Advances in the History of Rhetoric

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Aristotle’s Rhetorical Energeia: An Extended Note

Monica Westin

To cite this article: Monica Westin (2017) Aristotle’s Rhetorical Energeia: An Extended Note,
Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 20:3, 252-261, DOI: 10.1080/15362426.2017.1384769

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ADVANCES IN THE HISTORY OF RHETORIC
2017, VOL. 20, NO. 3, 252–261
https://doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2017.1384769

Aristotle’s Rhetorical Energeia: An Extended Note

Monica Westin
California College of the Arts

ABSTRACT
In Book III of the Rhetoric, Aristotle focuses at length on the effect
of lexical energeia. Scholarship on energeia in this passage almost
always associates it with with analysis of enargeia in later texts.
However, it is not clear that these two are used as equivalents in
Aristotle. Here I survey Aristotle’s conceptions of energeia across
the corpus in order to understand Aristotle’s use of energeia in the
Rhetoric more precisely. I argue that Aristotle’s model of energeia
has a consistent fundamental meaning, even as it crosses many
topoi, and that Aristotle’s rhetorical energeia cannot be conflated
with enargeia.

In Book III of The Art of Rhetoric, the section expressly devoted to style, Aristotle
lists what he understands to be the three key qualities of sophisticated speech:
metaphor, antithesis, and energeia (1410b). Aristotle focuses at length on the
rhetorical effect of energeia in several chapters of Book III. I am interested in
Aristotle’s specific meaning in this context of lexical energeia, a term he uses rather
than enargeia, which is the overwhelmingly common term used after Aristotle to
describe powerful vividness in speech. Scholarship on this passage about energeia
in the Rhetoric is almost always integrated with analysis of enargeia in later
contexts. However, it is not clear that these two are used as equivalents in
Aristotle. My project here is to examine energeia in itself and in relation to enargeia.
This analysis of energeia in Aristotle’s corpus is based on the warrant that
Aristotle’s philosophical concepts and models can enrich our understanding of
his rhetorical ones. I will argue that Aristotle’s conception of energeia across
several major works in the corpus (specifically the Physics, Metaphysics, and De
Anima) has a consistent fundamental meaning, even as it crosses many topoi. A
survey of this Aristotelian model of energeia can help define Aristotle’s use of
energeia in the Rhetoric more precisely.

Untangling Energeia from Enargeia

Lexical conceptions of energeia and enargeia have been consistently conflated
in translation and commentary, from the time the terms emerged as aesthetic

CONTACT Monica Westin mwestin@cca.edu California College of the Arts, 3205 Folsom Street, San
Francisco, CA 94110.
© 2017 American Society for the History of Rhetoric
 ADVANCES IN THE HISTORY OF RHETORIC 253

terms in Classical Greece through contemporary scholarship. One major

reason for this integration is that Aristotle’s energeia in the Rhetoric was
soon modified by classical rhetoricians into enargeia. For example, in
Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian echoes Aristotle’s definition of energeia in
describing enargeia as a kind of distinctness in style that forces itself on the
reader’s notice (Institutio Oratoria 8.3.61) and that produces an effect of
clearness or palpability (evidentiam) (4.2.63). Quintilian does refer to ener-
geia in Institutio Oratoria, but not in relation to enargeia; instead, he explains
that the term energeia is derived from “action” and serves to “prevent what is
said from being ineffective” (8.3.89). Quintilian’s blurring of Aristotle’s con-
ception of energeia with enargeia helped to cement the confusion between
energeia and enargeia.
In the Hellenistic rhetorical tradition, enargeia is by far the dominant term
in texts that explicitly reference and take up Aristotle’s argument about style
in Book III of the Rhetoric. In contemporary translation and research, many
scholars have noted Aristotle’s choice in The Art of Rhetoric to use this rare
(in the context of lexis) term energeia rather than the common enargeia to
describe metaphors that create powerful effects of reality, but this subject has
rarely been the focus of scholarship. Most scholars have ultimately dismissed
the contrast between these two terms as a distinction without a significant
difference. To give one example of the way that the history of energeia and
enargeia is often laid out in overviews, for Richard Lanham, energeia (which
he translates as “energetic expression”) is the broader term that

came early to overlap with enargeia… . Perhaps it would make sense to use
enargeia as the basic umbrella term for the various special terms for vigorous
ocular demonstration, and energeia as a more general term for vigor and verve, of
whatever sort, in expression. (65)

When scholars do work to differentiate the two terms, they often define
energeia circularly in terms of enargeia even as they try to isolate the
concepts. Kennedy is characteristic in suggesting that energeia as a rhetorical
term can be translated as “vivification” or “actualization” and distinguished
from enargeia, whose chief characteristic is “clearness,” but he goes no
further in theorizing the term (Kennedy 222). Kennedy cites Kathy Eden
for additional explanation, and Eden in turn claims that energeia in the
rhetorical-poetical mode is a parallel to the enargeia of tragic fiction (Eden
71). Both cases, Eden argues, begin with the speaker “visualizing to himself as
vividly (enargos) as possible the scene to be represented” before translating
that scene to audiences (71–72). The terms are conflated even when scholars
attempt to separate them conceptually.
Given the intertwined history of energeia and enargeia, I believe it is productive
to leave enargeia aside as a point of comparison and focus directly on energeia
itself in order to learn as much as possible about Aristotle’s own conception.
254 M. WESTIN

Energeia in The Art of Rhetoric

The most famous instance of Aristotle putting forth energeia as an effect of
speech occurs in Book III of The Art of Rhetoric. In 1410b, Aristotle explicitly
turns his inquiry to naming the “sources of urbanities [asteia] and well-liked
expressions” (Kennedy, 3.10.1410b). Aristotle’s aim is to show how such capti-
vating, sophisticated language is produced. First, Aristotle explains how the
structure of metaphor (and, to a lesser extent, simile and enthymeme) captivates
and produces a pleasurable experience of learning, through the creation of new
meanings and understandings (what we might now call defamiliarization).
Antithetical statements or phrases that contain “some contrast” produce the
same effect. Finally, Aristotle introduces the concept of rhetorical energeia:
Furthermore, [urbanity is achieved] by means of bringing-before-the-eyes [pro
ommaton poiein, “visualization”]; for things should be seen as being done
rather than as going to be done. [To achieve urbanity in style] one should
aim at three things: metaphor, antithesis, actualization [Energeia]. (Kennedy,
3.10.1410b)

In this first use of lexical energeia in the Rhetoric, energeia seems to be simply
a quality of language that sets things before the eyes as though they are
unfolding in the present moment (this process of unfolding is one I will
return to). Kennedy’s translation of energeia as actualization is consistent
with this conception.
After devoting the remainder of chapter ten to expanding on the way that
metaphors, particularly metaphors by analogy, can produce the effect of
bringing-before-the-eyes, Aristotle returns to the subject of rhetorical ener-
geia in more depth in chapter eleven, where he expands on the concept of
lexical energeia as a quality of aliveness or activity in speech. Aristotle returns
to the effects of bringing-before-the-eyes introduced in chapter ten: “It is
necessary to say what we mean by ‘before the eyes’ (πρὸ ὀμμάτων) and what
makes this occur. I call those things ‘before the eyes’ that signify things
engaged in activity (ἐνεργοῦντα σημαίνει)” (Kennedy, 3.10.1411b).
Aristotle quickly moves from this adjectival construction of things
“engaged in activity” to an abstract quality of energeia itself that some
language exhibits and some does not. Aristotle’s examples of energeia in
this section come largely from Homer and involve figurative speech, almost
always metaphors. In his first example, Aristotle contrasts a metaphor with
and without energeia: describing a man as “’foursquare’” versus “having the
prime of his life in full ‘bloom’” (Kennedy, 3.10.1411b). Both these meta-
phors are “complete” according to Aristotle, but only the second, he states,
has energeia. As another example, Aristotle quotes Euripides describing “the
Greeks darting forward on their feet.” For Aristotle, the word “darting” itself
“is energeia and metaphor” (Kennedy, 3.10.1411b). Aristotle praises Homer
for using energeia to make “the lifeless living through the metaphor” and
 ADVANCES IN THE HISTORY OF RHETORIC 255

declares that Homer “makes everything move and live, and energeia is
motion” (Kennedy, 3.10.1411b).
Not all the examples that Aristotle gives in this section are metaphors. In what
we would now call personification, Aristotle praises Homer’s descriptions of an
arrow as “eager to fly” and a stone as “ruthless” (Kennedy, 3.10.1411b–1412a).
Yet they all involve some kind of figurative language. Is energeia simply a quality
of language that successfully defamiliarizes and surprises? Is it an independent
rhetorical effect that Aristotle happens to contextualize in terms of figured
speech? To grasp the scope of lexical energeia and its relationship to (and
possible dependence on) figured speech, it is necessary to look outside these
passages in The Art of Rhetoric.
Aristotle twice uses the word energeia in other passages of the Rhetoric,
though not in the context of language. In both of these instances, he uses
energeia in what I will show is his consistent model of energeia elsewhere: as
a way of describing movement and actualization related to the realization of
potentiality (dunamis). In 1361a and 1378b, Aristotle uses energeia as a way
of distinguishing the potential and the made-actualized: “Wealth is the
energeia of money”; and “Belittling is the energeia of opinion.” In both of
these examples, energeia is an actualized outcome from some particular
potentiality: what turns inner thoughts and beliefs into external speech, and
the accumulation of money into wealth.
I will argue that not just in these more literal instances, but also in the above
sections on energeia and language in 1410–1412 of the Rhetoric, Aristotle’s use
is consistent across his corpus. I will first show that Aristotle is consistent in
the meaning of energeia across several major texts devoted to different subjects.
With this consistency elsewhere as evidence, I will argue that when Aristotle
uses energeia in the context of language, this term means something quite
specific, related to making present and making real (even “unfolding into
reality”) in a model that is valuable for contemporary rhetorical theory.

A Survey of Energeia Across Major Aristotelian Texts

Aristotle’s consistent use of energeia throughout the corpus, and the richness
of the term in these other contexts, can help us understand more deeply
Aristotle’s choice to describe creating impressions of actuality in language as
acts of energeia. We can even create a more robust model of lexical energeia
by drawing connections between Aristotle’s use of energeia in the Rhetoric
and elsewhere in Aristotle’s texts, where energeia is fundamentally associated
with not just activity but actualization: movement with a telos associated with
things coming into being.
Aristotle uses forms of energeia widely throughout the corpus, including
dozens of times in De Anima, the Physics, and the Metaphysics, the works I
focus on here as they represent a wide range of Aristotle’s thought, from the
256 M. WESTIN

natural world to the operations of the human mind. As a word and set of
related meanings, Aristotle is flexible in applying energeia to different sets of
problems while remaining consistent in energeia’s associated actions and
relationships.
Aristotle’s most extensive explanation and definition of energeia occurs in
Book Theta of the Metaphysics, the section devoted to questions of being in
terms of potentiality (dunamis), actualization (energeia), and processes of
becoming. In the Metaphysics, energeia as actualization is associated with an
activity or operation that has its cause (telos) built into it, unlike the generic
term kinesis for movement.
In Book Theta, Aristotle explicitly sets out to define energeia: “to make out
both what it is and what sort of thing it is.” Aristotle first defines energeia in
terms of what it is not:

Now energeia is something’s being-present not in the way that we speak of as in

potentiality; and we speak of being as being in potentiality, for example, Hermes in
a block of wood or a half line in the whole, because they can be separated out, or
someone who knows, even when he is not contemplating, if he is capable of
contemplating. (1048a, trans. Sachs)1

In contrast to things, qualities, or behaviors that are only potentially present

(that is, not currently realized or visibly active), something with energeia has
a realized potential, according to Aristotle.

The other way these things are present is in activity. And what we mean to say is
clear by looking directly at particular examples, nor is it necessary to look for a
definition of everything; but one can also see at a glance, by means of analogy, that
which is as the one building is to the one who can build, and the awake to the
asleep, and the one seeing to the one whose eyes are shut but who has sight, and
what has been formed out of material to the material, and what is perfected to
what is incomplete. And let energeia be determined by one part of each distinction,
and what is potential by the other. (1048b, trans. Sachs)32

Energeia in this model is the presence of something that has realized a

potentiality, associated with an activity or operation that has its cause built
into it (the thing forming out of the material being the energeia of the
material above)— just as Aristotle used the term in the Rhetoric in speaking
of belittling as the energeia of opinion.
The Metaphysics is devoted in full to the relationships between things and
their causes at the deepest nature of being. To attempt to lay out the role of
energeia is beyond the scope of this extended note, but for our purposes, it is
important to note that at the level of metaphysics, energeia is linked to a
model of potentiality being realized.
Energeia is also paired with dunamis, denoting potentiality, faculty, or
capacity, in the Physics. In the Physics, energeia is consistently used to mean
the physical actualization or realization of a material potentiality. Aristotle
 ADVANCES IN THE HISTORY OF RHETORIC 257

spends much of the Physics expounding on where and how this actualization
comes to be and where it can be found: in the process of the actualization rather
than in the material result of the potentiality. As one extended example, in
201–202, Aristotle explains how the process of construction is literally the
actuality (energeia) for something constructable, like a house:
Consider something constructable, for example. Its actuality, as constructable, is
the process of construction. For the actuality of something constructable must
either be the process of construction or the house constructed. But once the house
exists, there is no longer anything constructable; on the other hand, what is
constructable does undergo the process of construction. So the process of con-
struction must be its actuality, and this process is a kind of change.” (201b, trans.
Waterfield)

In the Physics, Aristotle is quite literal about energeia in how things come to
be actualized. In this most material kind of conception of energeia, the
actualization is the process: the making-present, rather than the thing that
is present. Again, though the subject has changed, the activity and operation
of energeia has not.
In De Anima, Aristotle uses the concept of energeia to uncover answers to
basic questions about being in the realm of psychology and perception;
specifically regarding energeia, the major focus is on perception. Aristotle
states that the faculty of perception itself is a dunamis: “the perceptive power
does not have being as an actuality, but only as a potency (dunamis)” (417a,
trans. Sachs). In this context of perception, energeia is that which allows the
faculty of perception to be realized as perception. For example, light is the
energeia of the transparent as transparent in that it allows us to observe the
transparent quality of material that could not be perceived without light
traveling through the material (418b).
In none of these three exemplary moments from the Metaphysics, Physics,
and De Anima does Aristotle use energeia in a way that seems directly related
to the vividness of language, although it does reflect Aristotle’s use of
energeia elsewhere in the Rhetoric. But given the conceptual uniformity of
energeia everywhere except, at first glance, in a lexical context, it is a worthy
exercise to apply some of the key characteristics of energeia elsewhere in this
context, to see whether we can productively add to our understanding of
rhetorical energeia.

Distinguishing Aristotle’s Rhetorical Energeia as a Process of

Unfolding
My argument has been that a broad survey of Aristotelian models of energeia
can help define Aristotle’s use of energeia in the Rhetoric more precisely.
What light can be shed on rhetorical energeia from these other contexts?
258 M. WESTIN

First, rhetorical energeia, like other Aristotelian models of energeia, is not a

figure, but rather a process, an activity, a movement, or a becoming/coming-
into-being involving language—rather than an end product of something like
a vivid image. By this I mean that Aristotle may be more interested in the
process by which the faculty of language (and, crucially, of phantasia, which I
will briefly discuss in the next section) can bring into being a rendering anew
of language. In this conclusion, I am supported historically by scholars
working on other Aristotelian texts who have concluded that a “process
interpretation” of energeia is in keeping with its active nature.24
Returning to the context of the Rhetoric Book III, in the rhetorical triumvi-
rate of metaphor, antithesis, and energeia that Aristotle sets out as being
particularly sophisticated and captivating to audiences, energeia can produce
through its activities an effect analogous to the pleasure of a new language
experience that metaphor and antithesis create structurally or stylistically. So,
for example, the “eager spear” perhaps has energeia in the way that it activates
the faculty of language or the mind of the audience rather than in the final
rhetorical figure it produces; and the energeia of Homer’s metaphors can be
understood in terms of the potential in the metaphor’s language itself to be
“brought to life” or “made to appear actively at work.” Energeia unfolds before
us one full potential for the experience of language.
In other words, lexical energeia can and must be understood in terms of a
lexical dunamis in Aristotle’s theory of language. We can now read energeia
as a making-present and a form of actualization that actively brings out a
potentiality inherent in language that can only be understood in relationship
to this dunamis of language. This (unexplained by Aristotle in the Rhetoric)
dunamis for language would then be a central part of Aristotle’s theory of
language. Through energeia, language can bring things into being and allows
the rhetor to transfer a vision to an audience—“putting it before the eyes”
and making them experience it as though it is real.
We can also see the way that rhetorical energeia can act on the mind of an
audience as analogous to, in perception, light being the energeia of transpar-
ency by showing material to be transparent. Under this model, energeia could
bring out particular qualities of language; for example, the startling power of
a phrase like the “eager spear” is the energeia, the bringing into being, of
speech’s ability to engage and affect the mind through personification.
Energeia can finally perhaps be seen as a system of operations for realizing
effects through language that are otherwise present in language only
potentially.
I have until now avoided the problem of directly translating rhetorical
energeia. Kennedy regularly translates energeia as “actualization” in the
Rhetoric, which is the most precise across the corpus, though perhaps not
the most lyrical or rich translation. Sachs’ translation of energeia as “active
presence” or “being-at-work” underscores the dynamism of the term. Other
 ADVANCES IN THE HISTORY OF RHETORIC 259

common translations include “actuality,” as in Freese in the Loeb edition of

the Rhetoric and Waterfield in the Physics. I might argue that the most
accurate definition of rhetorical energeia would be something like “unfolding
into presence,” where the focus is on the process of making language do
something that was before only potential, especially to create new, surprising,
strange, or otherwise striking impressions. This quality of an unfolding
strikingness might be only subtly different from enargeia and vividness, but
the distinction, I believe, is both real and significant.
Lexical energeia I would now define as a performance of making-alive or
making-actual in speech associated with the movement from potential (a new
metaphor, two unlike things, an impossible adjective for an inanimate object)
to actual. In contrast to the pictorial vividness of enargeia, lexical energeia is
closer to a vivacity, a lifelikeness lively in every sense, not just the visual
sense, unfolding in front of us whose being is akin to the kinds of being
Aristotle is so concerned with across the corpus, from the metaphysical to the
perceptive and the physical world.
To give a sense of the stakes of this difference, we may, for example, be
able to revisit Aristotle’s theory of metaphor with a new model of energeia.
One of Aristotle’s models of metaphor is of transference, structured as a
carrying of one thing to another context. Thus, is it particularly well-suited to
illustrate the way that energeia does its work of transferring from potential to
actual, and from the possible to the real.

Dunamis, Phantasia, Rhetorical Vision, Rhetorical Transport

To claim seriously that we think of energeia not as a figure but as a process by
which language can create the impression of bringing actual things into
being, it is necessary to show that one of the potentialities of language for
Aristotle is that it can create in us effects similar to original sense impressions
that create our perceptions of the real world. Earlier I noted that lexical
energeia, to be consistent with Aristotle’s general model of energeia, can and
must be understood in terms of a lexical dunamis in Aristotle’s theory of
language. This dunamis, or faculty, has to do with language’s ability to allow
such a process to take place. To answer the question of how evident or self-
evident it is for Aristotle that language has the power to create such impres-
sions, I turn to a growing field in contemporary rhetorical theory interested
in, for lack of a better word, the “realness” of rhetorical and aesthetic
experience for Aristotle; or, rather, the relationships and intersections
between the ways that perception operates on the senses and the way that
rhetorical language operates on an audience. This area of investigation is also
where dunamis is being worked out by contemporary critics working on
Aristotle’s rhetorical model of language.
260 M. WESTIN

A model of language that includes the process of energeia must include a

faculty of language that allows for an analogue of sense perception to occur
through language; this faculty is the dunamis of lexical energeia. Aristotle’s
conception of phantasia offers such a model, wherein cognitive experience
occurs in a process analogous to sense perception (see De Anima III.3,
particularly 414b33–415a3, where Aristotle lays out this model of phantasia).
Ned O’Gorman’s work on phantasia argues for the importance of phantasia
in Aristotle’s Rhetoric by reading this term in the Rhetoric alongside
Aristotle’s De Anima and showing that De Anima’s psychic/psychological
account of phantasia is important for the Rhetoric, particularly as it sheds
light on the senses and their relationship to language, including visualization
and imagination (see O’Gorman 2005).
More generally, rhetorical theorists are working out key issues related to
energeia in the rhetoric that offer a more robust understanding of energeia.
First, Sara Newman’s insight that “bringing-before-the-eyes” in Aristotle’s
Rhetoric is a perceptive instead of a cognitive category suggests a more active
role for the audience involved in persuasive speech, as well as emphasizing
the importance of phantasia in this model (Newman 20–23). A focus on
rhetorical energeia as process offers a rich site to consider the potentiality for
the audience’s position and agency in experiencing speech as akin to sense
perception. Debra Hawhee’s conception of a theory of “rhetorical vision”
expressly offers a counterpoint to visual rhetoric: not rhetoric that is visual in
nature, but rhetoric that can alter sense perception directly—vision itself—
through a kind of liveliness or vivacity (Hawhee 140). Hawhee also argues for
the importance of energeia in this model (153–154). Finally, Michele
Kennerly’s conception of “rhetorical transport” is based on a civic model of
phantasia, wherein rhetors can turn the otherwise unseeable into an object
visible and present for judgment (Kennerly 288). Both Hawhee’s dynamic
theory of rhetorical vision and Kennerly’s model of rhetorical transport are
based on a close reading of the role of phantasia (though Kennerly focuses on
Gorgias and Cicero, not Aristotle), which I believe to be crucial for unpack-
ing the full workings of rhetorical energeia. Future scholarship reading these
two terms closely together has the potential to further illuminate Aristotle’s
model of language and its implications for rhetoric.
Finally, in yet another instance of parallel and intertwined scholarship on
energeia and enargeia, Ruth Webb’s recent groundbreaking work on enargeia
suggests that this term, too, seemingly safer to translate as simple pictorial
vividness, has a more active, process-based life to unpack. Webb argues that
enargeia too is more than a figure of speech, but rather a “quality of language
that derives from something beyond words: the capacity to visualize a scene”
(Webb 105). I follow Webb in concluding that attempting to better under-
stand ancient rhetorical theorists like Aristotle and Quintilian, who are both
quite mute on the linguistic details of these processes, we ought to focus
 ADVANCES IN THE HISTORY OF RHETORIC 261

instead on “the theories and imagination and memory on which enargeia and
ekphrasis are predicated” (Webb 106). To these I would add the third figure
of Aristotelian energeia.

Notes
1. I have amended this translation by leaving energeia untranslated (Sachs translates it as
“being-at-work”).
2. For example, Blair (1967) has argued etymologically that because energeia as a noun is
constructed from the active form of a word normally found in the middle deponent (as
a reflexive verb only), its definition ought to be revised from “actuality” to stress its
active nature rather than a static state.

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——— Physics. Translated by Robin Waterfield, Oxford UP, 1996.
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Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1, 1967, pp. 101–117.
Eden, Kathy. Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition. Princeton UP, 1986.
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