It may be noted in passing that in spite of Spinoza's vast influence on modern political thought and action, his name is not connected with any emanc… - Benedictus de Spinoza

Spinoza's "theory" rejected every illusion about ideology, and especially about the number one ideology of that time, religion, by identifying it as imaginary. But at the same time it refused to treat ideology as a simple error, or as naked ignorance, because it based the system of this imaginary phenomenon on the relation of men to the world "expressed" by the state of their bodies. This materialism of the imaginary opened the way to a surprising conception of the First Level of Knowledge: not at all, in fact, as a "piece of knowledge", but as the material world of men as they live it, that of their concrete and historical existence. Is this a false interpretation? In certain respects, perhaps, but it is possible to read Spinoza in such a way. In fact his categories do function, daringly, in this way in the history of the Jewish people, of its prophets, of its religion, and of its politics, where the primacy of politics over religion stands out clearly, in the first work which, after Machiavelli, offered a theory of history. But this theory of the imaginary went still further. By its radical criticism of the central category of imaginary illusion, the Subject, it reached into the very heart of bourgeois philosophy, which since the fourteenth century had been built on the foundation of the legal ideology of the Subject. Spinoza's resolute anti-Cartesianism consciously directs itself to this point, and the famous "critical" tradition made no mistake here. On this point too Spinoza anticipated Hegel, but he went further. For Hegel, who criticized all theses of subjectivity, nevertheless found a place for the Subject, not only in the form of the "becoming-Subject of Substance" (by which he "reproaches" Spinoza for "wrongly" taking things no further than Substance), but in the interiority of the Telos of the process without a subject, which by virtue of the negation of the negation, realizes the designs and destiny of the Idea. Thus Spinoza showed us the secret alliance between Subject and Goal which "mystifies" the Hegelian dialectic.

During the last quarter or so of the eighteenth century and then well into the nineteenth century a wave of neo-Spinozism swept through German philosophy and literature: in addition to Lessing and Herder, further neo-Spinozists included Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel. This wave was largely a result of Herder's embrace of neo-Spinozism in God: Some Conversations (and in Goethe's case, Herder's sympathy with Spinozism even before that work). Accordingly, it for the most part took over Herder's modifications of Spinoza's position.

تَعوَّد اليهود أن يَنسِبوا إلى الله ما كان يتعدَّى فهْمَهم ويجهلون أسبابه الطبيعية في ذلك العصر، فالعاصفة «غضب الله»، والرعد والصاعقة سهام الله. ويعتقد أنَّ الله يحبِس الرياح في كهوفٍ يُسمُّونها غرفة كنز الله، ويختلفون في هذا الصَّدَد عن الوثنِيِّين؛ لأنهم يجعلون الله وليس أيول مُسيِّر الرياح، وللسبب نفسه سُمِّيت المُعجزات أفعال الله أي أفعالًا تُثير الدهشة، ذلك أنَّ كلَّ الأشياء الطبيعية أفعال الله، وهي لا تحدُث أو تُؤثِّر إلَّا بقدرة الله وحدَها. وهذا ما أراد كاتب المزامير أن يُعبِّر عنه عندما سَمَّى مُعجِزات مصر قُدرات الله؛ لأنَّ هذه المُعجِزات فَتَحت للعبرانيين، وهُم على شفا خطرٍ داهم، طريقًا للخلاص لم يَكونوا يأمُلون فيه، فأثارت إعجابهم الشديد. فإذا قِيل عن أعمال الطبيعة الخارقة للعادة إنها أعمال الله وإذا قِيل عن الأشجار الطويلة التي تزيد في طولها عن المُعتاد أنها أشجار الله، فليس هناك ما يدعو للدهشة عندما يُسمَّى الرجال الطُّوال الأقوياء في سِفر التكوين أبناء الله، حتى ولو كانوا قُطَّاع طُرُق وفَسَقة كفارًا.