Buber vs. Campbell: A Memorable Controversy
Clearing up the confusion around a famous misunderstanding
In 1956, Martin Buber gave a celebrated series of lectures at Columbia University. Among other things, he discussed the human experience of exile from God. Joseph Campbell was present, and asked a provocative question after the lecture. That question led to an exchange which has become notorious, especially among students and followers of Campbell. To some, this may seem like a dead controversy, of interest mainly to a few scholars and historians, but they are mistaken. On the contrary, I hope to show that the issues raised by that encounter may go far in explaining the confused motives behind a defamation campaign against Campbell, which began after his death in 1987, and continues today. Unfortunately, the Internet has brought us a kind of digital version of the famous Goebbels principle: If you post a big lie, and keep posting it over and over, people will eventually come to believe it, no matter how big it is. Articles can still be found on the Net, realating the “well-known fact” that Joseph Campbell was an anti-Semite, and was also a right winger. (Such falsehoods appear, for example, at a site called rationalwiki — not so alarming, perhaps, since it’s a terminally boring place, unless you’re interested in simple-minded rationalism.)
Since Buber was the lecturer, it would seem more appropriate to begin with his own version of the exchange. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find any indication that he ever published such an account. If anyone knows of one, I’d be grateful for them to post a link to it here.
We begin, therefore, with a brief version of Campbell’s recollection. (There are longer ones available, as well as partisan accounts by students of his who were there — notably, Jean Houston.)
It was during the third lecture that I got up my nerve to raise my hand.
Very gently and nicely, Dr. Buber asked, “What is it, Mr. Campbell?”
“Well,” I said, “there is a word being used here this evening that I just can’t follow; I don’t know what it refers to.”
“What is that word?”
I said, “God.”
Well, his eyes opened. He looked in utter amazement at me and he said, “You don’t know what God means?”
I said, “I don’t know what you mean by God. You’re telling us that God has hidden his face. Now, I’m just back from India, where people are experiencing and beholding God all the time.”
“Well,” he said, “do you mean to compare?…”
Unfortunately, this exchange didn’t quite fit with the ecumenical spirit of the occasion, and the chairman cut in very abruptly and said:
“No, Dr. Buber, Mr. Campbell just wants to know what you mean by God.”
He backed away and then, acting as though it were an inconsequential matter, he said,
“Everyone must come out of his exile in his own way.”
Well, that might have been perfectly all right from Dr. Buber’s standpoint. But what struck me immediately was that the whole point of Oriental wisdom and mythic themes is that we are not in exile — that the God is within you. You can’t be exiled from it. All that can happen is that you can fail to know it, that you don’t realize it, that you haven’t found a way to open your consciousness to this presence that is right within you.
This is a very important line of differentiation between the traditions of one world — the Orient — and the other, the Occident.
This exchange has been cited by students of Campbell, who express shock and dismay at Buber’s egregiously ethnocentric response. But I propose to show that their interpretation, along with Campbell’s (and perhaps even the chairman’s as well) arises from a misunderstanding of Buber’s meaning and intention.
Campbell says: “All that can happen is that you can fail to know it, that you don’t realize it, that you haven’t found a way to open your consciousness to this presence that is right within you.”
But isn’t it possible that this is exactly what Buber means by exile? I would argue that this is what he was trying to get across, when he said that we must all come out of exile in our own way.
On the other hand, I agree entirely with Campbell’s assertion (not only here, but at great length in several of his books) that Indian and other Oriental religious philosophy is entirely justified in its refutation of the fundamentalist, literalistic, Judeo-Christian interpretation of “exile”. That literalistic notion of exile is based on belief in a God who is a priori outside of us — a concept which is already a form of exile in itself. But literalistic religious thought is of course blind to all this, and dives even deeper into the delusion, proposing narratives of our having withdrawn still further from Him, or of His withdrawal even further from us — or perhaps both.
But what grounds are there for supposing that Buber’s interpretation of the word exile is such a mediocre, literalistic one, rather than a mystical one, evoking essentially the same spiritual blindness that Campbell himself describes ? Anyone familiar with Buber’s writings — The Legend of the Baal-Shem comes immediately to mind — knows that the evidence points overwhelmingly to the latter view. Even though Buber uses language similar to that used by fundamentalist Jews and Christians, with terms such as exile, and withdrawal, he clearly does not mean for them to be taken literally.
Furthermore, I feel that the real nature of the provocation that the Campbell faction senses, but fails to identify correctly, is to be found in Buber’s use of the word “compare”. Everything hinges on the meaning of this word. I find it almost inconceivable, that a man of Buber’s wisdom and brilliance was capable of being so bigoted as to suggest that the Jewish God is “beyond compare,” in the sense of being superior to Indian ideas of God, or anything of the sort. Rather, he was indulging in an admittedly condescending reference (with a distinct hint of irony) to Campbell’s own profession: a subtle challenge to what was known in those days as “comparative religion.” (In one taped lecture, Campbell reminisced about this incident, reliving it vividly. At one point, he actually exclaimed, with a laugh, “Yes, Dr. Buber, I do mean to compare — it’s my job!” But the mere fact that it’s his job does not qualify as an answer to that challenge. And Buber is certainly not the only one to make it — it occurs often in polemics of the Traditionalist school (though I don’t know enough about Buber to say whether he was sympathetic to that school or not). I would summarize that challenge as follows: mere comparison of different religions, valuable and necessary though it is, is insufficient for seekers of the deepest truth. Comparison alone will become a horizontality, which distracts us from the verticality of the deepest truth that is to be found in each of the great religions.
Personally, I feel considerable ambivalence about this and other Traditionalist views — and thus also ambivalent about Buber’s ironic (some would say cavalier) condescension towards an enlightening, and vitally important field of scholarship, and philosophy. But at least it’s a challenge worth considering, and debating. Indeed, that would have been a far more interesting debate (and one more respectful of Buber’s true intentions) than the one that unfortunately ensued, based on an egregious misinterpretation of the word “compare,” in this context. In other words, both Campbell and his disciples completely missed Buber’s subtle meaning, and therefore failed to see that his concluding remark about “exile” was, on the contrary, an acknowledgement of Campbell’s own point about God in India.
On the other hand, Joseph Campbell is at his most eloquent and convincing, when he evokes the one-sided tendency of Judaism, and of all the Abrahamic religions, to fixate on the transcendent, outer God, while overlooking the immanent inner God. In several of his books (especially Occidental Mythology), he achieves a lucid and thorough deconstruction of the collective superiority complex around the concept of monotheism, which is so deeply-rooted in all three Abrahamic religions. In his public teachings, and recorded conversations with people, he did not hesitate to point this out, mincing no words. His fearlessness in confronting this ancient collective, Abrahamic arrogance, combined with his audacity (and perhaps a certain lack of diplomacy), are without a doubt the source of the baseless allegations of anti-Semitism, which suddenly appeared after his death in 1987. As is so often the case with defamation efforts of this sort, the perpetrators preferred to wait until the target was safely in the grave before publishing their polemics. The most prominent of the latter, written by Brendan Gill in the New York Review of Books, descended to the level of cowardly slander. Here is just one example: anyone familiar with Campbell’s recorded conversations, especially, knows that he was very fond of evoking images of the Apollo moon mission, whose expansion of our inner horizons he held to be more important than our outer horizons. He often spoke of the astronauts’ experiences of seeing the whole Earth from the moon, as a possible cure for narrow religious views, and ethnocentrism of all kinds. On more than one occasion, he speculated that if a fundamentalist Jew (for example — he might just as well have said Christian, or Muslim) could be sent to the moon, and have the same awesome experience of seeing the Earth from there, they would no longer be able to maintain narrow and ethnocentric religious beliefs. In Mr. Gill’s hands, this became redacted into a story about Campbell ranting that “The moon would be a good place to put the Jews!” And the worst thing is, Gill’s story stuck. One still hears it today. This malicious (and stupid) distortion shows too much deliberation to be excused as a misunderstanding. It sufficiently discredits Gill’s intentions, so that I propose to waste no more time in discussing his other allegations, nor in idle curiosity about what sort of axe the man had long been grinding (as he himself admits elsewhere in that article) against Campbell.
One of the most persistent fallacies among people who live in Abrahamic-influenced cultures — and who have little knowledge, and less understanding of the discoveries of comparative religious scholarship — is the belief that Judaism was the first religion to proclaim the Oneness of God — or more accurately, to intuit the fundamental, divine Unity of Being behind all its plural manifestations. But the truth is that all great religions — including African “animistic” religions, such as that of the Yoruba, and even including Taoism and Buddhism, which generally refrain from speaking of God — recognize this divine Unity, in no uncertain terms. They may or may not accept the concept of an outside Creator — still less of a Boss of the Universe — (Buddhists clearly accept neither), but they all accept the absolute Unity of the divine, behind its manifold appearances. In the words of Egyptologist James Breasted: “Monotheism is imperialism in religion.”