This short essay is the first of a two-part exploration of modern conceptions of possibility. It traces the modern rebellion against antiquity’s deterministic framing of possibility as constrained by actuality, a view exemplified in the standard interpretation of Aristotle and reflected in much of modern modal theory.
Part I introduces the traditional Aristotelian conception of possibility, together with its transformation in modern modal logic, and shows how Kant’s preliminary reconfiguration of the faculties opened a path that thinkers such as Nietzsche and Bergson would later radicalize. They seized on Kant’s preliminary move from metaphysics to epistemology to break the historical linkage between possibility and determinate ends, thereby reimagining possibility as an open field of creative becoming.1
Part II will develop a critique of this Nietzschean–Bergsonian recasting of possibility as pure creativity. I will argue that it overlooks a richer role for teleology—not as deterministic necessity, but as the horizonal structure of projection developed in Kant’s theory of reflective judgment and deepened by Heidegger’s account of disclosedness.
1. Possibility as Modality in Aristotle and Modernity
An astute observer of nature will notice that it is defined by processes of generation and decay. We notice that things change and that this change is not random but orderly and consistent. Acorns grow into oak trees, and not the other way around. Acorns grow into oak trees, and have never been recorded to grow into elephants, and so on. These are the observations that shaped the understanding of possibility (Dunamis, lit. power, potential, or ability) developed by the ancient Greeks, in particular Aristotle.
For Aristotle, a possibility is not merely an indeterminate capacity or a formless becoming; it is always the capacity to be something in particular. Possibility is therefore teleologically structured from the outset. The power of the acorn is to become an oak tree, not anything whatsoever. In this sense, possibility is not an open horizon but a directed derivation toward a determinate end. In fact, according to Aristotle, it is this intelligibility of the final state (final cause) that makes the possibility itself intelligible. A sapling is understood as a developing oak tree; this end (telos) explains the process of its becoming.
On this basis, Aristotle distinguishes between primary and secondary possibilities. Living things have primary possibilities—self-directed, internal capacities that move them toward their proper activities. Secondary possibilities arise from external or accidental circumstances that may inhibit or disrupt this self-actualization. An acorn falling on infertile ground may grow into a stunted oak tree; the form remains the same, but the route to its fulfillment is diverted or blocked. In all such cases, the movement of nature is understood as the self-actualizing development of forms—ends or teloi guiding material processes toward their completion. This teleological orientation was later absorbed into medieval metaphysics, where the possibility of creatures was interpreted as a movement toward the perfection of God.
In modern analytical philosophy, this organic and teleological naturalism has been almost entirely effaced. Possibility is no longer a structure of nature but a logical function. Modal logic conceives possible worlds as alternative states of affairs, each fully determinate, existing in a conceptual space of options until one is “selected” for actualization. Here the Aristotelian language of final causes has vanished; what remains is a mechanical picture in which actuality is the realization of one logical possibility rather than another.
Yet despite the dramatic shift in metaphysical commitments, the structure of possibility insofar as it subordinates becoming to being remains intact. As in Aristotle, becoming is secondary: possibilities are defined by the end-states they represent, except now these ends are no longer vital forms but the outcomes of binary decision points—1 or 0, A or B. The teleology of nature has been replaced with a logic of deterministic branching, but the underlying architecture is similar. A “possible” state is a discrete, already-formed configuration awaiting selection. Aristotle’s developmental teleology survives in a disguised form as the modern assumption that macro-level phenomena emerge from microscopic possibility-events.
In both views, the actual is a pre-existing constraint on the possible, and becoming is merely the transition between actualized states. What is lost in the modern notion of possibility is the interior movement of an élan vital, an irreducible creative activity in nature itself. Possibility has become the geometry of predetermined states, not the open-ended novelty of life.
2. The Problem of Possibility in Nietzsche and Bergson
This modal picture of possibility as the unfolding of actuality is the enemy of post-Kantian thinkers such as Nietzsche and Bergson; one might even say it is the central object of their philosophical concern. For them, modal possibility is nothing less than the subjugation of becoming by being. In the modal framework, the future is already contained in the past; becoming is the mere execution of pregiven ends; novelty is a disguised form of necessity. There is no room for truly new forms of being to emerge.
Aristotle provides the classical articulation of this view: possibility (dunamis) is the power to be something, a power that renders becoming intelligible. To say that the possibility of the acorn is to become an oak tree is to explain the acorn’s becoming by restricting its future to a determinate range of outcomes. The acorn can be this, and therefore cannot be that. Its horizon of becoming is enclosed by its form. In this picture, the possible is not an open field but a pre-scripted trajectory.
In modernity, this concern has become more acute. High-level phenomena such as acorns, organisms, and persons are interpreted as the surface-effects of mechanical operations of modal possibilities taking place “behind the scenes.” Possibility becomes not only predetermined but fundamentally mechanistic, reducing life to the unfolding of hidden variables. The modal schema is preserved, but now in the starkest form: the world is a closed system of alternative states, all of which can in principle be described or predicted.
For Nietzsche and Bergson, this “closed” view of reality—where actuality exhausts the limits of possibility—is the defining error of philosophical thinking since classical antiquity. Kant’s critical philosophy appears, at first glance, to break this spell by displacing the ontological model with an epistemological one. In Aristotle’s metaphysics, nature is moved by its forms; in Kant’s epistemology, the causal order of nature is structured by the “transcendental conditions of representation.” Possibility now refers to what can appear for a subject, not to the latent powers of things. Yet even here, the structure remains fundamentally pre-determinative: experience is governed by a priori forms of intuition and categories of the understanding. Becoming is still subordinated to a framework that precedes it.
The decisive move made by Nietzsche and Bergson is to attack any pre-determinative conception of possibility—whether ontological or epistemological. For Nietzsche, the possible is a retrospective fiction imposed by interpretive forces; for Bergson, it is an abstraction derived from the actual after the fact. In both cases, modal possibility is exposed as a conceptual freeze-frame applied to the flux of life.
What results is a third concept of the possible, one freed from ontological and epistemological predetermination: possibility as creativity. Here becoming is not the realization of latent potentials nor the instantiation of cognitive forms, but the genuine production of new forms. The possible is not delimited by the actual; it is “open.” Possibility is now conceived of as creativity.
3. Possibility as Creativity in Nietzsche and Bergson
The particulars of how this is worked out in Nietzsche and Bergson are similar but also quite different. In Nietzsche, all conceptual worldviews, including Aristotelian ontology, Kantian epistemology, Christian metaphysics, scientific rationalism, are interpretations arising from the ascension and stabilization of certain perspectives (Perspektiven), understood as constellations of affective forces. These perspectives are basic for Nietzsche: they are not neutral viewpoints but dynamically organized patterns of drive, mood, and valuation. Because affects are inherently evaluative, they structure all conceptual forms—including time, causality, identity, necessity, etc.—in accordance with their immediate affective orientation.
In Nietzsche, conceptual worldviews and their truth-claims can be judged by examining the type of perspective that produced them: whether it arises from forces that are life-affirming (expansive, joyful, self-overflowing) or life-denying (reactive, resentful, ascetic). Here “life” refers to creative vitality apparent in the style of expression characteristic of the interpretation. Aristotelian teleology, for example, is a life-denying interpretation according to Nietzsche insofar as it seeks to limit creativity by imposing fixed representational forms (“the acorn may only grow into an oak tree”). Such representational constraints oppose the deeper creativity constitutive of life itself, reducing becoming to a regulated unfolding of pre-given ends.
Bergson, by contrast, grounds his account of creativity not in affective perspectives but in the nature of time itself, understood as creative duration (durée). For Bergson, time is not a series of homogeneous, spatialized units, nor a chain of discrete, causally related events. Rather, duration is the qualitative, heterogeneous, continuously generative flow of lived experience—a temporal continuity in which each moment carries the whole of the past in a contracted form and is thereby irreducibly distinct. Possibility, in both the ontological and epistemological sense, does not pre-exist the actual; it is a retroactive conceptualization we impose on events after they have occurred.
To treat time as a sequence of identical instants, or to understand change as the realization of fixed potentials, is to misunderstand its experiential texture. Moments are never homogeneous or repeatable; they interpenetrate one another as the past coalesces with perception, producing new realities at each step. The acorn never grows into the same oak tree, nor does it unfold a pre-given essence. Its growth expresses a creative duration whose character is sui generis—an emergent novelty rather than the fulfillment of a predetermined teleology. In this sense, Bergson’s ontology of life emphasizes the perpetual invention of form, not the execution of a metaphysical blueprint.
Conclusion
The classical and modern accounts of possibility—teleological in Aristotle or logical in contemporary modal metaphysics—treat becoming as secondary to being and restrict the future to predetermined forms. In response to the foundational work of Kant, Nietzsche and Bergson overturn this tradition by exposing such modal structures as retrospective abstractions that freeze the creative flux of life. For them, the possible is not delimited by the actual; it is generated by it creatively as the ground of becoming. Yet this very openness introduces a new difficulty: without any principle of organization, creativity risks becoming formless, leaving the future radically and, I will argue, self-defeatingly indeterminate. Philosophy becomes an emancipatory therapy, but risks “freeing” us from the very conditions that make human meaning possible. This tension sets the stage for Heidegger, who recovers imagination from Kant and reconceives possibility as a structured openness grounded in temporality itself.
- This is the philosophical meaning of the image of biting the head off the snake in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. ↩︎