palingenesis

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English

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WOTD – 12 February 2023

Etymology

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Probably a variant of palingenesia +‎ -genesis (suffix meaning ‘origin; production’).[1] Palingenesia is a learned borrowing from Late Latin palingenesia (“rebirth; regeneration”), from Koine Greek παλιγγενεσία (palingenesía, “rebirth”), from Ancient Greek πᾰ́λῐν (pálin, “again, anew, once more”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *kʷel- (“to turn (end-over-end); to revolve around; to dwell, sojourn”)) + γένεσις (génesis, “creation; manner of birth; origin, source”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ǵenh₁- (“to beget; to give birth; to produce”))[2] + -ῐ́ᾱ (-íā, suffix forming feminine abstract nouns). By surface analysis, palin- +‎ genesis.

Sense 2 (“apparent repetition, during the development of a single embryo, of changes that occurred previously in the evolution of its species”) is from German Palingenesis; while sense 3 (“regeneration of magma by the melting of metamorphic rocks”) is from Swedish palingenes. Both are derived from the Greek word: see above.[1]

The plural form is probably from palingenesis + Latin genesēs (a plural form of genesis).

Pronunciation

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Noun

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palingenesis (countable and uncountable, plural palingeneses)

  1. (uncountable, also figuratively) Rebirth; regeneration; (countable) an instance of this.
    Synonyms: palingenesia, (archaic, rare) palingenesy, renaissance, resuscitation, revival
    • 1836 February 27, Ed. Binns, “A Few Facts, Preliminary to a Philosophical Examination of Negro Intellect”, in The London Medical and Surgical Journal, volume I, number 5, London: [s.n.], →OCLC, page 139, column 1:
      The elegant and fashionable female of London, would start back with horror and consternation—with loathing and disgust—could palingeneses of her ancient ancestors be presented to her.
      From the Jamaica Physical Journal.
    • 1892, Johann Eduard Erdmann, “Second Division. Attempts at a Reconstruction of Philosophy.”, in Williston S. Hough, transl., edited by J[ohn] H[enry] Muirhead, A History of Philosophy […] (Library of Philosophy), 3rd edition, volume III (German Philosophy since Hegel), London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co; New York, N.Y.: Macmillan & Co, →OCLC, § 344, paragraph 4, page 111:
      If in connection with [Friedrich] Schleiermacher we reflect on the method of his speculations and on the contrasts which intersect each other, it can hardly be called a leap if we pass from him to the two men who were designated above […] as those who improved the System of Identity. For one of these, Johann Jakob Wagner, who had been misunderstood and was almost forgotten, a palingenesis had already begun.
    • 1986, Djelal Kadir, “Borges’s Ghost Writer”, in Questing Fictions: Latin America’s Family Romance (Theory and History of Literature; 32), Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, →ISBN, page 47:
      Thebes, […] is an originary site, a primal scene of writing; a point of transumption, where the Phoenician alphabet transmutes into the Greek, initiating thereby the variegated career of Greek writing and its palingeneses.
    • 1999, Eugen Weber, “Revivalists and Antichrists”, in Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs Through the Ages, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, published 2000, →ISBN, page 62:
      In contrast to this decaying world of darkness, the contemporary clerks, scholars, and gentlemen who named the Renaissance presented it as a resurrection: a revival of texts, art, systems of government, and ways of thinking long dormant; a renovatio, or renewal, of knowledge long lost and now plumbed anew; a palingenesis, or the beginning of a new world cycle after the old had worn itself out.
    • 2009, Damiano Canale, “The Many Faces of the Codification of Law in Modern Continental Europe”, in Damiano Canale, Paolo Grossi, Hasso Hofmann, editors, A History of the Philosophy of Law in the Civil Law World, 1600–1900 (A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence; 9), →DOI, →ISBN, page 165:
      On this model, codification was not aimed at effecting a palingenesis of civil society or at guaranteeing individual autonomy against public powers.
    • 2011, Katy Masuga, “The Drunken Inkwell – Arthur Rimbaud”, in Henry Miller and How He Got that Way, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, →ISBN, page 105:
      The first third of [Bertrand] Mathieu's text is given over to the painstaking alignment of [Henry] Miller with the Orphic tradition, not only in Colossus but also the trilogies, his metamorphoses into various figures including Orpheus and Hermes/Elijah and his palingeneses, or rebirths, in his works.
    1. The recurrence of historical events in the same order in an infinite series of cycles.
      • 2012, Michel Meulders, Helmholtz: From Enlightenment to Neuroscience, page 28:
        Schelling set himself the fundamental task of establishing a channel of ascensional intelligibility from the origins of creation to man, and even beyond man, in which the doctrines of survival and palingenesis, so dear to the Gnostics, found all their significance. Thus, the evolution of nature was marked by ever-increasing value, and creation would never by completed.
    2. (philosophy, theology, historical) Spiritual rebirth through the transmigration of the soul.
      Synonym: metempsychosis
      • 1848, Charles D[elucena] Meigs, “Letter XXIX”, in Females and Their Diseases; a Series of Letters to His Class, Philadelphia, Pa.: Lea and Blanchard, →OCLC, page 387:
        [I]t was averred that all germs, or ova, were originally created—each thing living at this hour, having proceeded from a germ which was included within the germ of its antecedent, back as far as the original creation; […] This evolution doctrine was opposed by the Pythagorean idea of a palingenesis, or metempsychosis, under which notion you are to suppose that the animating principle that has heretofore animated the bodies of the living, seeks a new union with organizable matter, upon the dissolution of its last tabernacle, and carries on the new evolution until again displaced, and set free to make new combinations.
      • 1849 October, R. H. Whitelocke, “Art. V.—1. Der Mensch nach den verschiedenen Seiten seiner Natur, order Anthropologie für das gebildete Publikum. Von K. F. Burdach. Stuttgart. 1836. […] [book review]”, in The Westminster Review, American edition, volume LII, New York, N.Y.: Leonard Scott & Co., […], published 1850, →OCLC, page 65, column 2:
        To appear again as identically the same, would require the palingenesis of Plato, that is, the recommencement of all things, so as to have the same series of causes and effects from the very beginning; but this creed implies the finality of God's power in the phenomenal universe, and Plato never thought that.
      • 1868, J[ohn] B[ickford] Heard, “The Resurrection and Spiritual Body”, in The Tripartite Nature of Man: Spirit, Soul, and Body […], 2nd edition, Edinburgh: T[homas] & T[homas] Clark, […], →OCLC, page 345:
        But by the light of [Xavier] Bichat and Bell's discoveries, we can see one way to a theory of a Palingenesis of man, in which the flesh and blood of St. Paul, the animal life of Bichat, is eliminated, and the pneumatical body or organic life, the senso-motor nervous system, as distinct from the mere ganglionic, is retained.
  3. (uncountable, biology, chiefly historical or obsolete) The apparent repetition, during the development of a single embryo, of changes that occurred previously in the evolution of its species.
    Synonyms: (obsolete, rare) palingeny, recapitulation
    Antonym: (in the writings of Ernst Haeckel) caenogenesis
    • 1882 August, “Summary of Current Researches Relating to Zoology and Botany (Principally Invertebrata and Cryptogamia), Microscopy, &c., Including Original Communications from Fellows and Others”, in Frank Crisp, editor, Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society; […], volume II, part 2 (series II), London, Edinburgh: [F]or the [Royal Microscopical] Society by Williams & Norgate, →OCLC, page 493:
      [P]alingenesis is to be seen in the Ectoprocta, cœnogenesis in the Entoprocta.
    • 1894, Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Address by Henry Fairfield Osborn, Vice President, Section F [Zoölogy]. The Rise of the Mammalia in North America.”, in Frederic W[ard] Putnam, editor, Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for the Forty-second Meeting, Held at Madison, Wisconsin, August, 1893, volume XLII, Salem, Mass.: Permanent Secretary [American Association for the Advancement of Science], →OCLC, page 197:
      Now that all mammals are led back to a distant diphyodont stem, it is also true that the further we go back both in palingenesis and embryogenesis, the more widespread heterodontism is—all modern homodontism proving to be secondary.
    • 1963, Jovan Hadži, “The Consequences of the New Interpretation of Cnidaria”, in [Janez Stanonik], transl., edited by Gerald A[llan] Kerkut, The Evolution of the Metazoa (International Series of Monographs on Pure and Applied Biology; Division: Zoology; 16), Oxford, Oxfordshire, London: Pergamon Press, →OCLC, page 342:
      Fortunately enough we find that recently zoologists have become more and more convinced that it is necessary to relinquish the erroneous "fundamental biogenetic law" which sees whole phylogenies repeated in the ontogenies, with a very small number of deviations ("Fälschungen") which cover 10–0 per cent only of the total number; all the rest are, according to this interpretation, palingeneses, i.e. recapitulations.
    • 1998, Arthur McCalla, “Palingenesis”, in A Romantic Historiosophy: The Philosophy of History of Pierre-Simon Ballanche (Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History; 82), Leiden, Boston, Mass.: Brill, →ISBN, →ISSN, page 156:
      It is not, as [Michel] Foucault asserts, that [Charles] Bonnet's palingenesis is absolutely opposed to evolutionism; it is that his model of is internalist rather than externalist: […] Bonnet's palingenesis, while not development according to the externalist, scientific model of evolution founded by [Charles] Darwin, ranks as a "classical internalist theory" of development: a program placed in the germs at the Creation unfolds in its divinely preordained pattern.
  5. (uncountable, geology) The regeneration of magma by the melting of metamorphic rocks.
    • 1926 November 11, G[eorge] W[alter] Tyrrell, “Metasomatism and Additive Processes of Metamorphism”, in The Principles of Petrology: An Introduction to the Science of Rocks, 10th edition, London: Methuen & Co. […], published 1949, page 336:
      This process of regeneration of magma has been called palingenesis by [Jakob] Sederholm, who ascribes to it many of the Archæan granite and granodiorite masses of Fennoscandia.
    • 1949, Caleb Wroe Wolfe, This Earth of Ours: Past and Present, Revere, Mass.: Earth Science Pub. Co., published 1950, →OCLC, page 58:
      Sedimentary rocks may weather to produce more sedimentary rocks; they may be metamorphosed to produce metamorphic rocks; or they may be transformed to magma by palingenesis.
    • 1984, Miloš Kužvart, “Origin of Industrial Minerals and Rocks”, in H. Zárubová, transl., edited by Jan Petránek, Industrial Minerals and Rocks (Developments in Economic Geology; 18), Amsterdam: Elsevier, →ISBN, page 72:
      In ultrametamorphism, useful components and volatiles, particularly water, are mobilized before partial anatexis or palingenesis of rocks takes place.

Derived terms

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Translations

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See also

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References

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  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Compare “palingenesis, n.”, in OED Online Paid subscription required⁠, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, March 2022; “palingenesis, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
  2. ^ “palingenesia, n.”, in OED Online Paid subscription required⁠, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, March 2022.

Further reading

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