Palingenesis

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Not to be confused with Pathogenesis or Parthenogenesis.

Palingenesis (/ˌpælɪnˈdʒɛnəsɪs/; also palingenesia) is a concept of rebirth or re-creation, used in various contexts in philosophy, theology, politics, and biology. Its meaning stems from Greek palin, meaning 'again', and genesis, meaning 'birth'.

In biology, it is another word for recapitulation – the largely discredited hypothesis which talks of the phase in the development of an organism in which its form and structure pass through the changes undergone in the evolution of the species. In political theory, it is a central component of Roger Griffin's analysis of fascism as a fundamentally modernist ideology.[1] In theology, the word may refer to reincarnation or to Christian spiritual rebirth.

Philosophy and theology

Further information: Regeneration (theology)

The word palingenesis or rather palingenesia (

transmigration of souls, and Cicero
of his own return from exile.

In the

Aramaic) using the word "παλιγγενεσία" (palingenesia) to describe the Last Judgment foreshadowing the event of the regeneration of a new world.[7]

In philosophy it denotes in its broadest sense the theory (e.g. of the

Pythagoreans) that the human soul does not die with the body but is born again in new incarnations. It is thus the equivalent of metempsychosis. The term has a narrower and more specific use in the system of Arthur Schopenhauer, who applied it to his doctrine that the will does not die but manifests itself afresh in new individuals. He thus modified the original metempsychosis doctrine which maintains the reincarnation
of the particular soul.

Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy
(1628), writes, "The Pythagoreans defend metempsychosis and palingenesia, that souls go from one body to another."

Politics and history

In

Greek Revolution. Thomas Carlyle used it in Sartor Resartus (1833–34), referring to the "Newbirth of Society", a stage in Carlyle's cyclical view of history as the "burning of a World-Phoenix".[8]

British political theorist Roger Griffin has coined the term palingenetic ultranationalism as a core tenet of fascism, stressing the notion of fascism as an ideology of rebirth of a state or empire in the image of that which came before it – its ancestral political underpinnings. Examples of this are Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Under Benito Mussolini, Italy purported to establish an empire as the second incarnation of the Roman Empire, while Adolf Hitler's regime purported itself to be the third palingenetic incarnation of the German "Reich" – beginning first with the Holy Roman Empire ("First Reich"), followed by Bismarck's German Empire ("Second Reich") and then Nazi Germany ("Third Reich").

Moreover, Griffin's work on palingenesis in fascism analysed the pre-war fin de siècle Western society. In doing so he built on Frank Kermode's work The Sense of an Ending which sought to understand the belief in the death of society at the end of the century.[9]

Chilean dictator

project in government as a national rebirth inspired in Diego Portales, a figure of the early republic:[10]

...[democracy] will be born again purified from the vices and bad habits that ended up destroying our institutions  ... we are inspired in the Portalian spirit which has fused together the nation ...

Science

In modern biology (e.g.,

kenogenesis
, in which the inherited characteristics are modified by environment.

It was also applied to the quite different process supposed by Karl Beurlen to be the mechanism for his orthogenetic theory of evolution.[11]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Griffin, R. Modernism and Fascism (Basingstoke, 2007).
  2. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, 2.627
  3. ^ The concept is attributed to Chrysippus by Lactantius. See: Wolfson, Harry Austryn (1961), "Immortality and Resurrection in the Philosophy of the Church Fathers"; Ferguson, Everett (ed.), Doctrines of Human Nature, Sin, and Salvation in the Early Church; Taylor & Francis, 1993, p. 329.
  4. ^ Michael Lapidge, Stoic Cosmology. Rist, John M. (ed.), The Stoics. Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. 182–183.
  5. ^ Harrill, J. Albert. "Stoic Physics, the Universal Conflagration, and the Eschatological Destruction of the “Ignorant and Unstable” in 2 Peter". Rasimus, Tuomas; Engberg-Pedersen, Troels; Dunderberg, Ismo (eds.). Stoicism in Early Christianity. Baker Academic, 2010, p. 121.
  6. ^ Matthew 19:28
  7. ^ Matthew 19:28–30
  8. ISBN 978-0-8386-3792-0
    .
  9. ^ Kermode, F. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in Theory and Fiction. Oxford, 2000.[page needed]
  10. ^ Pinochet's discourse of 11 October 1973.
  11. ISBN 978-3-938616-85-7. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help
    )

References

Look up palingenesis in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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