Palingenesis

Concept of rebirth or re creation

Palingenesis (,/p//æ//l//ɪ//n/'/dʒ//ɛ//n//ə//s//ɪ//s/; 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 recapitulationthe 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. In theology, the word may refer to reincarnation or to Christian spiritual rebirth.

The word palingenesis or rather palingenesia (παλιγγενεσία) may be traced back to the Stoics, who used the term for the continual re creation of the universe. Similarly Philo spoke of Noah and his sons as leaders of a renovation or rebirth of the earth, Plutarch of the transmigration of souls, and Cicero of his own return from exile. In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus Christ is quoted in Greek (although his historical words most probably would have been Aramaic) using the word "παλιγγενεσία" (palingenesia) to describe the Last Judgment foreshadowing the event of the regeneration of a new world. 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."

In modern biology (e. g., Ernst Haeckel and Fritz Müller), palingenesis has been used for the exact reproduction of ancestral features by inheritance, as opposed to 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.