In reading Paris alongside Ballanche's 1829 Palingenesie sociale, one observes that Hugo had not totally abandoned the principles of Ballanchian
palingenesis. While Jacques Roos, like McCalla has discerned parallels between Ballanche's and Hugo's vision of the expiatory suffering that leads man to an increasing access to unity with fellow man and with God, neither scholar has treated Paris.
(114) The expression
palingenesis was also occasionally used to denote Plato's doctrine.
Because of this, their successors in the Platonic tradition have had to interpret.(65) Ficino then offers accounts of the interpretation of this problem in Platonic hermeneutics by the six ancient academies.(66) He argues that the last two, the Roman and the Lycian, have interpreted the problem wrongly, believing that the soul travels in "circuits" and is constantly being reborn, i.e., that they basically endorse one form or another of
palingenesis.(67) It is rather the first four academies who interpret Plato more correctly, and of these, it is the academies of Xenocrates and Ammonius, the first and the fourth, who have done the best job:
(98) For William Shuter's informative discussion of Preller and Pater, see "History as
Palingenesis in Pater and Hegel," PMLA 86 (May 1971), pp.
I even continue to experience a strong intellectual embarrassment before "believers" (of any kind), and I continue to sustain the need for razors and truisms; and I remain, in any event, on the side of reasonableness versus any offer of
palingenesis (but also versus any rationalism, be it understood), in the conviction - not at all playful - that a couple of calculus courses would do everyone good, above all poets.
Chapter 4 very helpfully expounds various conceptions of the end of the world: as successfully endured catastrophes, as cyclical
palingenesis, as a one-time event, as annihilation and renewal, as destruction of the cosmos, as the decline of the West, as limits to growth, and as a nuclear holocaust.
Chapter 3 ("Theory and suspended animation and its metamorphoses") sketches the historical metamorphoses of the "epistemic suspended animation" of savants with four main steps: Cicero (rehashing the Pythagorean ontological aristocracy and
palingenesis), Giordano Bruno (with only an apparently revolutionary interpretation of Ovid?), Fichte (with his groundbreaking emphasis on the "unconscious" (2)), and Valery (incorporating Platonism with dandyism).
He extracts from Carlyle a notion of the historian's task as "
palingenesis, the pious reconstruction of the past in its integrity," which requires "both scientific and poetic apprehensions of the world within the mode of Metaphor in such a way as to conceive the relationship between them as a natural 'transfer' of concepts." (10) Whatever the specific combination of elements that may be deduced from White's scheme to characterize Carlyle, his analysis suggests that there are affinities of style, emplotment, and motivation between Carlyle and Scott, or more generally between historical narrative and historical fiction.
In truth, Italians, and no doubt many of the international observers, had lost by 1997 any hope in the
palingenesis promised by the birth of a Second Republic.
For example, Phaedon (1767) by Moses Mendelssohn (1729--1786), Aussichten in die Ewigkeit (1769--1773, 1778) by Johann Caspar Lavater (1741--1801), the final sections of Die Erziehung des Menschgeschlechts (1780) by Gottfried Ephraim Lessing, and Uber die Seelenwanderung by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744--1803), a reply to a pair of essays of the same title (1781--82) by Johann Georg Schlosser (1739--1799), the brother-in-law of Goethe, all contributed to a spate of speculative frenzy about
palingenesis and metempsychosis in the late eighteenth century.
Schleiermacher saw the true Church as being most fully manifested in the gathering of the disciples in the Upper Room, "praising God and honoring their Lord"; he held that "this special way of being church has never been completely submerged in the other but continually arises anew within it."(19) He called this process the "
palingenesis" of the Church, its continually being born again amid mediating structures.