A Philosophy of the Possible: Modalities in Thought and Culture

For most of us, the world in which we live is that of the actual and the necessary. We are good at making statements about what is and claims about what must be, hence so much text everywhere. The more we move away from the material dimension of our lives and into the textual, the more ethereal our world becomes. Epstein notes of this change of modalities that “a thing or event acquires meaning only in the context of its possibilities.” This shift of attention from thing or event to text, to the context of possibilities, opens paths for multiple futures—for what could be. The search for flickering signs of possibility may seem elusive if not illusory, and the reader may wonder, Why write a book about such intangibilities? The value of this book, however, is palpable. It takes us beyond the limits of the actual and imperative modalities by means of a method that Epstein calls “potentiation,” which forms the basis for “potentiology,” the science of “ableness.” Epstein brilliantly applies the method to questions of society, culture, ethics, psychology, and religion. He is careful to note that potentiation, as a method transforming the real into the possible, works only insofar as possibilistic thinking remains elastic. Unlike, as it were, a plastic approach to objects that results in their deformation, elasticity of thought leads to the world undergoing creative and constructive shifts yet resuming its development in new and potentially important ways.When Epstein writes that “it is desirable for any writer to produce an interesting work,” he takes interesting to mean more than “catching or holding attention.” Truly interesting books develop and explore alternative worlds, and in doing so inspire the readers’ creativity and freedom to “possibilize” reality in their own ways. Epstein has produced, in this sense, an extremely interesting work, admirably and eloquently achieving his goal, which is to show that the actual and the necessary cannot exist unless they are first thought and expressed as possible.