Apocalittica e profetismo in Buber e Bloch

Even without having explicitly confronted each other on the subject, Martin Buber and Ernst Bloch engage in a close dialogue on prophecy and apocalyptic in their writings, presenting two antithetical models. Buber favors prophecy as the relationship between humanity and God in historical action, seeing instead in apocalyptic the loss of the centrality of human action prompted by God. Bloch, on the other hand, reads apocalyptic as the definitive placing of the human being at the center of historical action, an exodus from God for which Job’s protest against God represents a crucial turning point. The last part of the essay illustrates some precedents of the definition of these paradigma in the early writings of the two authors. The conclusion to be drawn from this comparison is that, beyond the clear opposition of paradigma, both philosophers tend to bring apocalyptic back into historical action.