Buber and Jung
Robert A. Clark, M.D.
In February 1952, the German periodical, Merkur, published an article by Martin Buber, Religion und Modernes Denken (Religion and Modern Thinking). The article was in large part a criticism of Jung, accusing him of “overstepping with sovereign license the boundaries of psychology” in his observations on religion. Jung’s reply, Religion und Psychologie, appeared in Merkur, May 1952, and was followed in the same issue by a brief rebuttal by Buber.
When two scholars of such stature clash it should be a matter of interest to many beyond the followers of either. Buber is one of the greatest living philosophers and students of. Jewish mysticism. Born in Vienna in 1878, he now lives in Israel. He has written a study of Hasidism, a mystical movement among the Jews of Poland and the Ukraine. He is perhaps best known for his philosophy of the relation between the individual and God, summed up in the title of another book: I and Thou.
Early in his essay, Religion and Modern Thinking, criticizing Sartre’s view that God no longer exists for man, Buber writes: “God can never become an object for me; I can attain no other relation to him than that of the I to its eternal Thou, that of the Thou to its eternal I. But if man is no longer able to attain this relation, if God is silent toward him and he toward God, then something has taken place, not in human subjectivity but in Being itself. It would be worthier not to explain it to oneself in sensational and incompetent terms, such as the ‘death’ of God, but to endure it as it is and at the same time move existentially toward a new happening, toward that event in which the word between heaven and earth will again be heard.1
Buber first praises Jung as “the leading psychologist of our day,” “who has accomplished astounding feats, far outstripping all previous psychology” and who has explained that he does not wish to “overstep the self-drawn boundaries of psychology.” Soon, however, he finds Jung apparently identifying himself with a view that God “does not exist apart from man,” which he takes to be a negative “statement about the transcendent.” He asserts that Jung’s concept of the Self is no longer genuinely mystical but Gnostic, alluding to an early unpublished poem by Jung allegedly professing a Gnostic god, “in whom good and evil are bound together and balance each other.” “One would grasp Jung’s idea better if one said that from now on the Godhead no longer takes the place of the human self.… Man now draws back the projection of his self on a God outside of him”2, thus dispensing with God. “This god who unites good and evil in himself” is a Gnostic figure, “traced back ultimately to the ancient Iranian divinity Zurvan.”3 “Jung’s psychology of religion is to be understood as the announcement of that god as the Coming One.”4
Concerning his conception of the “actual other,” Buber goes on to say: “My soul does not and cannot include the other, and yet can nonetheless approach the other in this most real contact.”5 Yet it is possible, as he writes in an earlier chapter, to experience the other, by “mutual contact, as the genuinely reciprocal meeting in the fullness of life between one active existence and another.”6 This “meaning is to be experienced in living action and suffering itself, in the unreduced immediacy of the moment,”7 growing out of the entrance into “the concrete situation as it actually is … even if in the form of fighting against it.”8 In other words we should really live life, rather than theorizing about it, and so come as close to God as is humanly possible.
In his reply, Jung asserts that he is a scientific empiricist, who does not pretend to have knowledge of the unknowable, as his metaphysician critics do. On the other hand, he has never said that there are not unknowable things of another world. For practical reasons he must deal with metaphysical and religious phenomena of the human mind, not with actual gods or angels, but with autonomous images having strong specific energy. He believes that Buber has erred in not distinguishing between the images and the corresponding metaphysical concepts. Since Jung does not possess the “charisma of belief,” he does not think that conscious conceptions are correct representations of the metaphysical objects. He insists he has not overstepped the boundaries of experience, but has represented only a psychic factor, which is objective by virtue of its autonomy and therefore can be designated as a “Thou.” When he uses the word “God” he refers to “absolutely nothing other than the demonstrable psychical processes,” of whatever shocking reality. His concepts are considered to be only tools. He does not believe he can be accused of Gnosticism unless his facts can be proved to be “nothing but inventions.” Buber has been led astray because he “apparently cannot grasp to what extent an autonomous psychic content like the divine image can be in opposition to the ego.” When Buber speaks of God, he is talking from his consciousness and consequently from his unconscious presupposition, which is very difficult to define and presumably peculiar to himself.
Jung states that everything asserted about God is necessarily psychical. Only poetically could it be said that God has placed an image of himself in the human mind, so that “the unassuming man may glimpse, in the quietness of his mind, an image” which “has everything in it he will ever imagine concerning his gods.” This archetype, in itself, satisfies Jung completely, so humanly close is it, and so strange and different. Though he finds it uncongenial to believe that the metaphysical God speaks through everyone, quotes the Bible or ventilates his own religious opinions, yet he considers the structure of Christian dogma to be on a higher level spiritually than that of the Gnostics or, for that matter, than the concepts of medical psychology, in so far as the latter are closer to earth, contradictory, unfinished, and consequently logically and esthetically unsatisfying. The image of God in the unconscious is presumably less beautiful and sublime than the dogmatic concept of God, Jung denies preaching a new religion, but rather claims only to be a physician seeking remedies for man’s malady. A Gnostic might reproach him for lack of a cosmogony.
Buber, in his brief reply, denies having either placed in question Jung’s empirical psychiatric material, or criticized his psychological theses. He reiterates his charge that Jung has overstepped his own realm.9 He modifies his own statement by saying that “my own belief in revelation … does not mean … that finished statements from God were handed down.… Rather it means that the human substance is melted by the spiritual fire which visits it, and there now breaks forth from it a word, a statement, which is human in its meaning and form … and yet witnesses to Him who stimulated it.”10 He further states: “The distinction … is thus not between psychic and nonpsychic … but that between psychic statements to which a superpsychic reality corresponds and (those) … to which none corresponds.”
He asserts his awareness that men have many and different images of God, “painted in the intention of faith … directed towards an existing Being.” Jung’s attitude is Gnostic, not in historical terms, but in so far as the Gnostic outlook is a universal category. “Its modern manifestation concerns me … not only because of its massive pretensions,” but because it deifies the instincts “instead of hallowing them in faith”
Thanks to the editor of Merkur, Buber has the last word. It would be unfortunate, however, to have the discussion end there. The question at issue is an important one, namely, the relation between depth psychology and religious mysticism. Although Jung himself espouses no organized religious group, many of his followers do. His concepts have a particular attraction for those with a mystical interest—especially, in this country, certain Episcopalians and Quakers. The fact that they, like Buber, believe that there is a Being beyond the archetype does not prevent them from calling themselves Jungians, nor from getting enlightenment and inspiration from Jung’s writings. They do not feel they must scorn those analytical psychologists of a more scientific or human bent, who, like Jung, are quite satisfied with the archetype and wish to search no farther. Nor, for that matter, should the scientifically minded consider the religious to be somehow victims of an illusion. It seems to me that each, respecting the other’s views, makes his own decision as to his own need. Both, meanwhile, can carry on their own inquiries, and amicably discuss their experiences and interpretations, with the expectation that they will find that they have more in common than not.
l. p. 91
2. p. 114
3. p. 119
4. p. 121
5. p. 118
6. p. 46
7. p. 49
8. p. 52
9. p. 172
10. p. 173
Robert A. Clark is a psychiatrist. He has recently moved from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, where he is Clinical Director of Friends Hospital. He was one of the founding group of our Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology, and is the author of Six Talks on Jung’s Psychology, Boxwood Press, Pittsburgh, Pa.