Dynamis

Dynamis (δύναμις) means power, capacity, or potentiality — what something is able to do or to become. It comes from the verb dynasthai, 'to be able', and survives in a crowd of English words: dynamic, dynamo, dynamite, dynasty.

The seed of the actual

In Aristotle's hands dynamis is the partner of energeia, actuality. The acorn is an oak in potentiality, the marble block a statue in potentiality, the child an adult in potentiality — each holds within it a capacity that activity will draw out and make real. Matter itself is potentiality in its purest form: the sheer capacity to receive form and so become a definite thing.

Productive power

The word carries a second, more forceful sense — power as productive force. In Neoplatonism this becomes central: each level of reality possesses a dynamis, an overflowing power by which it generates the level below, as the One produces Intellect and Intellect produces Soul. The whole procession of things is the unfolding of an inexhaustible power that loses nothing by giving.