholasticism and modern science would later unfold.

Thus, in contrast to Plato’s abstraction, Aristotle’s legacy was to anchor possibility in the very processes of individuation and actualisation. It is here that Western philosophy first began to construe being not only as what eternally is, but as what can become.