Man as Potentiality: Nietzsche, Aristotle, and the Fate of Becoming

dunamis and energeia. AI image

 Introduction

“Man is something that shall be overcome,” declares Zarathustra (Prologue, §3). In another passage Nietzsche writes: “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch—a rope over an abyss.” (The Will to Power, §868). These two lines, brief yet immense, contain the essence of Nietzsche’s anthropology: humanity is not an accomplished being but a transition. Man is not an endpoint, but a bridge, a perilous crossing suspended between what he was and what he could become.

To explore what this means, it is helpful to borrow the vocabulary of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: potentiality (dunamis) and actuality (energeia). In these terms, man appears as a potentiality—a being capable of transformation—whose realization may proceed in radically different directions. Nietzsche offers two possible outcomes: the last man, who renounces the struggle of becoming, and the Übermensch, who embraces the creative task of self-overcoming. The destiny of humanity, then, lies in how this potential is actualized.

Man as Potentiality: A Being Between

In Aristotle’s thought, potentiality refers to what can be but is not yet. A seed contains the possibility of becoming a tree; an apprentice, that of becoming a master. Each being strives toward its proper form, its fulfillment (entelecheia). Nietzsche inherits this dynamic sense of being, but empties it of teleology. When Zarathustra says that man is something to be overcome, he implies that humanity has no fixed essence. To be human is precisely to be unfinished, to exist as an open project.

The metaphor of the rope expresses this perfectly. A rope is not a resting place but a tension stretched between two points. It holds together the animal, representing instinct and necessity, and the Übermensch, symbolizing creative transcendence. Between these poles, man hangs suspended, defined by his instability. As Zarathustra tells his listeners, “Man is a bridge, not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is a going-over and a down-going.” (Zarathustra, Prologue §4). The human being thus occupies a space of becoming, a fragile passage where potentiality seeks its direction.

Two Actualizations: The Last Man and the Übermensch

For Nietzsche, the fate of this potential is not guaranteed. It may culminate in the triumph of spirit or in its exhaustion. These two possibilities—the last man and the Übermensch—represent opposing ways of actualizing the same human potential.

The last man embodies the decline of the will to power. He is the one who has turned away from risk, passion, and creativity, preferring comfort and security. “‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink,” mocks Zarathustra (Prologue, §5). In him, potentiality collapses into inertia; the rope slackens. He no longer desires to become anything other than what he is. The abyss, once terrifying, is now ignored.

The Übermensch, by contrast, represents the fullest flowering of human possibility. He is not a metaphysical savior but the figure of self-creation, the one who says yes to existence even when it wounds. In Beyond Good and Evil (§260), Nietzsche writes that the noble soul “honors itself as one who commands, as one who creates values.” This creative affirmation transforms the absence of divine purpose into an opportunity for invention. Where Aristotle’s actuality fulfills a given form, Nietzsche’s actualization creates form itself.

Both figures arise from the same field of possibility, but they diverge in their relation to becoming: one seeks to terminate it; the other to intensify it. In Aristotelian terms, man’s dunamis can be realized as either the closure of potentiality (the last man) or the affirmation of endless becoming (the Übermensch).

The Abyss and the End of Teleology

The image of the abyss introduces a decisive difference between Nietzsche and Aristotle. For the latter, every being tends toward its natural end, its telos. The acorn’s potential is oriented toward the oak; the sculptor’s toward the completed statue. In Nietzsche’s vision, however, the telos has vanished. The death of God dissolves every preordained goal. The rope now stretches over emptiness, and the abyss signifies precisely this absence of necessity.

This is why Nietzsche’s anthropology is tragic. The human being is condemned to choose without guidance, to define itself without appeal to nature or divine order. Man must now be his own end. The Übermensch is therefore not the perfection of a natural essence, but the creation of a new one. The process of becoming no longer leads toward fulfillment but remains open, perilous, and creative. “Man,” writes Nietzsche in The Gay Science (§125), “is a transition and a destruction.”

In this light, Nietzsche does not reject the Aristotelian distinction between potentiality and actuality; he radicalizes it. He transforms it from a metaphysical principle into an existential condition. To exist is to be perpetually incomplete, to oscillate between ascent and decline, invention and exhaustion.

Conclusion: The Fate of Potentiality

If “man is something that shall be overcome,” it is because he is not yet himself. He stands at a threshold, capable of realizing his nature either as decadence or as creation. The Aristotelian framework helps us see that for Nietzsche, humanity is a metaphysical experiment: the question of what life can become once it is freed from fixed ends.

In our own time, when technology promises infinite comfort and automation threatens to dissolve effort, Nietzsche’s diagnosis regains its urgency. The risk is not that we will fail to perfect ourselves, but that we will cease to desire perfection altogether—that we will become, willingly, the last men. Yet the same potential that allows for decline also allows for greatness. The abyss is dangerous, but without it there can be no rope, no crossing, no future.

Man, then, remains what he was for Nietzsche: a possibility suspended between animal and creator, a question rather than an answer. His task is not to rest but to become—to affirm, in the face of nothingness, the creative power of life itself.

Bibliography

Aristotle. Metaphysics. Trans. W.D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1978.

———. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968.

———. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1990.

———. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche. Vol. I–IV. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.