The Dialectics of Energy: From the Concept to Actuality, from Actuality to Virtuality, from Virtuality to…

Abstract

I will consider, first, the positive charge of energeia in Aristotle, who identified it with the actuality of the actual. Then, I will pay attention to the negative charge that re-signifies the term, bestowing on it the exact opposite sense of potentiality. Rather than a radical correction of Aristotle, this polarizing modern signification unfolds in the field prepared in, if also rejected by, Greek Antiquity and unblocks the electric current of the concept of energy, a directional flow of charged particles of meaning from the positive to the negative pole. Still, the flow does not just happen by itself: the equivalent of electromotive force (EMF) is a fresh glance at the history of philosophy, not as a field dotted with static monuments to past intellectual achievements, but as an electric, or electromagnetic, semantic field. Only by grasping the conceptual circuitry of energy as a whole is it possible to appreciate the complex relation of this concept to the history of philosophical and theological thought and to the present.

1. Prologue: A Phenomenology of Energy

What is energy, before it becomes a quantity, before it is measured in joules, extracted from the depths of the earth or the core of an atom, or dissipated into the entropy of the world? What is energy before it is harnessed, its types classified? The question does not seek a definition, least of all a scientific one, but an orientation: a way of standing with and within what moves, what works or is put to and into a work, what resists exhaustion while remaining finite. Philosophy is this orientation. It is where the word energeia first made sense and emerged as a word and a concept; where the play of act and potency, of presence and privation, received its earliest formulation. Yet, philosophy, too, has forgotten this origin, surrendering it to the technical, the economic, the industrial, and the reductively scientific domains—those latter-day theologies that mistake conversion for creation and productivity for being.

To begin again from and with energeia is not to return to Aristotle as to a lost source, but to enter the domain his thought opened without fully anticipating its consequences. The question of energy is not only that of what powers or propels machinery (including that of an organismic body) but of how being itself manifests itself, appears as the non-autonomous, finite, essentially incomplete presence of a thing. Thus, even as energy migrates from the lexicon of metaphysics to the laboratories of modern physics, from the unmoved mover to the dynamo, the transformer, and the reactor, its conceptual current remains unbroken, though often occluded by its own intensities.

We might say that every epoch of thought is characterized by the dominant polarity of its energetic imagination. For Aristotle, the positive pole (the actuality of being-in-the-work and of being-at-work) draws the circuit of reality to completion. For modernity, the negative pole (the power, the potential, the potency of transformation) gives rise to endless production, to the will-to-energy that consumes the world and finally itself. Today, the field is unstable, oscillating between the virtual and the actual, between storage and expenditure, between the promise of renewable energies and the entropy of planetary exhaustion, often donning the ideological mask of renewability. We live not in the age of energy but in the age of its forgetting, where the very abundance of energetic phenomena and discourses concerned with them conceals the conceptual poverty of our understanding.

To think energy anew is not to add another concept to the philosophical and theological inventory, but to reopen the dialectic that traverses the history of thought—from energeia to dunamis, from Wirklichkeit to Möglichkeit, from actuality to virtuality (and back). The following reflections trace this dialectical current as a complex field of interactions, where every philosophical “charge” induces a counter-charge, every concept is an inversion of itself, and where the fate of a livable world depends on recovering its energetic actuality otherwise. The aim is neither to restore nor to invert Aristotle’s legacy; the aim is to think its unthinkable remainder: the energy of the concept itself, working through us as we attempt to work through it.

This essay, then, refrains from dealing with energy in the abstract and proposes, instead, an energetics of thought, attending to how the concept of energy generates its own field, its own movement, its own resistances. To think energy is already to participate in its unfolding, to be caught in the circuit that links the conceptual and the actual, the actual and the virtual, the virtual and the still-to-come. Each turn of the dialectic marks not a closure but a discharge, not the end of philosophy but its recharging into what Heidegger will have called “the beginning of thinking.”

2. The E-Field of the Concept of Energy

The topic we are about to touch upon cannot be easily circumscribed: try as we may, we would not be able to fit it within 5000 words, or within 50,000, for that matter. On the one hand, energy is an ancient gift of philosophy and theology to the world, a word that puts the face, or the mask, on the elusive thing it names. It is, more precisely, the gift of a thinker, namely Aristotle, who insisted that it should never be interpreted the way we grasp energy today. On the other hand, and despite being so ancient, it is a gift yet to be received, one that, regardless of our constant hankering after energy, has been thoroughly forgotten and that, from the depths of this oblivion, will continue steering the world, so long as something still endures, holding tight to being.

Along with these preparatory thoughts, a set of questions comes to light. How to delimit the unlimited? How to conjugate philosophy and energy, keeping in mind the origination of the latter from the former (at least, as a concept) and the subsequent betrayal of that origin? What is the paradigm that could do justice to this conjunction?

The framework that has been adopted here is admittedly derived from physics; it is the framework of electricity applied to the concept of energy. We will consider, first, the positive charge of energeia in Aristotle, who identified it with the actuality of the actual.1 Then, we will examine the negative charge that re-signifies the term, bestowing on it the exact opposite sense of potentiality. Rather than a radical correction of Aristotle, this polarizing modern signification unfolds in the field prepared in, if also rejected by, Greek Antiquity and unblocks the electric current of the concept of energy, a directional flow of charged particles of meaning from the positive to the negative pole. Still, the flow does not just happen by itself: the equivalent of electromotive force (EMF) is a fresh glance at the history of philosophy, not as a field dotted with static monuments to past intellectual achievements, but as an electric, or electromagnetic, semantic field. Only by grasping the conceptual circuitry of energy as a whole will we be in a position to appreciate the complex relation of this concept to the history of philosophical and theological thought and to our actuality.

Field theory in physics explains the interactions of one charge “with another charge at a different place and at a later time.” (Chirgwin et al. 1971). What of the conceptual space and time that constitute the history of philosophy? And how does the field of a charged concept (in this case, energy) interact with another such charged unit (which is also energy in its otherness to itself)? The electric field of a positive charge irradiates outwards in all directions: that is, mutatis mutandis, the influence of Aristotelian energeia on the subsequent and future thinking of energy. Nowhere near a self-contained unit, energeia creates its own field, to which, undeterred by various efforts poured into repressing the conceptual origin of energy, thinking must respond. “Instead of considering the electric force as a direct interaction of two electric charges at a distance from each other, one charge is considered the source of an electric field that extends outward into the surrounding space, and the force exerted on a second charge in this space is considered as a direct interaction between the electric field and the second charge.” (Gregersen 2011). It follows that, by revisiting Aristotle’s thinking of energeia, we are gaining much more than insight into a particular form of conceptualizing energy. We are entering a field with which every ensuing form of this conceptualization will have to contend and interact.

3. The Positive Charge of Energy: Aristotle and the Actuality of Energeia

Energeia, as already mentioned, is an Aristotelian coinage, a neologism made of the prefix en-, the root ergon, and the suffix -eia. In Energy Dreams, I proposed to translate this word, from which “energy” derives, as enworkment, while noting that “the work in its midst is nowhere near transparent; we have to work at it, at this work, if we are to appreciate its countless nuances. The range of what ergon signifies is quite broad: from task to function and from work to its product.” (Marder 2017). Combining an accomplished work and the workings that precede and succeed it, energeia encompasses the potential thing-in-the-making and the actual thing-that-is-made. It, thus, pulls together the two opposite strands of sense that will have been elucidated in the course of history (philosophico-conceptual and empirico-practical) and that will have received their differential evaluations already from Aristotle himself.

The word invented by Aristotle expresses, nevertheless, a hidden preference, before any philosophical justification or theoretical explanation. Energeia is a noun with the suffix -eia. It is akin to the English activation, which quells the impulse of an act in another substativation, audible in the suffix -tion. Energeia, Aristotle states, “means the presence of the thing, not in the sense which we mean by ‘potentially’ [ἔστι δὴ ἐνέργεια τὸ ὑπάρχειν τὸ πρᾶγμα μὴ οὕτως ὥσπερ λέγομεν δυνάμει]” (Met. 1048a, 31–2). It is, then, a mode of presence of the thing that is not merely potential, is not suffused with dunamis and its already-not- or not-yet-present condition. The positive conceptual charge of energy consists of a double negative: not dunamis, not lack, which potentiality embodies vis à vis actuality. That is the analog of the electric field the term creates.

Although reflections on the pair energeia/dunamis begin with a consideration of movement (kinesis), they are not limited to movement alone, reaching all the way down (or up) to the ontological level (Met. 1045b, 35–1046a, 4) (Heidegger 1995). Movement, for Aristotle, is irreducible to changes of place; it involves also what, in modernity, would be called development or unfolding, with the moments of growth, metamorphosis, and decay included. Should we confine our thinking to movement, it would appear as if potentiality with its dynamism were primary, as if everything were ceaselessly guided from potentialities to actualities, as “everything changes from what it is potentially to what it is actually [μεταβάλλει πᾶν ἐκ τοῦ δυνάμει ὄντος εἰς τὸ ἐνεργείᾳ ὄν]” (1069b, 15). (Keep in mind that change—metabolē—is a variety of movement in Aristotle.) Were we, conversely, to insist on the immobility of being, compared to becoming, we would endorse nothing more than a privation of movement, which is not the same kind of double negative as that implied in the definition of energeia as not-dunamis. It is by working his way through movement and its paradoxes that Aristotle arrives at an insight into the unmoved mover, his attempt to reach pure energy, or actuality unalloyed with potentiality.

“It seems,” Aristotle suggests, “that everything that actually functions has a potentiality, whereas not everything that has a potentiality actually functions; so that potentiality is prior [δοκεῖ γὰρ τὸ μὲν ἐνεργοῦν πᾶν δύνασθαι τὸ δὲ δυνάμενον οὐ πᾶν ἐνεργεῖν, ὥστε πρότερον εἶναι τὴν δύναμιν]” (1071b, 22–5). These are only potential actualities, not living up to his roundabout definition of energeia in terms of the presence of a thing rid of potentiality. And so, still within the phenomenal field of movement, Aristotle leaps to “that which moves without being moved,” a conceptual knot tying together energeia, or actuality, being, and the unmoved mover. With regard to a work (ergon), we must conclude that, while it comes out of itself, “there is also something that moves it. And since that which is moved while it moves is intermediate, there is something which moves without being moved; something eternal, which is both substance and actuality [ἔστι τι ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, ἀΐδιον καὶ οὐσία καὶ ἐνέργεια οὖσα]” (1072a, 20–5).

Even a cursory glance is sufficient to realize that the unmoved mover has little to do with the metaphysical caricatures it has been subject to in the history of philosophy. Pure, active without a shadow of passivity, eternal being deduced from the impossibility of infinite regress (something is moved while it moves, and what moves it is itself moved…) is entwined with the movement of becoming. Corresponding to the definition of energeia as a presence that is not potential, it does not stagnate, but “moves without being moved.” Its activity is counterbalanced by a substantive form: first, as ousia and, second, as energeia. In the shape of actuality, Aristotle’s energy is, at the same time, the act that actuality contains, the unity of subject and substance, to put it in Hegelian language.

4. The Negative Charge of Energy: Power and Potentiality

The Aristotelian lineage of thinking energy as actuality survived in philosophy up to the nineteenth century, when Hegel translated energeia as Wirklichkeit in his own dialectical system (Marder 2021). This lineage passes through Plotinus, adamant that pure actuality is accessible in the intelligible world, whereas potential existence is “the world of things perceived by the senses” (Enneads II.5.1, 5–10). It then makes a detour through theology: in Western Christianity, St. Thomas Aquinas’s identification of matter with potentiality and the energy of actus purus with the being of God (Summa theologiae I.3, 2); in the Byzantine tradition, the contrast Gregory Palamas draws between divine creative power and “its energy directed toward created things [τα δεδημιουργημένα ἐνεργείας]” (Triads III.ii.8). Meister Eckhart forms a link of sorts between Aristotle and Hegel by projecting the difference between the divine act and God’s supreme inactivity—the difference we also find in Palamas—onto the distinction between God (Gott) and Godhead (Gottheit) (Eckhart 1994).

The lineage, or the philosophico-electric line, extending from Aristotle to Hegel amplifies the conceptual e-field of positively charged energeia (despite the preponderance of negativity in Hegelian dialectics). Nonetheless, in the nineteenth century, the thinking of energy undergoes a dramatic reversal: as it becomes synonymous with potency, potentiality, or power, energy acquires the very meaning Aristotle denied it, namely that associated with dunamis, or the Latin potestas. At roughly the same time, energy leaves the purview of philosophy and is said to be the competence of physicists and other scientists. Which begs the question: can one think energy philosophically only with and through Aristotle, as the movement of and in the actual?

The laws of thermodynamics are fundamental in physics, and, in one way or another, they deal with energy under the heading of dunamis, potentiality. For example, the first law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of the conservation of energy, was codified by German chemist Karl Friedrich Mohr in 1837, presenting energy as “the one and only agent in the physical world.” (Wasserman 2012). Mohr’s word for energy is Kraft—force or power. Work (the ergon of energeia) is no more than the process of transferring energy from one system to another. That is the active dynamism of energetic transformations. Their passive dynamism, in turn, is encapsulated in “potential energy,” a term coined by Scottish physicist William Rankine and referring to energy stored in any physical system (Vincent 2011). As I note in Energy Dreams apropos of this concept, “stored energy retains the potential for conversion into other types of energy, participating in an endless chain of events that will never be actualized.”2 After energy is conceived as a quantum of power or force, it can only present itself as active or passive dynamism, that is to say, an actively changing or a passively stored potentiality, saddled with the minus sign in Aristotle’s philosophy.

The second law of thermodynamics, crystallized in the works of nineteenth-century French engineer Nicolas Leonard Carnot and refined by German physicist Rudolf Clausius, introduces the notion of entropy. Besides the fact that the sequence of energy transformations can never be actualized (i.e., all we have are transitions from one potential energy to another), every energy system “that goes through a cycle of operations and returns to its original state does so only by increasing the entropy of its exterior with which it is interacting.” (Kondepudi and Ilya 2015). Putting energy to work is losing it, irreversibly, leading to its entropic dispersal from the system at work.

Curiously, Clausius invented the word entropy on the Aristotelian model, replacing ergon with tropē (transformation, change) (Bushev 1994). In fact, entropy means, precisely, dunamis that, rather than the opposite of energy, comes to define its operativity, the condition of being-at-work. It ties energy to movement, indeed to a specific variety of movement in Aristotle that is metabolē, implying the primacy of potentiality, even as “kinetic energy” converts kinesis, in the limited sense of movement as dislocation, into one among many types of energy: chemical, thermal, gravitational, nuclear, etc. Energy at rest, for its part, is equally in the grip of potentiality, insofar as it implies, according to Rankine, storage in a closed system prior to its release or transformation. The conceptual tyranny of dunamis becomes total by the time the second law of thermodynamics is formulated.

In nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, a shift in the concept of energy takes place surreptitiously, given the relegation of this concept (no longer as a concept but as a scientific term) to physics and associated disciplines. From Friedrich Nietzsche’s will-to-power through Martin Heidegger’s assertion in Being and Time that “higher than actuality stands possibility [höher als die Wirklichkeit steht die Möglichkeit],” (Heidegger 1962) dunamis in thin disguise gains an upper hand over energeia in philosophy, as well. Heidegger’s programmatic statement is vital to the entire existentialist tradition of the twentieth century, where the actual is actually subjugated to the possible. And that is not to mention other currents of thought, such as possible worlds theory or fictionalism, that present a hyperbolic version of the same tacit resignification of whatever remains of energy in philosophy.

5. Unblocking the Electric Current of Energy as a Concept

From the standpoint of Aristotelian philosophy, the attribution of potentiality and power to energy makes it into what it is not. We lose energy the moment we think we have captured it in the nets of dunamis, now translated into the Latin potestas or potentia. However radical and however impervious to historical antecedents it may be, this inversion happens on the grounds of Aristotelianism. We live in a topsy-turvy world of energeia identified with its other, which is also, and not by coincidence, the upside-down reality of capital, where exchange value is primary with respect to use value.

The inversion is not an instance of betraying an authentic concept we ought to recover at any cost; instead, it is an opportunity to “air” the traditional notion of energy, stamped by Aristotle, and to examine its actual historical interaction with potentiality. One of the last thinkers to hear an echo of Aristotle’s energeia, Hegel laid the foundations for thinking this interaction dialectically: in dialectics, where through self-negation energy generates its opposite, and as dialectics, interpreted as the trials and tribulations of energeia–Wirklichkeit–energy. As I note in Hegel’s Energy: “A historical schema suggested itself, whereby, having first surfaced as actuality in Aristotle’s energeia and having been then negated into a dynamic form of energy in modernity, the concept of energy is only beginning to come into its own in Hegel’s thought that replays both of these movements at once. More importantly, though, it must come into its own in our twenty-first century actuality if the murderous and suicidal tendencies of contemporary “energy production” are to be countered, because—like all dialectical concepts—it is not just an ideal-theoretical entity (a thing of the mind, to put it simply) but also a set of practices, embodied relations, and institutions.”3

Dialectics explores energy within the conceptual electric current, in which the rate of flow of a charge4 depends on tensions between actuality and potentiality vying for the determining role. And it fashions itself into this conceptual electric current, a conduit for the flow of speculative meanings, of X and not-X, actuality and non-actuality. Aristotle’s circuitous definition of energeia as the “presence of the thing, not in the sense which we mean by ‘potentially’” is elucidated otherwise, once non-actuality is understood in its essential dialectical co-belonging with actuality.

But, in addition to dialectics, there are other methods of unblocking and gauging the rate of flow of energy’s conceptual charge. Some of these other methods have been hovering on the margins of philosophy and theology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Giorgio Agamben’s inoperosità (the French désoeuvrement, or, in English, inoperativity), it is easy to detect the negation of opera, of oeuvre, work, or ergon. Rather than a mere absence of work or activity, it is “a generic mode of potentiality, which is not exhausted (like the individual or collective action, intended as the sum of individual actions) in a transitus de potentia ad actum.” (Agamben 1998). Agamben explicitly aligns the negative charge of inoperosità with a “generic…potentiality,” but, leaping over potential actualities and actual potentialities, he makes a full circle and reaches in absolute potentiality the state of fulness and accomplishment, characteristic of Aristotle’s energeia. As purely potential beings devoid of a work (ergon) that is proper to them,5 humans are not, thereby, separated from energeia; on the contrary, they are entrusted with care for energeia as such and as a whole, a mission, in which they have suffered a spectacular world-historical failure.

In his unintended return to an aspect of Aristotelian energeia under the sign of its other, Agamben follows in the footsteps of Georges Bataille, from whom he inherits désoeuvrement, and Alexandre Kojève, with his “Sabbath of Man.” And it is not only a generic potentiality, but also an “impotentiality,” adunamia, that completes the circle or the circuit of energy, unblocking the conceptual electric current it carries (Agamben 2000b). If, for Aristotle, energy is the “presence of the thing, not in the sense which we mean by ‘potentially’,” then the negation of dunamis by energeia dovetails with the not-only-privative self-negation of potentiality. (This is what, in basic electronics, is called an “alternating current,” or AC—the electrical current that “is changing in both the positive and negative directions with time.” (Bhargava et al. 2013).) Emmanuel Levinas’s, Jacques Derrida’s, Gianni Vattimo’s, and John Caputo’s philosophical and theological musings on “God without God,” “God beyond God,” “the weakness of God,” or “a trace of God” belong together with the non-dialectical conceptual circuitry, into which Agamben wires energy, actuality, and potentiality.

6. Whither Philosophy and Energy?

Now that I have offered this all too brief overview of the being-at-work or of being-in-the-work that is energy, it is necessary to ask how philosophy may contribute to the theory and practice of the concept it birthed nearly two and a half millennia ago. My preliminary response is contained in the five theses below.

(a)

In the twenty-first century, philosophical and theological approaches to energy are as indispensable as the one guided by physics, among other theoretical and empirical disciplines and methodologies. It is crucial to ask what energy is, how it fits within the logic of means and ends, and in what ways our conceptions of it might be transformed in tandem with changes made to the practices of procuring it. Absent this base, the discourses on alternative, or “green,” sources of energy will ring empty.

(b)

Despite a series of discontinuities, gaps, and even U-turns in the thinking of energy since Aristotle, its history is bound to the first emergence of energeia on the philosophical scene and to the multiple effects it has produced, some of them unconscious, unintended, or altogether unaccounted for. Provided that a future philosophy of energy keeps in view the grand historical panorama of the concept outlined in this essay, it would have to make a decision, leaning toward Aristotelian actuality, the potentiality that succeeded it, or the complex conceptual current that recombines the two. Once this choice takes the form of a decision, it becomes clear that—given (a) the impossibility of recovering an original concept as though all subsequent intellectual history did not take place, and (b) the tacit involvement of energy-qua-potentiality in our extractive–destructive worldview and mode of energy production—only the third option opens up a bona fide field for the future thinking of energy.

(c)

Just as the philosophical, theological, and scientific formulations and formalizations of energy are intricately interwoven—various incongruities, inversions, and contradictions among them notwithstanding—the most mundane practices of procuring energy are inseparable from what, at first glance, appears to be high theory. In general, the activities and artefacts comprising our world are energy at work and in the work; in particular, activities, such as fracking, and artefacts, such as energy drinks, are energy redoubled, reflected into itself and expressive of our relation to it as something to be extracted, even and especially at the price of destroying that in which or those in whom it is temporarily stored (recall Rankine’s “potential energy”).

(d)

There is nothing as lethal as a hypostatized potentiality, i.e., energy in its otherness to itself, separated from the field that has contained it hitherto. Akin to a black hole, it emits no light and sucks in everything in its vicinity. When possibility knows no limits, when it disregards the actual with its finite span and fragile outlines, it acts to level down what is for the sake of what could be, to make the actual conform to its own mold. A future philosophy and theology of energy would need to put actuality and potentiality in touch otherwise, either dialectically or non-dialectically. Far from accomplished, the work of unblocking the electric current of energy as a concept has hardly begun. This work, too, is an integral part of the enworkment that energeia is and that, here, more than elsewhere, is urged to keep working on itself.

(e)

By reimagining the shapes energy may assume today and into the future, philosophy and theology would be reinventing themselves, while philosophers and theologians would be responding anew to the ancient injunction, Know thyself! It is not only a matter of envisioning “greener,” more sustainable forms of energy production, but also, and above all, of creating the ground upon which these axiological judgments are made within the logic of means and ends informed by evolving energy configurations. The miniature conceptual-electric circuit I have sketched on these pages is but a detail in the still hidden vistas of this endeavor.

7. Epilogue: Toward a Virtual Actuality of Energy

If, in the course of its history, philosophy has thought energy as either actuality or potentiality, perhaps it is time to think it as both… and neither. Between energeia and dunamis stretches not a gulf but a field, a region of mutual induction where one is recharged with the other. In this field, the conceptual current of energy reveals itself as alternating: positive and negative, actual and virtual, productive and entropic, alternating at the frequency of being itself. The alternation (and the alteration in the senses of energy) may be only registered within a historical perspective on philosophy, without which philosophy itself is closed to understanding.

We find ourselves, now, at the threshold of another transmutation. The energy that once meant actuality (energeia) and later meant power (Kraft, potentia) now begins to mean virtuality: the potential to appear, to manifest, manifests nothing but its own annihilation and that of the world, of which it is the expression. The virtual absolutized is the self-displacement of energy into the space of its own mediation, where being no longer flickers between appearance and disappearance, between charge and discharge, but appears as already disappeared, lost, done away with. Digitality, information, algorithmic flows—these are the latest masks of energy. Yet, beneath them, the ancient dialectic of presence and potentiality continues to hum, unbroken, if increasingly inaudible.

The challenge, then, is to think energy not as a thing, nor even as a concept, but as a relation that both constitutes and exceeds its poles, a field where theology, physics, and philosophy are not distinct but continuous modes of thinking the actual and the potential that, far from mere objects of thought, sweep thinking into their whirlwind. The relation is broken if one of its sides is so hypervalorized as to nearly erase the other. Today’s lopsidedness is on the side of energy’s virtuality, which strives to do away with the actual.

The unmoved mover and laws of thermodynamics, the Sabbath of the world and the entropy of work belong to one and the same circuit, charged by the oscillations of actuality and virtuality. To approach energy philosophically and theologically is to acknowledge this circuit, to inhabit it knowingly, to become part of its conductive medium. It is to put the two aspects of energy that have emerged in the history of thought together in a manner that affects the very senses of thought and of being.