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

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.