Anne Texier, speaking at the conference on Spinoza and Negativity at KU Leuven, offers a thorough exposition of the ways in which Spinoza’s philosophy can be understood as involving both an “inversion of nature” and a “negation of negation.” Although Spinoza’s metaphysics is commonly described as an ontology of positivity, there are numerous instances in his work where he employs negation in order to correct what he sees as inverted assumptions. For instance, he denies that human beings judge something good before desiring it; rather, our judgment of goodness emerges precisely because we already desire the thing in question. He also declares that humanity is not “an empire within an empire,” meaning that human agency is not an isolated dominion outside nature’s universal laws. In setting nature straight, Spinoza effectively negates these entrenched errors, so the negation is itself a transformative step rather than a mere cancellation. This approach, as Anne Texier argues, becomes central to a deeper understanding of how Spinoza redefines the subject, the act of decision, and the entire notion of freedom.
She challenges Hegel’s claim that Spinoza’s system lacks the dynamic of a true negation of negation. Hegel sees in Spinoza a static philosophy in which determinations are simply negations and never double back on themselves to produce something novel. According to Texier, Spinoza actually does introduce a process akin to negation of negation whenever he corrects a view that inverts nature. Spinoza thereby produces something fruitful rather than returning only to an original affirmation. The step from inadequate knowledge to more adequate knowledge reveals this kind of movement, since it shows how imagination is replaced by rational insight, opening new pathways for the conatus, the drive that defines each individual’s striving. This move is neither barren nor repetitive. It does not circle back to a starting point; it instead offers a genuine evolution of thought, resulting in greater understanding and liberation.
In discussing decision-making, Texier highlights a central shift: Spinoza suggests that decisions constitute the subject rather than the subject autonomously performing the decision. To illustrate this shift, she undertakes a close reading of the prologue to Spinoza’s Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. There, Spinoza writes in the first person in a way he rarely does elsewhere, creating the impression of an individual struggling with choices tied to wealth, honor, and pleasure as well as an uncertain but higher good. This personal narrative initially sets up a scene of indecision. The narrator wishes to unite two incompatible sets of goals and fails repeatedly to choose either side. Yet as reflection becomes more acute, the narrator realizes that the three pursuits—often prized by the masses—are not inherently evil but are misleadingly taken for ultimate goods. Further reflection reveals that one’s unhappiness or happiness depends on whether one loves perishable or imperishable objects. There remains, however, a lingering difficulty in fully relinquishing these common desires, which indicates that clear intellectual insight alone does not guarantee practical transformation.
Anne Texier shows that many translators and commentators, following an earlier line of interpretation, have used voluntarist language to describe what Spinoza calls deliberation in the prologue. They have occasionally treated it as though it were a Cartesian decision of the will. However, a more precise rendering reveals that Spinoza’s text points to a rational process of reflection rather than a purely volitional act. Over the course of four phases in the prologue, what initially appears as a clash of competing goods is revealed to be a problem best solved by seeing how uncertain goods of ordinary life can be integrated as means, rather than being condemned as outright obstacles. There is no real battle of wills. The deeper understanding that emerges cancels the idea of conflict, dissolves the illusion of a purely voluntary choice, and replaces it with a sharper, rationally driven comprehension of real utility. At the climax, the narrator acknowledges a difficulty in renouncing certain habitual cravings for pleasure and honor, yet the decisive force is ultimately reflection itself. The will never stages a triumphant final act; instead, this rational clarity becomes the primary agent of change, transforming the narrator’s perspective and, in the process, transforming the narrator as well.
This same dynamic reappears in the Ethics, where Spinoza desubjectivizes both thought and decision-making by situating them within the infinite attribute of divine substance. There, he explains that whenever the human mind perceives or decides, it is actually God, as the infinite thinking being, who does so from the vantage point of this particular mode called the human soul. Hegel’s protest against Spinoza’s version of substance highlights the absence of what Hegel describes as the principle of subjectivity. Spinoza’s version of God is neither an autonomous subject nor a Cartesian ego; it is infinite substance whose necessity unfolds through each of its attributes. The mind is not a free-floating agent that exists apart from the universal laws of nature but is instead a finite expression of the infinite intellect. Texier shows how unsettling Hegel found this view, given the sense that it denies a personalized freedom. Yet Spinoza’s position offers a new conception of decision and agency: it overturns the assumption that an individual subject stands entirely above nature, and it inserts each finite mind into the broader field of causal and intellectual necessity.
This reorientation leads to a transformation of subjectivity itself. Rather than willing a decision, one’s identity becomes shaped by the decisions that unfold through reflection and understanding. Texier identifies how, in the prologue of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, the more Spinoza’s narrator moves away from personal narrative and toward a generalized, demonstrative mode, the more powerlessness and indecision recede. The apparently personal “I” of the beginning gradually disappears as it penetrates the structure of what Spinoza calls a spiritual automaton, which is the mind’s capacity to proceed according to the natural laws of thought, free of private, idiosyncratic errors. A deeper alignment with truth, impersonal as it may seem, becomes a vehicle for genuine liberation. The text thus stages a drama in which the personal voice intensifies in moments of suffering and uncertainty, while the path to clarity emerges alongside a depersonalized, universal mode of thinking.
Texier connects these ideas to her ongoing research on “The idea of decision in Spinoza,” undertaken under the supervision of Chantal Jaquet at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. She lectures on philosophy both at the university and in a high school setting in Paris, further illustrating her commitment to making Spinoza’s insights accessible and demonstrating how they challenge the conventional, and often comforting, notions of free will that many take for granted. By showing how decisions constitute the subject—and not the reverse—she stresses that Spinoza’s method leads not simply to flipping an erroneous worldview back to its original position but to generating a new, fruitful trajectory of reasoning. The negation of negation in Spinoza is never static. It replaces a mistaken conception of reality with one that is more coherent, opens new possibilities for conatus, and genuinely alters the contours of how we see ourselves in the world. Decisions, viewed through this lens, trace back to impersonal rational processes, yet they remain intimately bound up with the formation of personal identity. The text shows that it is in these transformations that Spinoza’s philosophy finds its richly affirmative power.
In his major works Ethics and Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza develops an ontology in which all that exists is an expression of the one substance (God or Nature), leaving “no holes… no lack… no privation” in being. He uses the concepts of negation and inversion primarily to diagnose errors of human imagination—especially the belief in final causes and free will—arising from seeing absence or teleology where there is only necessary causation. This historical-philosophical backdrop clarifies why Anne Texier refers to Spinoza’s approach as involving a “negation of negation”: rather than accepting the idea that reality is shaped by lacks or privations, Spinoza consistently argues that every real thing is a positive manifestation of God/Nature. Hence, every purported lack arises from the way our imagination compares or fails to grasp the true causes of things. Correcting those failures is a matter of setting nature straight—negating the mistaken assumptions that led to imagining deficits or teleological goals in the first place.
The result is not a mere cancellation of error but a profound reorientation that opens new rational insights, thus allowing individuals to align their striving (conatus) more adequately with the real order of nature. As Texier contends, this grounding in positivity influences Spinoza’s account of the subject, shifting the focus from a presumed free will to a deeper understanding of how decisions are embedded in the causal structure of thought and reality.
Simon Gros 
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