Affinities

Letters

Vol. 12 No. 14 · 26 July 1990

From Yirmiyahu Yovel

I am grateful to George Steiner for his extended account of my Spinoza and Other Heretics (LRB, 19 April). I liked his liberal use of quotation marks, which let the author’s voice, too, be heard. The piece is entitled ‘Affinities’, and I felt that it betrayed his own affinity, not only for Baruch Spinoza, the lucid loner, but for the predicament of ‘an exile within an exile’ in Spinoza’s Marrano background, as described in Volume One; and also for the disillusioned, secular philosophy, infused with this-worldly spirituality, which Spinoza introduced into later modern thought (the subject of Volume Two). Yet despite this, Steiner has misunderstood the methodology of the two volumes, and therefore much of my argument. He attributes to each volume an exaggerated claim it does not make, and finds it unconvincing. Of the Marrano story in Volume One – that of the Iberian Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity, and their dazzling dualities – Steiner says that I make it ‘existentially determinant’ of Spinoza’s whole case. ‘According to Yovel,’ he tells his readers, the Marrano experience ‘is the source and informing dominant in the entirety of Spinoza’s life and labours’. I certainly don’t hold this inflated view and in fact warned against it in my text. I did, of course, happily spend almost an entire volume on the varieties of Marrano culture in Spinoza’s background (including Roja’s Celestina) and found them highly illuminating and relevant: but unlike others (whom Steiner wrongly believes I go ‘far beyond’), I do not try to make this an exclusive approach.

In calling Spinoza ‘the Marrano of Reason’ I make a claim, not about causality, but about analogies and recurrent patterns. I notice certain patterns of Marrano life and mentality that manifest themselves throughout two centuries of Marranism, and then recur in Spinoza’s case as well, transformed from the universe of historical religion into the opposite world of secular reason and immanence. These patterns include a break between the inner and the outer life; an intellectual quest, unrest and ambivalence; a knack for dual language, mask and equivocation; a tendency to religious scepticism in some – and also an aspiration to a more inward and spiritual religiosity in others; a career broken in two; and, above all, the pursuit of an alternative way to salvation, opposing the way of the ruling orthodoxy. ‘We are saved not by Christ, but by the Law of Moses,’ said the Judaising Marranos. ‘We are saved neither by Christ nor by Moses, but by reason and the “third kind of knowledge”,’ said Spinoza.

Steiner’s reading of Volume Two is even more puzzling to me. This volume follows the adventures of the idea of immanence (as I call Spinoza’s leading idea) in the work of other moderns from Kant to Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. The pattern I trace of their relation to Spinoza is that of ‘enemy brothers’, best illustrated by Nietzsche, but recurring in all the others as well. They all shared the idea of immanence, but construed it in contrasting ways, in response to the flaws they found in each others’ construal, or in Spinoza’s original. I do not stand refuted, therefore, as Steiner suggests, by the fact that all these thinkers had serious differences with Spinoza: this is part of my thesis. I don’t have to ‘admit’ it in ‘painful honesty’, for I say so myself and quite cheerfully. Thank God that Nietzsche and Marx have also diverged from Spinoza: otherwise, the history of ideas would be as simple-minded and barren as both I and Steiner know it can’t be.

Yirmiyahu Yovel
Spinoza Institute, Jerusalem