https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yirmiyahu_Yovel
Spinoza and other Heretics
Yovel's best-known book is Spinoza and other Heretics, (Princeton 1989), a diptych in two volumes that offers a new interpretation of the existential origins of Spinoza's intellectual revolution (Vol. I) and its developments in later thinkers of modernity (Vol. II). Spinoza appealed to Yovel primarily by his radical principle of immanence, which Yovel sees as paradigmatic of much of modern thought, and by his striking personal case. No modern thinker before Nietzsche has gone as far as Spinoza in shedding all historical religion and all horizons of transcendence. In wondering what had enabled Spinoza to tear himself so drastically from the Western theistic tradition, Yovel did not turn directly to the rational arguments that drove Spinoza, but looked first for the historico-existential situation that cleared the mental space for those arguments to emerge and take hold in the mind.[10]
The answer, Yovel suggested, is linked to the dualities and confused religious identity of the peculiar Jewish group from which Spinoza came, the so-called Marranos, who before arriving in Holland had lived for generations in Spain and Portugal as forced converts from Judaism, absorbing Christian symbols, mental patterns and ways of thinking. Former Jews who tried to remain Jewish in secret had only scant knowledge of Judaism, and what they knew they conceptualized in Christian terms; while others, having mixed the two religions, ended up neither Jews nor Christians, and looked to the affairs of this life and this world as a substitute to religious salvation in either Jesus or Moses. However, describing the events of Marranos responding to the miracle in the Convent of São Domingos in Lisbon on April 19, 1506 with statements such as "How can a piece of wood do miracles?", or "Put some water to it and it'll go out", Yovel states that these words "expressed the same rough Jewish common sense resisting the Catholic sense of mysterium and insisting on calling super-rational phenomena by their earthly names."[11] The Marrano experience, Yovel suggests, made it possible for several ex-Marranos to adopt the immanent and "secular" standpoint which Spinoza radicalized and gave it a powerful systematization.[12]
Volume One (The Marrano of Reason)[13] uses historical and literary materials to elicit a set of typical and recurring Marrano patterns (for example: life on two levels, overt and concealed; the use of equivocation and dual language; the search for an alternative way to salvation, replacing Jesus and Moses with philosophical reason, etc.) which in Spinoza are transposed from the context of religion to that of reason. From the other direction, key philosophical issues in Spinoza (language, politics and the multitude, the third kind of knowledge) are also, at the same time, shown to be responding to Marrano-like elements that further illuminate and contextualize them. Yovel insists that this contextualization is not reductive: Spinoza's ideas have an independent rational import that cannot be reduced to the historical circumstances that allowed them to arise.[14]
A heretic to all religions, Spinoza was banned by the rabbis but refused to convert to Christianity. By calling him "the first modern Jew", Yovel highlights his relevance to the Modern Jewish situation. His case - even more than his thought - anticipated most of the rival and contradicting solutions that were offered in later centuries to non-orthodox Jewish existence. Yet Spinoza himself neither advocated nor personally realized any of those options. He thus became, involuntarily, a founding father of almost all the forms of modern life in which he himself did not participate.[15]
Volume Two (The Adventures of Immanence)[16] uncovers the presence of Spinoza's revolution in some major turns of modern thought. Yovel distinguishes between naturalism and the broader concept of a "philosophy of immanence". The latter maintains that (a) immanent reality is all there is, the overall horizon of being; (b) it is also (through humans) the only valid source of moral and political norms; and (c) interiorizing this recognition is a precondition to whatever liberation or redemption humans can hope for. Yovel takes the reader into the latent and overt conversation with Spinoza in the work of Kant, Hegel, the left-Hegelians (Heine, Feuerbach, Hess), Marx, Nietzsche and Freud - all of whom shared a core philosophy of immanence but worked it out in rival ways, which also diverge from Spinoza's. This approach makes vividly present Spinoza's influence on modernity, including Jewish modernity. In the Epilogue, speaking for himself, Yovel argues for a critical philosophy of immanence to modify Spinoza's "dogmatic" one.[17]
The book was widely discussed and translated into French, German, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese.[18]
