well, not true! It never exists separately. And it is certainly not something individual or discrete.
Δύναμις-ἐνέργεια-ἐντελέχεια (dynamis-energeia-entelecheia). At another point in his writings, Aristotle uses a whole new set of words to describe this phenomenon. He looks at things – empirically, that is, in “experience” – and says there is some dynamic as the condition for things “within which” phenomena appear. This he calls in Greek δύναμις/dynamis, which we normally translate as “potency” or “potentiality.” And traditionally we hear in this word a name for something that is merely potential, something that is quietly and passively waiting to be acted upon, with no power of its own and not dynamic at all! Sometimes called materia prima?
But this dynamis, itself in movement-dynamic, is nothing passive and nothing material-physical! Its no-thing and no-form “condition” does not wait passively to be acted upon. It is always already “in action,” anticipating, filled with pregnant possibility that is already at work in δύναμις.
In the traditional interpretation of Aristotle here, when this passive “potency” gets acted upon, it becomes something – a tree, a building, a glass. And this something is then “actual,” which traditionally means having reached its result and then being static. Aristotle’s word for this actuality is energeia (ἐνέργεια). In the received, traditional sense, something moves from potentiality to actuality and then stands there in its ἐντελέχεια or completedness, that is, has reached its goal and is now static. But this is not the way things are, and Aristotle knew that!
Let us take a tree as an example. When we look at an oak tree, we say that the “potentiality” of oak tree is in the acorn and that when it sprouts and then is a seedling and then a young sapling … it is on its way to becoming an oak. And at one point it becomes an oak tree. But then our usual thinking thinks that the oak tree is now there, complete and “actual” – completed and static. But the Greek words do not say this. Rather they say that the tree is always “being-at-work” (en-ergon) in becoming an oak tree. It is always changing, in motion: always at-work.