Prelim notes: Buber I

Buber, Martin. "Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour." On the Bible. Ede. Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1982.

Buber begins with an anecdote-like paragraph about those times we all face wherein we recognize a *moment*--that this moment will change everything, the (as Badiou might say) horizon of an event. At this moment there are two basic impulses: first, to "cherish the until-now-unsuspected certainty of thus being able to particpate on the ground of becoming" (to seize the day and make change); or to "banish all such impulses and resolve... not to let himself be fooled--not by the situation, which is just an embroilment, and not by himself, who is just a man come to grief; for everything is linked invincibly with everything else, and there is nowhere a break where he can take hold" (172). Again, I turn to Badiou--how does something new emerge? How do we break with the state of the situation, with the continual movement of "history" in order to form a future? Is human agency (here, "choice"--173) part of that break, or are humans just incidental? What is history?

"How shall we manage to escape from the dilemma whose discursive expression is the old philosophiucal quarrel between indeterministic and deterministic views of the world?" (173). Indeed, this old quarrel seems to be what dystopian fiction addresses--the genre as a whole seeks to provide a response to that quarrel (to "put in his oar" in Burke's words), and the early pieces, at least, fall on the side of choice, making that implication by their very publication, their readership, their circulation. Later, "postmodern" dystopian fictions are less certain of their own agency, their ability to incite choice by increasing awareness. Buber states this for me: "....philosophy does justice to the life experience in which the moment of benginning the action is illumined by the awareness of freedom, and the moment of having acted is overshadowed by the knowledge of necessity" (173).

Buber next asks several questions "Does a historica; hour ever experience its real limits otherwise than through undertaking to overstep those limits it is familiar with? Does the future establish itself ever anew or is it inescapably destined?" (173)--again, these are the questions that dystopian fiction addresses, and answers with many different answers. Then again, it's "equipment for living", not holy scripture, so that's not surprising. These two options--breaking with history (choice) or following a predetermined progression in faith are visible in the two kinds of apocalyptic writings in the Bible--those of "the prophets in the ages of the kings of Judah and Israel" and those of "the apocalyptic writings of Jewish and Jewish-Christian coinage in the age of late Helenism and its decline" (174). Human understanding of history and our role in it has changed dramatically, giving rise to these two options, this crisis of agency--the divide between the "prophetic" and the "apocalyptic" (174).

Jeremiah is his key OT example--Buber explains that twenty years before the destruction of Jerusalem, before the exile, God spoke to him to reveal the change that was to come. Jeremiah becomes the prophet, the "announcer" (Nabi/navi)(175). In Jeremiah, God is seen as a potter who "works on the historical shapes and desitines of human nations" (176) but humans still have freedom to either act in accordance with his will or to turn from the plan. Jeremiah, as the announcer, reads the situation before him, and plans his speeches accordingly--sometimes he tells them to turn from evil for they will be saved, at other times he proclaims a coming storm, an inevitable catastrophe (176). In either case, "no end is set to the real working power of the dialogue between divinity and mankind, within whichcomapssion can answer man's turning of his whole being back to God" (176). The time table is open, there is no sense of entellechy. "Dialogue" is key here--the conversation is ongoing, not one prophecy (fiction) mapped out already. Put simply, "The task of the genuine prophet was not to predict but to confront man with the alternatives of decision" (177).

Buber cites one important "mixed form" (hybrid genre) between the prophetic and the apocalyptic--that of the "anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile" who appears in Isaiah. "Among the prophets he was the man who had to announce world history and herald it as divinely predestined. In place of the dialogue between god andf people he brings the comfort of the One preparing redemption to those He wants to redeem; God speaks here not only having foreknown but also having foretold what now takes place in history--the revolutionary changes in the life of hte nations and the liberation fo Israel conummated in it" (178). In this new genre, there is "the unheard-of new character of the historical situation" (179).

We begin with the Fourth Book of Ezra, in which "the speaker pretends to be living as amember of the king's house in exile just after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans", yet the book was clearly written in the first century CE: "The actual historical-biographical situation of the speaker is deliberately replaced by an alien scene taken over as analogous to his own" (180). Here we get further contrasts between the fiction-writer (the writer of apocalypses) and the prophet--the prophet "addresses persons who should hear him" while the "apocalyptic writer has no audience turned toward him; he speaks into his notebook. he does not really speak, he only writes; he does not write down the speech, he just writes his thoughts--he writes a book" (180). In the apocalyptic writings, "there exists for him [the writer] no possibility of a change in the direction of historical destiny that could proceed from man, or be effected or coeffected by man. The prophetic principle of the turning is not simply denied in its individual form, but aturning on the part of the communithy is no longer even thought of" (182). Here I should connect communual turning, communal atoning to Girard's sacrificial atonement and the role of tragedy. Somehow.

Connections: "There is, of course, an optimistic modern apocalyptic, the chief example of which is Marx's view of the future. This has erroneously been ascribed a prophetic origin....Here in place of the power superior to the world that effects the transition, an immanent dialectic has appeared" (183). Yes, yes it has.

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Further contrasts: "Prophecy originates in the hour of the highest strength and fruitfullness of the Eastern spirit, the apocalyptic out of the decadence of its cultures and religions" (183).