If the world has an end, that end is, in keeping with Hegels thinking, the realization of freedom and, therefore, a new beginning the absolute beginning, one might say. Unlike abstract universal freedom, the realized freedom he invokes does not demand the sacrifice of existence as such and as a whole to the Moloch of an ideal. The end is nothing more and nothing less than freedom actualized in the world as that world. In parallel, the domain of right (that is, of justice) is vacuous without the actualized good, which, rather than a promise, has been fleshed out in specific activities and their outcomes. For this reason, acts of justice cannot be followed by the perishing of the world: the doing (fiat) of justice, its becomingactual, is the becoming of the world itself at its absolute end purpose. Only a pure negation, engrained into universal freedom, is capable of envisaging the devastation of the world as its ultimate result.

How should we grasp the becomingactual of justice, which seems to be in tandem with the becomingactual of the world? According to the reading protocols I have established in my Energy Dreams and, subsequently, in Hegels Energy,15 actuality (Wirklichkeit) is Hegels word for energy in a complex dialectical attempt to inherit and transform Aristotles coinage, energeia. Whereas, in the modern mindset, energy (much like the ideal of justice) essentially stands for a promise, a potentiality that can never be actualized, for Aristotle, it is precisely the other of potentiality, or, in his words, Justice at the Ends of Worlds 131 notdunamis: energeia means the being of the thing, not in the sense which we mean by potentially [ ] (Met. 1048a, 31 32). The becomingactual of justice and of the world is, far from entropy or senescence setting in, an experience of energetic fullness, of a promise fulfilled.

Lest you be tempted to read utopian overtones into these formulations, consider the implications of interpreting energy in the terms and on the terrain of actuality. It has nothing to do with attaining an ideal in a predetermined teleological journey, in the course of which bare potentialities are actualized. Energy is the being of a thing (of the world, of justice) at work and in the work (ergon). Now, justice can be neither at work nor in the work outside the world; in that hypothetical, extramundane sphere, it can exist only as a pure possibility, an ideal, or, in Aristotles words, as dunamis, not energeia. The energy of justice is also that of the world. The Latin dictum ought to be rewritten as Fiat iustitia, floreat mundus, Let justice be done, so that the world flourishes.

The worlds preservation through the work of justice is not the sole divergence from the genealogy of the maxim we have been tracing on these pages. You might recall that in the original phrase, the world perishes as a whole, an immense animal superorganism that coincides with the Earth (Gaia) as a living system, dying in an instant. From its mortal edge, ending as a result of justices fiat, the world receives its identity and final determinacy. But, assuming that an act of justice can only promote the most varied forms of the worlds wellbeing, this unity of an end and, hence, of the world itself is no longer a given. The flourishing of the world bursts out into worlds that, though still finite, have their ends defined by the energiesactualities at work and in the work in them. They are vegetal, not animal even when animals are the ones flourishing. It follows that the world does not die all at once, for it does not live all at once (at most, different lifeworlds partially over