Much despised during the century after his death in 1677, Spinoza has become an inspiration to so many of the world's greatest minds from the late 18th century on to the present. In Volume II of Spinoza and Other Heretics, Yirmiyahu Yovel explores some of these relationships. From Hegel, to Marx, to Nietzsche to Freud, Yovel demonstrates how huge a debt many of Western Culture's greatest thinkers owed to Spinoza. But Yovel doesn't just chronicle facts; he puts forth a thesis. To Yovel, the most profound heresies that took wings during the past two hundred years have been grounded in Spinoza's philosophy of "immanence." By that term, Yovel refers to the view that the reality of our world, not some transcendent noumenal realm, is the best foundation for our values and beliefs.

Yovel quotes Hegel in saying that "when beginning to philosophize, one must first be a Spinozist." If you assume that all serious philosophers need to embrace their share of heresies, perhaps that Hegelian statement provides the subtext of the entire book.

For me, Yovel was quite successful in demonstrating his thesis and in proving to all of us Spinoza lovers that we are not alone. While I hate to be critical of such a marvelous book, I am compelled to point out a rather strange omission. In running through a litany of thinkers who have been influenced by Spinoza over the years, Yovel devotes little space to one of Spinoza's greatest disciples, Goethe. It was during Goethe's young adulthood in Germany that Spinoza's name was resuscitated as a God intoxicated man after many years when he was thought to resemble the devil. By all accounts, Goethe simply adored Spinoza and the latter was largely responsible for cementing some of Goethe's own heretical views.

Yovel missed quite an opportunity to discuss the Spinoza-Goethe relationship in depth. Nietzsche, for one, would have been furious at the omission.

Chevrin and Kevane (authors of Love of Wisdom: An Introduction to Christian Philosophy) were absolutely right and did not exaggerate to regard Spinoza as a formidable foe. No Christian can or should sympathize with his pantheistic views. Spinoza's influence on subsequent thinkers is over-arching; his hostility to transcendence needs to be reciprocated by theistic thinkers' open disavowal and rejection of his immanentist philosophy. In the literary production of this brilliant thinker we have a prime example of the incompatibility of Eastern and Western world views. We theists should watch his ideas the same way we watch animals in the wild: from a safe distance.

Spinoza was an avowed enemy of revealed religion: he used biblical hermeneutics as a weapon, in his fight against theism. To him, historia sacra was just a myth; messianism a misguided illusion; miracles a pious thing, explainable through natural causes. To him God, was an immanent substance, eternal, not liable to change, and yet lacking personal self-consciousness; it is devoid of personality, subjectivity and spirit; it is identical with reality. Accoridng to Spinoza God is a pure being involving no negation. Spinoza distinguished between:

a)Vera religio: attained by a few, nurtured by an amor dei intellectualis. It is an idea vera.

b)Religio catholica: the result of imaginatio, it consists in putting into practice social beliefs borrowed from Scriptures (justice, mutual help and obedience to the laws of the state). Thus, religion can be useful.

c)Superstitio: it entails belief in miracles, teleology, historical religion, immortality of the soul, belief in the "Son of God. Spinoza's immanent revolution set the ground for later thinkers, who sought to construe the philosophy of immanence either more coherently or still more radically to new areas (Economics, Depth Psychology, Ethics). The brilliant author of this book, Yovel, proceeds to map a list of alternatives by which a philosophy of immanence can be built. (p.171)

How did Spinoza influence later thinkers?

Kant= He built his own philosophy of immanence, which was both human-centered and anti-naturalistic. He wanted to build a system of rational ethics (based on morality and on absolute imperatives) on the ruins of metaphysics. He professed and preached intellectual agnosticism. He bitterly criticized Judaism, Catholicism and the Byzantine Church. Later on in his life, he also rejected Pietism. Kant believed that the rational attitude can be propagated on a massive historical scale (Spinoza saw it as the privilege of a few).

Hegel= God, the Absolute, is spirit, not a substance, but an organic and conscious subject. Hegel attempted a dialectical critique of Spinoza, by encompassing it, not by denying it: "When beginning to philosophize, one must first be a Spinozist"(p.29, 32).The Absolute must not be conceived as a ready made beginning, but as a result. According to Hegel, the Absolute produces itself as absolute in the process of History; he is a becoming God. God attains self-knowledge and actualizes himself through human history. Historical pantheism: God deifies history rather than nature. The totality must be conceived as a siubject. If totality is pure affirmation, with no inner differences, than his exclusion of negativity must lead to a Parmenidean kind of unity, wiping out all distinctions and making all finite entities, change and dynamisms ontologically impossible (Advaita Vedanta: Nirguna Brahman; Acosmism).

Marx= Spinoza is always present in Marx's thought (p.79). Homo oeconomicus. Marx made the economic substratum into an arche', the first principle, the foundation of the realm of immanence. Emphasis on natura naturata.

Nietzsche= Speaking of his "ancestors," he always mentioned Goethe and Spinoza. This worldliness is co-extensive with being in general. Why should a world of pure immanence be conceived as a rational and organized totality? He rejected not only God, but "god's shadows"(meaning, moral world, order, fixed law, truth, rationality). Man exists in an ever-transient flux of "will to power" or in a metaphysical wasteland. (p.123)

The will to power is a drive toward self-transcendence, but not in the style of Kant, the Stoics and Christianity's morality and asceticism. It does not impose external constraints upon life and the emotions, but lets life reshape and sublimate itself. Man is his own creator, in the state of "self-being without God." Nietzsche was a modern Heraclitus, though he denied the logos or fixed rational order presiding over the world flux (ETERNAL RECURRENCE, p. 124-27).

Freud= Human beings are moved by a dominant, natural striving or source of energy (libido vs. Spinoza's conatus). Atheism must resign itself to man's impotence in the universe without seeking illusory compensations. Empedocles' love and hatred are replaced by Freud's own version of dualism of eros and thanatos; Spinoza stuck to absolute monism.

Macchiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Sartre are philosophers of the "dark enlightenment", in that they challenge the "divine part" in man and its alleged origin in a transcendent realm. Each worked to shatter complacent self-images, comforting illusions and claimed to have found something dark and unsettling about the structure of man and of the world.

Spinoza has suffered a strange fate. He is the invisible man of modern philosophy. Resolving his riddle as it is concealed in the later work of modern philosophy requires some detective work and Yovel's account, the second volume of his series, acutely traces the underground stream of influence through Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzche, Freud, and others. The first volume on the Marrano's and Spinoza's background is the author's intriguing starting point. Much modern philosophy hardly makes sense without putting putting a tracer on some key notions, they lead back to Spinoza, a point all too clear to Hegel, who is otherwise incomprehensible. Modern science can handly him, yet he prophesies its limitations. The book has a brisk pace, and is a surefooted guide to a field that requires a great deal of legwork. This digest of such a huge field is a fascinating study of a puzzle most seem to wish unsolved.

This book is in a simple language for all,full of insights and makes you think after you closed the book.

Wide knowledge of the writer about Shpinoza and the feelinfg the writer loves the subject makes you fall in love as well.