Yirmiyahu Yovel (; 20 October 1935 – 10 June 2018) was an Israeli philosopher and public intellectual. He was Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the New School for Social Research in New York. Yovel had also been a political columnist in Israel, cultural and political critic and a frequent presence in the media. Yovel was a laureate of the Israel Prize in philosophy and officier of the French order of the Palme académique. His books were translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Hebrew, Korean and Japanese. Yovel was married to Shoshana Yovel, novelist and community organizer, and they had a son, Jonathan Yovel, poet and law professor, and a daughter, Ronny, classical musician, TV host and family therapist.
Biography
Education and early philosophical development Born in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine, Yirmiyahu Yovel graduated in 1953 from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa. Following his mandatory military service he studied philosophy and economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, completing his B.A. in 1961 and M.A. in 1964. He supported his studies as radio news editor and presenter. However, he declined a permanent career in broadcasting and went to the Sorbonne and Princeton University to complete his philosophical studies. In 1968 he earned his PhD from the Hebrew University. His adviser was Nathan Rothenstreich.
Yovel came to the university driven by existential philosophical concerns and suspicious of rationalism. Upholding individual subjectivity, young Yovel was estranged from the collectivist ideals and political ideologies of the time (including the socialist-Zionist ethos), because of their demand to monopolize and politicize all intellectual concerns. Religion, too, was not the answer, but rather an escape. Yovel has shared from the start Nietzsche's radical drive to existential lucidity, which can be emotionally taxing but also liberating.
It was, in particular, Kant's program of critical reason (though not its actual execution), and the concept of finite rationality that provided Yovel with the terms for a constructive critique of rationalism, one that recognizes rationality as indispensable for human life and culture, even while taking its finitude more radically than Kant's, by admitting its fallibility, open-endedness, and non-absolute nature.
Yovel holds that the history of philosophy is embedded in most philosophical discourse, and that often it contains issues and insights that can be fruitfully contemporized by a method of immanent reconstruction. His own philosophical position can be described as "a philosophy of immanence," which, following Spinoza, views the immanent world as all there is and as the sole possible source of social and political normativity. The latter theme was extensively probed in his two-volume Spinoza and Other Heretics (Princeton, 1989), which traces the idea of immanence back to Spinoza and follows its adventures in later thinkers of modernity from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche and beyond.
Yovel was to return as visiting professor both to Princeton University (1970–71) and the Sorbonne (1978–80), among other foreign appointments. His years on both sides of the Atlantic helped shape Yovel's attitude towards Anglo-American analytic philosophy. He shares its demand for clarity and precision – this was recognized as a hallmark of his writing – but criticized its often scholastic tendencies and a-historical approach.
Following his academic and public activity Yirmiyahu Yovel became a prominent voice in Israeli intellectual life. His numerous columns in major papers, mostly Ha'aretz and Yediot Aharonot, probed public attitudes and government policies. He was an early advocate of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, and strongly opposed the settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza as politically wrong and motivated by false Messianism.
Journalism and public activity
Yovel's involvement in journalism started in his student days. In 1960–64 he worked for radio Israel and co-founded its weekly news magazine. In 1967 he participated in the project of creating an independent Israeli broadcasting authority, serving two terms on its council. Later he edited the first political documentaries of Israel TV, and during 1975–1978 he edited and hosted 30 major TV programs on social and political issues (drugs, gay liberation, divorce, adoption, violence in sports, Arab land rights; the right to die, etc.). His viewers also remembered him as a military reporter in the Sinai frontline in both the 1967 and 1973 war. In 1973 he was among the few journalists who insisted on reporting the truth about Israel's military setbacks in the early stage of the war.
After Labor's historic defeat in 1977, he joined "Circle 77," a group of intellectuals that tried to reform the Labor party, but found himself unfit for party politics. Henceforth he focused on the written press, publishing scores of political columns until the 1990s.
Academic career
Most of Yovel's career took place at the Hebrew University, where he served in various academic posts and held the Shulman Chair of Philosophy. During that time, he also visited and lectured in numerous universities and institutes worldwide including Columbia, Hamburg, Milan, Oxford, Paris IV ("Paris-Sorbonne"), and others. In 1994 he accepted an appointment to teach annually one-term at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research which became his "second academic home." He was then nominated to the inaugural Hans Jonas Chair in Philosophy, from which he retired in 2010.
In 1986, Yovel founded the Jerusalem Spinoza Institute with a dual intention – to foster Spinoza scholarship, and to promote public education around ideas associated with Spinoza (such as democracy, secularism, and tolerance) both as all- European thinker and as an emblematic figure of Jewish modernity).
In 2000 Yovel won the Israel Prize for his achievements in philosophy. His thank-you address on behalf of his fellow laureates was entitled "A Report on the State of Reason." Reason is alive and breathing, Yovel reported, but is besieged by inner and outer enemies. Reason's "inner enemy" is its over-ambitious tendency to exceed its limits and control, and three "external enemies": mysticism, global commercial culture, and post-modern radical critique. Yovel argued that these challenges can be tackled by a sober attitude, committed to reason all while accepting its fallibility, finitude, and lack of absolute character. This is rationality "on a human scale," rather than a secular replica of religion.
Publications Yirmiyahu Yovel's published numerous scholarly articles and several books, among them Kant and the Problem of History (Princeton 1980,86) Spinoza and Other Heretics (Princeton 1989), Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews (Polity 1996) and The Other Within: The Marranos (Princeton 2013). He translated into Hebrew two major philosophical classics (Spinoza's Ethics and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason) with systematic introductions, and edited several collective books, including a 5-volume encyclopedia of Jewish modern secular culture. Yovel's credits as journalist include dozens of press columns and 30 major TV programs.
Kant and the Renewal of Metaphysics Yovel's first book, based on his PhD dissertation, was Kant and the Renewal of Metaphysics (1974, in Hebrew.) While Kant had been often held to have destroyed metaphysics, Yovel's book argues that Kant's actual program was to renew it, by replacing the old dogmatic metaphysics with a new critical one. Metaphysical questions are deeply significant even when they exceed the range of legitimate answers. To either repress the questions or to pretend answering them is equally irrational. Reason in Kant has a metaphysical interest and a critical interest that are equally indispensable, yet contradict each other in the absence of a critique. The critical turn resolves this antinomy in two stages. First, it establishes a system of synthetic a-priori categories and principles that functions as a valid metaphysics of the immanent (empirical) domain; and, secondly, in the Dialectic, it re-orients the metaphysical drive from its search of empty, illusory objects back into the empirical world, and makes us realize our fundamental finitude, as well as the endlessly open horizons within this world which we can explore.Wolfgang Bartuchat, "Yirmiahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History", Archiv Fuer Geschichte der Philosophie, 66 Band Heft 3, 1984.
By metaphysics Kant understood a system of supersensible elements that (1) determines the entities in the sensible world, and (2) concerns the meaning of their being. The Kantian synthetic a-priori categories and principles fulfill the first role, but do so critically, since they are not supersensible objects existing in themselves but are only ingredients in the synthesis of empirical objects. As such they also determine what it means for empirical objects to be (namely, to be a synthesis of sense perceptions linked by the categories.) The a priori system is thus not only an epistemology, but equally an ontology of finite, natural beings.
The book also highlights the dynamic, self-driving nature of Kantian reason (which Yovel sometimes calls "erotic" in the Platonic sense). Human rationality is not a mere calculus in Kant but a goal-oriented activity, which projects its own inherent ends and strives to realize them. Finally, the book describes Kant's method as the self-explication of reason, which depends upon its own history, including a series of collapses, and culminates in a critical revolution.
Kant and the Philosophy of History Yovel's major work on Kant was to become his Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton 1980, 1986; French 1989). Kant's historical thought had for a long time been ignored, or dismissed as marginal and inconsistent. Yovel's work was instrumental in reversing this outlook. The book goes beyond Kant's customary moral teaching, which revolves on the formal and personal characteristics of morality, to uncover a second, material tier in Kant's practical philosophy, in which the moral will becomes a world-shaping will: the will is not satisfied with its personal morality alone, but works to reshape the entire social-historical world as "a moral totality". The will does not only strive to make itself good, but to reshape its world in its own image—to see its moral goals embodied in the actual world's ways and institutions. This makes possible a critical philosophy of history, and of particular areas within it—politics, law, social ethics, moral education, and a religion of reason.Kenneth Kierans, "Kant and the Philosophy of History. By Yirmiyahu Yovel", Dalhousie Review Vol.69 No.2
The lever leading to the second stage is Kant's concept of "The Highest Good" and the imperative to promote it. A close analysis of this concept leads Yovel to interpret it as the Kantian regulative idea of history, an ideal that combines maximal morality (personal and institutional, ethical and political) with universal well-being and prosperity. Kant even calls the historical task "the ultimate end of creation itself"Kant, Critique of Judgment §84), thus suggesting that moral history, in which humans change themselves and reform the world, is the only possible justification of there being a world and a human race, which otherwise would be utterly contingent and meaningless.
In method, the book is not a narrative commentary but a systematic reconstruction. While relying on careful textual analyses, it organizes the material in relation to the inner logic and latent implications of Kant's positions, which allow Yovel to draw new conclusions that shed light on unknown aspects in his philosophy.