From Lapham's Quarterly, Energy edition, Winter 2024:
William Ewart Gladstone was Britain’s prime minister four times between 1868 and 1894, a member of Parliament for more than sixty years, a brilliant and passionate orator, an accomplished writer, and an indefatigable social reformer. Lord Kilbracken, his private secretary, estimated that if a figure of 100 could represent the energy of an ordinary man and 200 that of an exceptional one, Gladstone’s energy would be represented by a figure of at least 1,000.
That’s some multiple. But then I vividly remember the day a Benedictine monk walked into my high school classroom and told us, “Some people are more alive than others. Even permanently so.” I find that true to my own experience, even if it is hard to state clearly in what form such vitality exists.
There are over a dozen common forms of energy, as usually itemized, from chemical, gravitational, and electromagnetic to nuclear, thermal, and wind. It is a formidable register—but human energy rarely appears in such listings. When set against those other categories, what do we mean by the term, anyway? The word energy itself comes from the ancient Greek ἐνέργεια, meaning “activity.” Aristotle said it was a condition that describes the capacity to do work. More recently, human energy has been similarly defined as the amount of stamina, vigor, or “juice” a person has to engage in a particular activity. None of this, unfortunately, takes us very far. There is obviously a difference between a person full of gusto and joie de vivre and a person with significant actual productivity. Marcel Proust spent much of his adult life lying in bed, but his masterwork, À la recherche du temps perdu, has 1,267,069 words in it, double the number in War and Peace. Voltaire spent eighteen hours a day writing or dictating to secretaries, eventually completing an output covering two thousand works; he sustained himself by drinking, so it was said, fifty cups of coffee a day. But while such prodigious feats are all about get-up-and-go, it is not something, a chemical reaction, but someone who has to do the getting up and going.
In November 2021, The New Yorker published an entertaining article by staff writer Nick Paumgarten, “What a Feeling,” retitled for the internet “Energy, and How to Get It.” Each of us, he explains, has many trillions of mitochondria, “the organelles that fuel living creatures: the powerhouses of the cell, as every schoolkid learns.” They convert glucose and oxygen into adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, “the primary cellular fuel.” These mitochondria transform chemical energy into electrical energy. If a cell were a car, mitochondria would be its engine.
However, Paumgarten acknowledges that the human variety is a case apart: “Energy is both biochemical and psychophysical, vaguely delineated, widely misunderstood, elusive as grace.” After granting that the word “is a misnomer, or at least an elision,” he recognizes that, while energy has to do with vigor, it also embraces “charisma, aura, and temperament.” Further, there is a distinction to be made between calorific energy and levels of cortisol, a hormone that is released in response to stress—in other words, chemical energy potential in the body compared with hormones that influence mental energy. Plainly, energy goes beyond chemical interaction—its outcome elusive as grace, indeed.
So, can we say—outside a chemical reaction—what human energy is? For centuries, we have been trying to answer that question. It was of particular interest to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century philosophers. Schopenhauer wrote about man’s “will to live,” Freud of the libido being energy’s vital source, while in 1907, in his book Creative Evolution, the French philosopher Henri Bergson identified an élan vital that impelled consciousness and evolution. This notion also corresponds to the German word Lebensdrang, which translates as “life-urge.” Most languages have their own terms for it: Scottish Gaelic has two, lùth (“energy”) and beòthachd (“vigor”); Mandarin Chinese three, lìliàng (“strength”), néngyuán (“power”), and jīnglì (energies in the plural); and Hindi at least four, covering energy systems, consumption, sources, and supply. Interesting, but still not that helpful....
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