Romain Rolland (1866-1944), écrivain, dramaturge, historien et musicologue, est l'auteur d'une oeuvre considérable et variée. La Grande Guerre fut pour lui l'occasion d'une méditation sur la violence et la haine, et le désastre qui s'abattit sur l'Europe, méditation qui aboutira à la rédaction d'Au-dessus de la mêlée (1914). Ce manifeste pacifiste, lucide et passionné, contribua à l'obtention, par l'auteur déjà célèbre de Jean-Christophe, Beethoven, La vie de Tolstoï, Danton, Les Loups, etc, du prix Nobel de littérature (1915). Son (...) oeuvre se caractérise par la recherche d'une harmonie universelle, de paix et de justice. Empédocle (1918) et L'éclair de Spinoza (1924) sont une expression "enthousiaste" de gratitude envers deux immenses penseurs, compagnons de route de Rolland, qui en a subi la profonde et durable influence. Il s'y révèle un styliste de grande classe, poète original en même temps que rigoureux penseur et pédagogue. (shrink)

In these three Indian biographies dating from the 1920s, Romain Rolland introduces the French reader to Gandhi's political struggle and to the spiritual careers of Ramakrishna and his disciple Vivekananda, while revealing the deep meaning of his attraction to Hindu India at this time of his life.

Written in the early 1990s by a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Ce livre a été publié en 1929. Il est le premier tome de l'Essai sur la mystique et l'action de l'Inde vivante, le deuxième tome étant La vie de Vivekananda et l'évangile universelpublié en 1930. Il présente la vie et la pensée d'un des plus grands sages de l'Inde : Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna est un saint du Bengale né en 1836 à Calcutta et mort dans cette même ville en 1886. Ramakrishna enseignait que toutes les religions recherchent le même but : (...) l'union avec Dieu. Proche de l'Islam, du Christianisme et bien que profondément hindou, il a cherché à faire une synthèse des religions. Son message demeure plus que jamais d'actualité. (shrink)

This is a new release of the original 1930 edition.

--I. The life of Ramakrishna. -- II. The life of Vivekananda and the universal gospel.

By the author of Life of Ramakrishna, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This intellectual portrait of Romain Rolland --French novelist, musicologist, dramatist, and Nobel prizewinner in 1915--focuses on his experiments with political commitment against the backdrop of European history between the two world wars. Best known as a biographer of Beethoven and for his novel, Jean-Christophe, Rolland was one of those nonconforming writers who perceived a crisis of bourgeois society in Europe before the Great War, and who consciously worked to discredit and reshape that society in the interwar period. (...) Analyzing Rolland's itinerary of engaged stands, David James Fisher clarifies aspects of European cultural history and helps decipher the ambiguities at the heart of all forms of intellectual engagement. Moving from text to context, Fisher organizes the book around a series of debates--Rolland's public and private collisions over specific committed stands--introducing the reader to the polemical style of French intellectual discourse and offering insight into what it means to be a responsible intellectual. Fisher presents Rolland's private ruminations, extensive research, and reexamination of the function and style of the French man of letters. He observes that Rolland experimented with five styles of commitment: oceanic mysticism linked to progressive, democratic politics; free thinking linked to antiwar dissent; pacifism and, ultimately, Gandhism; antifacism linked to anti-imperialism, antiracism, and all-out political resistance to fascism; and, most controversially, fellow traveling as a form of socialist humanism and the positive side of antifascism. Fisher views Rolland's engagement historically and critically, showing that engaged intellectuals of that time were neither naive propagandists nor dupes of political parties. David James Fisher makes a case for the committed writer and hopes to re-ignite the debate about commitment. For him, Romain Rolland sums up engagement in a striking, dialectical formula: "Pessimism of the Intelligence, Optimism of the Will." His story presents a powerful challenge to modern intellectuals. (shrink)

In a letter written in 1927, the French writer Romain Rolland asked Sigmund Freud to analyse the “oceanic feeling,” a religious feeling of oneness with the entire universe. I will argue that Rolland’s intentions in introducing the oceanic feeling to Freud were much more complex, multifaceted, and critical than most scholars have acknowledged. To this end, I will examine Rolland’s views on mysticism and psychoanalysis in his book-length biographies of the Indian saints Sri Ramakrishna and Swami (...) Vivekananda, which he wrote just after he mentioned the oceanic feeling to Freud in 1927. I will argue that Rolland’s primary intentions in appealing to the oceanic feeling in his 1927 letter to Freud—intentions less evident in his letters to Freud than in his biographies of Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda—were to challenge the fundamental assumptions of psychoanalysis from a mystical perspective and to confront Freud with a mystical “science of the mind” that he felt was more rigorous and comprehensive than Freud’s psychoanalytic science. (shrink)

This is a review of Guh'as magnum opus which honestly problematises Tagore's Mussolini episode.

Hélène Cixous’s engagement with faith is a significant but overlooked facet of her work. Focusing on Beethoven à jamais ou l’existence de Dieu [Beethoven Forever or the Existence of God] (1993), this article contends that Cixous envisions faith as the ground and horizon of both artistic creation and love. To illustrate this point, the author focuses on Cixous’s idiosyncratic portrayal of Ludwig von Beethoven. Her representation of Beethoven as an impassioned lover and artist runs against the grain of the canonical (...) depiction of the composer as a “great man” or a “heroic individual,” as found in the writings of Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freud. For Cixous, love and writing both stem from an unpredictable, joyful event that infinitely exceeds our understanding. Both are predicated on a state of “active passivity” that clears the ground for the event of passion and creation to occur without predetermining what it will be. (shrink)

C’est à Romain Rolland qu’il est d’usage d’accorder la paternité de l’expression « sentiment océanique », à l’occasion d’un débat avec Sigmund Freud dont les premières pages de Malaise dans la civilisation rendent compte1. Que l’auteur de Jean-Christophe ait forgé l’expression est une chose, qu’il..

: William James' investigation of religious experience neglected consideration of immortality. This was likely because, as James saw it, belief in personal immortality often engenders what can be called spiritual provincialism. In Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (1897/1979), James brings up the phenomenon of psychological overload that occurs when an individual considers the immense numbers of humans who would inhabit Heaven if spiritual merit were determined democratically. Consideration of James' example shows the beginnings of his pragmatic notion (...) of immortality, one that is influenced by the religious philosophy of Henry James, Sr., and which focuses on the undeniable connections among people on earth rather than the immutable persistence of individual souls in Heaven. Those who have considered the implications of James' notion of immortality as it relates to the notion of worldly embeddedness include French writer Romain Rolland, who, inspired in part by the work of James, advocates a socialistic religious philosophy. With reference to Rolland and the elder James, as well as contemporary Christian pragmatist Cornel West, James' view can be more clearly understood. (shrink)

William James' investigation of religious experience neglected consideration of immortality. This was likely because, as James saw it, belief in personal immortality often engenders what can be called spiritual provincialism. In Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (1897/1979), James brings up the phenomenon of psychological overload that occurs when an individual considers the immense numbers of humans who would inhabit Heaven if spiritual merit were determined democratically. Consideration of James' example shows the beginnings of his pragmatic notion of (...) immortality, one that is influenced by the religious philosophy of Henry James, Sr., and which focuses on the undeniable connections among people on earth rather than the immutable persistence of individual souls in Heaven. Those who have considered the implications of James' notion of immortality as it relates to the notion of worldly embeddedness include French writer Romain Rolland, who, inspired in part by the work of James, advocates a socialistic religious philosophy. With reference to Rolland and the elder James, as well as contemporary Christian pragmatist Cornel West, James' view can be more clearly understood. (shrink)

Hans Drieschs "Wirklichkeitslehre".--Emanuel Laskers "Philosophie des Unvollendbar".--Carl Ludwig Schleich und die "neue Epoche der Weltanschauung".--Fr. J. Kurt Geisslers "System der Seinsgebiete".--Graf Hermann Keyserlings "Gefüge der Welt", "Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen", "Unsterblichkeit", "Prolegomena zur Naturphilosophie".--Henri Bergsons "Schöpferische Entwicklung".--L. William Sterns "Person und Sache".--G. Heymans "psychischer monismus".--Wilhelm Wundts "Sinnliche und übersinnliche Welt".--Emil Boutroux und die "Kontingenz der Naturgesetze".--Rudolf Otto, Christof Schrempf, Romain Rolland und die intuitive Methode des Welterkenens.--Rudolf Steiners "Philosophie der Freiheit".--Erich Becher und die fremddienliche Zweckmässigkeit.--Edmund Husserl, Heinrich Rickert, Emil (...) Lask, Leonard Nelson und der methodologische Gott.--Anhang: Eucken, Dessoir, Scheler, Heiler, James, Bo Yin Ra, Oesterreich, Schneider. (shrink)

This study examines the history of the psychoanalytic theory of mysticism, starting with the seminal correspondence between Freud and Romain Rolland concerning the concept of "oceanic feeling." Providing a corrective to current views which frame psychoanalysis as pathologizing mysticism, Parsons reveals the existence of three models entertained by Freud and Rolland: the classical reductive, ego-adaptive, and transformational. Then, reconstructing Rolland's personal mysticism through texts and letters unavailable to Freud, Parsons argues that Freud misinterpreted the oceanic feeling. (...) In offering a fresh interpretation of Rolland's mysticism, Parsons constructs a new dialogical approach for psychoanalytic theory of mysticism which integrates culture studies, developmental perspectives, and the deep epistemological and transcendent claims of the mystics. (shrink)

This handbook brings together a distinguished team of scholars from philosophy, theology, and religious studies to provide the first in-depth discussion of Vedanta and the many different systems of thought that make up this tradition of Indian philosophy. Emphasizing the historical development of Vedantic thought, it includes chapters on numerous classical Vedantic philosophies as well as the modern Vedantic views of Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo, and Romain Rolland. The volume offers careful hermeneutic analyses of how Vedantic texts have (...) been interpreted, and it addresses key issues and debates in Vedanta, including religious diversity, the nature of God, and the possibility of embodied liberation. Venturing into cross-philosophical and cross-cultural territory, it also brings Vedanta into dialogue with Saiva Nondualism as well as contemporary Western analytic philosophy. Highlighting current scholarly controversies and charting new paths of inquiry, this is an indispensable research guide for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of Vedanta and Indian philosophy. (shrink)

This study examines the history of the psychoanalytic theory of mysticism, starting with the seminal correspondence between Freud and Romain Rolland concerning the concept of "oceanic feeling." Providing a corrective to current views which frame psychoanalysis as pathologizing mysticism, Parsons reveals the existence of three models entertained by Freud and Rolland: the classical reductive, ego-adaptive, and transformational (which allows for a transcendent dimension to mysticism). Then, reconstructing Rolland's personal mysticism (the "oceanic feeling") through texts and letters (...) unavailable to Freud, Parsons argues that Freud misinterpreted the oceanic feeling. In offering a fresh interpretation of Rolland's mysticism, Parsons constructs a new dialogical approach for psychoanalytic theory of mysticism which integrates culture studies, developmental perspectives, and the deep epistemological and transcendent claims of the mystics. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell: The Colours of Pacifism analyzes the tenacious commitment of one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary intellectuals to the cause of civilization, progress, and human rights. Through his active and pragmatic pacifism, Russell sought to confront the problems stemming from the unstable and dramatic political conditions of his age: the beginning of the Great War, the establishment of the League of Nations, the rise of totalitarian regimes, the outbreak of the Second World War, the dawn of the Atomic (...) Age, the escalation of the Cold War, the weakness of the United Nations, and the need for world government. His reflections on the subject of peace, which constitute the main focus of this book, led Russell into dialogue with some of the greatest figures of his time, including Romain Rolland, Albert Einstein, Woodrow Wilson, Leon Trotsky, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Nikita Khrushchev, and J. F. Kennedy. Shining new light on a lifelong preoccupation in Russell's work and thinking, The Colours of Pacifism is a landmark study that will appeal to students, scholars and anyone curious about the philosopher's engagement with the world around him. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Amongst the Italian exiles who arrived at the Canton of Ticino following repression perpetrated by the Di Rudinì and Pelloux administrations – after the popular uprisings of 1898 – are Enrico Bignami, Giuseppe Rensi and Arcangelo Ghisleri, who, in Lugano, created a sort of secular symposium for fostering spiritual values. This gave birth to Coenobium, the ‘international journal of independent studies’, which remained in operation between 1906 and 1919. This periodical distinguished itself due to the diversity of the issues (...) addressed: from science to law, from history to philosophy, from literature to spiritualism, philosophy and psychology. With the beginning of the First World War, however, Coenobium’s focus was on the spiral of violence triggered by the war; hence a series of denunciations entrusted to the column ‘War to war!’, which marked a dramatic change in the editorial policy of the magazine edited by Bignami, who was determined to turn it into a strong instrument of pacifist propaganda. Several prestigious figures in Europe’s cultural and political milieus participated in this venture, notably Norman Angell, Romain Rolland, Angelo Crespi, Raffaele Ottolenghi, Claudio Treves, Filippo Turati, Henri La Fontaine, Nicholas Murray Butler and Enrico Bignami. (shrink)

Vivekananda ist der berühmteste Schüler des großen Mystikers und Weisen Ramakrishna. Es gelang ihm, eine Brücke von Ost nach West, zwischen den Religionen und Völkern zu schlagen. Sein messerscharfer Verstand, seine außergewöhnliche Denk- und Konzentrationskraft, seine geniale mystische Schau, seine unermüdliche Tatkraft und Menschenliebe und sein gerechter Zorn angesichts der versklavten Massen setzten den heutigen sozialen Strukturwandel in Indien in Bewegung und brachten dem westlichen Menschen neue Impulse zur eigenen geistigen Höherentwicklung. Auf der spirituellen Grundlage des Advaita-Vedanta, der Einheit allen (...) Seins legt er uns als besonders wichtige Form der Gottesverehrung den Dienst am Menschen ans Herz: "Mag ich wieder und wieder geboren werden und tausendfaches Elend erleiden, wenn ich nur den einzigen Gott verehren darf, der existiert, den einzigen Gott, an den ich glaube: die Gesamtsumme aller Seelen." Vivekananda zeigt uns unsere eigene Göttlichkeit und die Methoden, wie wir sie in jedem Augenblick unseres Lebens zum Ausdruck bringen können. Seine Worte lassen die Poesie des göttlichen Einen erklingen und sind, wie Romain Rolland schrieb, "Melodien im Stil Beethovens, erregende Rhythmen in Händels Musik". (shrink)

Psychoanalytic critical theory explores the dynamics of individual identity formation within specific cultural contexts. Freud understood that psychoanalysis is a critical social theory as well as a therapeutic practice. His studies on religion illustrate the depths of society and culture within the mind. Freud was thus able to respond to Romain Rolland's experience of an “oceanic” or mystical feeling in thoroughly explanatory psychoanalytic terms that led him to speculate about pre-Oedipal memories of maternal care. Freud made an important (...) contribution to the psychoanalytic study of religion that remains relevant to contemporary academic studies of religion. (shrink)

L’origine d’un « besoin de croire » mérite une recherche en particulier dans les profondeurs psychiques archaïques dont on peut retrouver trace en certains phénomènes comme le « sentiment océanique ». Freud, Winnicott, Meltzer et d’autres auteurs après Romain Rolland, inspirés par les pathologies précoces apparentées à l’autisme permettent un aperçu des liens entre ces expériences vécues et un mode psychique premier du « croire » marqué par son absence de limites.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response 2: “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”Antonis BalasopoulosLet me begin with a few words on my title, which was chosen as reflecting the nature of the orientation of my work in the field of utopian studies and therefore also of my orientation toward the theme of this roundtable. As Francesca Antonini puts it in a recent essay, the phrase, which became associated with the work of (...) Antonio Gramsci though it originates in Romain Rolland, describes “the (seemingly contradictory) coexistence of a realistic description of the status quo, on the one hand, and a genuine commitment to the possibility of transforming reality, on the other.”1Anyone who has read Thomas More’s Utopia knows that Rolland’s and Gramsci’s formula very much describes that book’s bifurcation between a voice of relentless critique of what exists in Europe—and particularly in England—in More’s time (in Book 1) and a voice preoccupied with the description of an alternative, and arguably better, world (in Book 2). This bifurcation, it is equally well known, is part of the genetic material More’s book bequeathed to its successors, so that one calls a “utopia” a (mostly, though not always) literary text, where the “realistic description of the status quo” coexists with a vision arising out of a “commitment to the possibility of transforming reality”—admittedly in different admixtures and proportions of [End Page 544] the critical or negative and the anticipatory, projective or prefigurative elements. Though Ernst Bloch’s distinction between “cold” and warm” streams within Marxism is not identical to this first binary, it is certainly related to it, so that the “cold” stream is one that privileges the rational and analytical element (usually, I would propose, in relation to the part of the Marxist tradition we know as “critique of political economy”), while the “warm stream” is one that rather foregrounds that which relates to affect, to desire, hope, or fidelity to the transformative project (these are frequently correlated to those elements of Marxism that correspond to its also being a political and philosophically imbued creed).2 What follows here, then, explores the implications of the dialectical interplay between these two sets of oppositions—and hopefully justifies such insistence on dialectic itself.3To the extent that I can see, the basic themes and areas of concentration in my colleagues’ essays involve decolonizing utopian studies as a project; addressing, in that connection, the heterogeneity of utopianisms that emerge out of a number of marginalized subjectivities; the provenance of the questions of ecology, sustainability, animal life for the present and future of utopian studies (and to some degree, for utopianism’s past); and finally, the question of utopian forms of social activism and therefore also the search for spaces beyond the walls of academic insularity. These are important and largely interconnected questions, but I am afraid I will only have the space to touch on them briefly and sketchily here.In her cogent and multifaceted intervention, Caroline Edwards begins her reflections on the task of decolonizing utopian studies by noting the high investment of fin-de-siècle utopian fiction in notions of industrial progress, noting that such notions have involved “lasting damage” for “Black writers, artists, and thinkers.” Within this framework, she evokes Joseph R. Winters’s argument that “modern notions of progress and freedom are inherently flawed,” since they are founded on the oppressive traditions of capitalism and colonialism. In turn, this leads to an argument against the teleological futurism of most nineteenth-century utopias and in support of the deconstruction of “the idea of historical progress unfolding in Hegelian dialectical stages.” What is to replace this is a hauntological (after Derrida) conception of the relation between the present and the past, for which “the present is always a site of potential breaks and ruptures that can signify both dislocation and pain as well as novelty and possibility.” In a similar vein, Heather Alberro questions the teleological futurism of an earlier tradition of utopia, evoking Laurence Davis’s observation on the importance of [End Page 545] “neglected or suppressed possibilities for qualitatively better forms of life” within the “Now.” The desideratum is, again... (shrink)

The idea of human freedom is essentially rooted in the concept of human development, according to Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen's 'Development as Freedom' thesis. And the idea of human progress is a construct that is designed around the axis offreedom. What is freedom? Is it only lack ofsocietal constraint, withdrawal of discipline and punish, willing suspension of the panoptic super ego that they address as the 'mainstream'? Or is freedom a concept much more fundamental, to be read into the texts (...) of Rabindranath Tagore, Romain Rolland or Walden? Sociologists claim that civilization is what we are and culture is merely an arrangement of artifacts that we happen to use during the course of our politics of everyday life. Civilization, however, is also a system of values that is handed down generations as a movement of socialization that laymen identify as 'progress'. (shrink)

« L'expression la plus adéquate que j'ai trouvée pour désigner les trois expériences hors du commun qu'il m'a été donné de vivre est celle utilisée par Romain Rolland dans sa correspondance avec Freud : le sentiment océanique. Romain Rolland aurait emprunté le magnifique et mystérieux terme « océanique » à la mystique indienne, notamment à Ramakrishna. Ce dernier parlait de son extase comme d'un « océan de joie ineffable ». Alors, qu'est-ce donc que ce sentiment océanique? (...) Ce serait l'expérience rare, fulgurante et généralement brève d'être Un avec le Tout. Comme si les frontières entre le Moi et le monde s'évanouissaient au profit d'un sentiment d'unité, de compréhension et de conscience élargie. » (Yves Vaillancourt) Rassemblant les morceaux épars de la littérature, de la psychanalyse et de la musique, l'auteur retrouve les pierres d'un chemin à la fois singulier et universel. (shrink)

Recent times have seen an emergence of cold-water sea swimming as a popular pasttime for increased numbers of people in coastal regions. Within this paper, we seek to outline the philosophical relationship between water and society, right back to Thales. From this we continue through anthropological sources to highlight the relationship between culture and the sea throughout much of human history. Sociology offers only piecemeal theoretical bases for this relationship. Here, the concept of liminality is deployed as a mechanism through (...) which we can interpret human-water relations. On from this, the concept of the ‘oceanic feeling’, coined by French intellectual Romain Rolland, is discussed to situate how the experience of swimming might offer one among many means through which we can return to the world as it is given to us, in a Nietzschean sense, and in doing so return at once to an experience of the eternal borne from presence. (shrink)

"Monteverdi et Wagner : hiatus, mariage impossible, défiance à l’entendement. Le mélomane proteste. Mais le parallèle n’est pas inédit. Car mettre en relation Monteverdi et Wagner, qu’a priori tout oppose, permet de lever le voile sur l’essentiel. À deux siècles d’intervalle, les changements de paradigme opérés par les deux artistes ont un terreau commun. Au-delà des analogies formelles, les attaques portées aux deux compositeurs et leurs répliques sous forme d’écrits théoriques mettent en évidence un monde d’idées. Nietzsche commença sa carrière (...) philosophique en le soulignant. À travers Ficin et Politien pour Monteverdi – Hölderlin, Schelling et Novalis pour Wagner –, les racines néoplatoniciennes communes aux deux créateurs constituent une autre correspondance révélatrice. On les retrouve au seuil du baroque comme du symbolisme. Venise, Pétrarque et Le Tasse ne laissent pas de réunir Monteverdi et Wagner, tandis qu’Orphée et Tristan offrent au chercheur une série d’analogies frappantes. Alors pourquoi ce rapprochement a-t-il été si peu approfondi? Certes, la dénonciation des frontières interdisciplinaires propres au système académique n’est pas nouvelle. Mais faut-il rester muet devant leur persistance? Il existe aujourd’hui toute une philosophie de la musique, ou précisément de la musique instrumentale. Mais où est la philosophie de l’opéra? Après avoir évoqué les apports lumineux de Romain Rolland et de Jean-Jacques Nattiez à la musicologie, Olivier Lexa établit un bref historique de la philosophie de l’opéra, de Rousseau à Nietzsche en passant par Hegel, Novalis, Schopenhauer et Kierkegaard. Par la suite, l’auteur aborde la portée exemplaire de l’histoire de l’art, de l’histoire culturelle et de l’esthétique analytique, avant de se pencher sur les relations que plusieurs grands penseurs récents et contemporains ont entretenues avec l’art lyrique : Adorno, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Bourdieu, Badiou, Lacoue-Labarthe et Žižek. Sera-t-on surpris de retrouver les noms de Monteverdi et Wagner parmi les récurrences dominantes?" -- Site internet de l'éditeur. (shrink)