thoughts on Dr. V's thoughts re: Buber's critique of mysticism

Dr. V has an interesting Substack article up in which he examines Martin Buber's critique of mysticism. I have a few random thoughts that I'm not even going to attempt to organize. Some thoughts are a response to the substance of Dr. V's article; others are merely reactions to this or that point. Let's begin with a superficial reaction.

Mysticism "annuls relationship" (132) psychologizing both world and God. (141).  Verseelen is the word Kaufmann translates as 'psychologize.'  A more literal translation is 'soulifies.' 

The old Greek term psyche/ψυχή, in its biblical use, meant "soul," not "mind" or "emotions." Viewed this way, Kaufmann's psychologize actually means nothing more or less than soulify. Kaufmann and Dr. V are, perhaps inadvertently, saying the same thing.

Perhaps the underlying issue can be put, roughly, like this: in the end, does the One absorb everything and extinguish all finite individuality, or in the end[, do] duality and (transformed) finite individuality remain? In soteriological terms: does salvation in the end consist in a becoming one with the One[,] or [are] duality and difference preserve[d] even at the highest soteriological levels?

I sometimes wonder whether Buddhism can even be said to have a soteriology. Some forms of Buddhism probably do, e.g., with the concept of entering parinirvana or the bardo when you die. Still, in Buddhism, true nirvana entails a total extinguishing of the self (nirvana = literally, "blowing out," as of a candle flame), so many Buddhists rightly ask, "Who attains nirvana?"—almost as a sort of koan. If a soteriology (salvation) is explicitly a postmortem phenomenon, then many strains of Buddhism don't really have a soteriology. Zen interprets nirvana as the here-and-now: you're already in nirvana! As I learned it in various religious-studies classes: nirvana is samsara. This is, of course, far removed from any dualistic theistic conception of the afterlife as eternal communion with the divine.

But spirit is not in man, Buber thinks, but between man and what is not man. (141). I take it that he means that spirit is not in an individual man, to be realized in the depths of his isolated interiority, but between individual human beings and between individual human beings and what is not human. Spirit is thus actualized only in the relation of man to man, man to world, and man to God. 

At this point[,] I would put a question to Buber. If spirit subsists only in relation, ought we conclude that God needs man to be a spiritual being in the same way that finite persons need each other to be spiritual beings? Is God dependent on man to be who he is? If yes, then the aseity of God is compromised. A Christian could say that the divine personhood subsists in intra-divine relations, relations among and between the persons of the Trinity. But as far as I know Trinitarian thought is foreign to Judaism. Anyway, that is a question that occurs to me.

This is a logical critique of where Buber seems to be headed. Insistence upon duality, with spirit being a product of relationality, does seem to defy the classical-theist conception of God as possessing aseity, i.e., independent self-existence. In Eastern thinking, however, relationality is a fundamental quality of existence. What something is is dependent on how it relates to the things around it. I used to write a lot about this sort of topic long ago (see this post, for example). Eastern thinking puts primacy on relationships whereas Western thinking tends to see discrete entities as wholly separate monads. The notion of a distinctly dualistic "I-Thou" relationship could only come from the West.

Buber seems to be maintaining that Buddhist and other mysticism is an escape into illusion, an escape into a mere annihilation of dual awareness for the sake of an illusory non-dual awareness:  "insofar as this doctrine contains directions for immersion in true being, it does not lead into lived actuality but into 'annihilation' in which there is no consciousness, from which no memory survives—and the man who has emerged from it may profess the experience by using the limit-word of non-duality, but without any right to proclaim this as unity." (136) 

Both Buber and Dr. V seem intent on critiquing only one specific form of Buddhism, i.e., older Buddhism, known to some scholars as Pali Buddhism because the older Buddhist canon was written in Pali (where they say dhamma instead of dharma, anatta instead of anatman, and kamma instead karma, etc.). Maybe it's because I'm mostly rooted in a Zen perspective when I think about Buddhism, but Buddhism has always struck me as more pragmatic and realistic, more world-affirming than world-denying, more empirical than apodictic. Older scholars like Noss and Noss (Man's Religions, 1984) would probably note the influence of this-worldly Taoist thinking on Buddhism, thereby producing Taoist-inflected Zen. 

So for me, a big question is: is there such an animal as pragmatic mysticism? What if there were a mysticism that, despite being wordless and ineffable and all the rest, was nevertheless rooted in the here-and-now? I think such an animal exists and finds one of its best expressions in Zen, although I'd add that the Zen perspective, being a human perspective, is arguably pancultural—it's just that different cultures, with their different histories and vocabularies, necessarily express the Zen perspective in culturally specific ways. Modern Western exponents of Zen, for example, often use American jazz music as a metaphor for the Zen mindset: the naturalness, the instant adaptation to changing situations, the uninterrupted flow. These things are all jazz, and they're also all Zen.

This prompts me to put a second and more important question to Buber.  If there is no other life, no higher life, whether accessible in this life via Versenkung [sinking in, as via meditation] or after the death of the body, and we are stuck with this miserable crapstorm of a life, then what good is God?  What work does he do if he doesn't secure our redemption and our continuance beyond death?  This is what puzzles me about Judaism.  It is a worldly religion, a religion for this life—which is almost a contradiction in terms.  It offers no final solution as do the admittedly life-denying religions of Buddhism and Christianity.  Some will praise it for that very reason: it is not life-denying but life-affirming.  Jews love life, this life here and now, and they don't seem too concerned about any afterlife.  But then they don't have the sort of soteriological interest that is definitive of religion.  "On whose definition?" you will object.  And you will have a point.

If Judaism is as Dr. V characterizes it—i.e., a this-worldly, life-affirming tradition—then it's closer to Zen and Taoism than I thought. As Dr. V has said elsewhere, his definition of religion entails a postmortem soteriology. My own definition, laid out long ago, does not. And as I've already implied, calling Buddhism (and even Christianity) "life-denying" is something I very much disagree with. Even before Zen, Buddhism had elements of this-worldiness, and in Christianity, there's the tension between the other-worldly "in the world but not of the world" school and the this-worldly "stand in awe of God's creation laid out before you" school. Summing up Christianity as "life-denying" therefore seems like a false step to me. What's there to be thankful for if everything mortal/physical is fallen and to be rejected/renounced?

One of my ongoing frustrations with Dr. V's critiques of Buddhism is his superficial understanding of it. He knows a lot of the basic concepts and doctrines, to be sure, but he often seems unaware of the larger contexts in which those concepts and doctrines exist. Take the core concept of no-self (anatman, or 무아/無我/mu-a in Sino-Korean). Does Buddhism simply say there is no self? No; as per the Madhyamika doctrine of two truths (conventional and ultimate), there is a self, conventionally speaking (so the pronoun "I" does have a referent), but no self in the ultimate view. So there is fundamentally no self, but conventionally, there is one. Many different, distinct waves, but all one ocean. The fact that distinctness and oneness can exist at the same time points you toward nondualism. And there's another concept that I think Dr. V is shaky about. Back to this:

Buber seems to be maintaining that Buddhist and other mysticism is an escape into illusion, an escape into a mere annihilation of dual awareness for the sake of an illusory non-dual awareness:  "insofar as this doctrine contains directions for immersion in true being, it does not lead into lived actuality but into 'annihilation' in which there is no consciousness, from which no memory survives—and the man who has emerged from it may profess the experience by using the limit-word of non-duality, but without any right to proclaim this as unity." (136)

Dr. V's phrase "non-dual awareness" doesn't sit well, especially if he's interpreting what Buber says in that quote: "...non-duality, but without any right to proclaim this as unity." Unity and non-duality are not the same thing at all. Nondualism, as I tried to hint above, resides somewhere in the tension between uniqueness/difference and oneness. Coincidentia oppositorum is probably the Western concept that comes closest to expressing what nondualism really is. The coincidentia is just as important as the oppositorum.

Anyway, my usual frustrations aside, Dr. V's essay was interesting and rewarding, and it prompted some thoughts the type of which I haven't thunk in a long time. Give the rest of his essay a read if you're so inclined.