Aufheben
Based on Wikipedia: Aufheben
There's a German word that means three contradictory things at once: to lift up, to abolish, and to preserve. The word is Aufheben, and it sits at the heart of one of the most influential philosophical systems ever constructed. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel built his entire understanding of how ideas evolve, how history unfolds, and how consciousness develops around this single, stubbornly paradoxical term.
That a word can simultaneously mean "to cancel" and "to keep" isn't a linguistic accident. For Hegel, it's the key to understanding how anything changes at all.
The Problem With Simple Change
Think about how we normally describe change. Something exists, then it's destroyed, then something new takes its place. A caterpillar dies so a butterfly can live. An old building is demolished so a new one can rise. But Hegel saw that real change—the kind that matters in ideas, in history, in the development of human consciousness—doesn't work this way.
When a scientific theory replaces another, the old theory doesn't simply vanish. Newtonian physics wasn't erased by Einstein's relativity; it was absorbed into it, preserved as a special case that works perfectly well at everyday speeds and scales. The old theory is simultaneously overcome and maintained.
This is what Aufheben captures. It's typically translated into English as "sublation," though this Latin-derived word lacks the everyday resonance of the German original. A German speaker might use aufheben casually to mean picking something up off the floor, or canceling an appointment, or setting aside money for later. The word's contradictory meanings coexist comfortably in ordinary speech.
The Engine of Dialectics
Hegel's philosophical method, called dialectics, proceeds through sublation. Here's how it works at the most basic level.
Take two concepts that seem as opposed as possible: Being and Nothing. Pure Being, with no qualities or determinations whatsoever, is so empty that it's indistinguishable from Nothing. And Nothing, thought through carefully, turns out to require the concept of Being to have any meaning at all. These opposites don't just clash—they pass into each other.
What emerges from this interplay? The concept of Becoming. Becoming preserves both Being and Nothing while transforming them into something richer. Being becomes Nothing in the process of ceasing; Nothing becomes Being in the process of arising. Becoming sublates its parents.
This pattern repeats throughout Hegel's system. In his Science of Logic, quality and quantity stand opposed to each other, only to be sublated into the concept of measure—where qualitative change happens precisely at quantitative thresholds. (Think of how water doesn't just get "more liquid" as you heat it; at exactly one hundred degrees Celsius, a qualitative transformation occurs.)
History's Spiral Staircase
Hegel didn't limit sublation to abstract logic. He saw it at work in the bloody, contingent, often seemingly chaotic flow of human history.
The popular shorthand for Hegelian dialectics—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—is actually a simplification that Hegel himself never used in quite that neat form. But the underlying pattern holds: historical conditions generate their own opposition, and the conflict between them produces something new that neither side could have anticipated.
Consider Hegel's analysis of political freedom. In ancient Oriental empires, he argued, only one person was free: the despot. Everyone else existed as an extension of the ruler's will. This thesis generated its antithesis in ancient Greece, where some people were recognized as free citizens—though still dependent on a class of slaves who were not. The Roman Empire attempted a synthesis, extending citizenship more broadly while simultaneously developing an ever-more-powerful state apparatus.
Each stage preserves elements of its predecessors while transforming them. The Greek recognition of individual freedom doesn't simply negate the power of the collective that Oriental despotism embodied; it sublates it, incorporating collective power into a new relationship with individual liberty.
For Hegel, this process reaches its culmination—at least in his own time—in the modern state that emerged from the French Revolution. The First French Empire, in his perhaps over-generous reading, achieved what had previously seemed impossible: placing the individual in harmony with the collective. The abstract freedom won by the Revolution was sublated into concrete institutions that could actually realize it.
The Master and the Slave
One of Hegel's most famous applications of dialectical sublation appears in his analysis of the relationship between masters and slaves, or more literally, lords and bondsmen.
The scenario begins with two self-consciousnesses encountering each other. Each needs recognition from the other to confirm its own existence. But this need creates conflict: each wants to be recognized as the essential consciousness while reducing the other to an object. They fight.
One is willing to risk death; the other isn't. The one who flinches becomes the slave. But here's where sublation enters: this apparently stable relationship begins to undermine itself from within.
The master gains recognition, but from someone they've reduced to an object. What's the value of being recognized by a thing? Meanwhile, the slave, forced to work on the physical world, develops skills and capacities. Through labor, the slave transforms nature and, in doing so, transforms themselves. They become capable of a kind of self-confirmation that doesn't depend on another's recognition.
The master's victory sublates into a kind of existential dependency. The slave's defeat sublates into a path toward genuine autonomy. Neither remains what they were; both are preserved and transformed.
Philosophy Eating Itself
Hegel applied the same dialectical lens to the history of philosophy itself. Previous philosophers, in his view, hadn't simply been wrong—they'd each grasped part of the truth, which subsequent thinkers had to sublate rather than merely reject.
Take Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who built his philosophy on the concept of the "I" or ego as the ultimate ground of all reality. The self posits itself; this is the first principle from which everything else follows. But as Hegel pointed out, the very concept of an "I" depends on a "not-I" against which it defines itself. Fichte acknowledged this, building the opposition into his system. But the circularity troubled Hegel.
Reflective philosophy—philosophy that takes a starting point and then reasons from it—always has this problem. Whatever ground you choose, you can always ask what that ground itself rests on. Philosophy becomes, as Hegel put it, a philosophia perennis—an eternal recurrence of the same fundamental problems, generation after generation.
His alternative? Speculative thought, which doesn't try to reduce contradictions to one side or the other but holds them together in creative tension. Rather than choosing between the "I" and the "not-I," speculative thought grasps how each requires and generates the other. This isn't mere relativism or wishy-washy both-sides-ism. It's an attempt to think at a higher level where apparent contradictions reveal themselves as moments in a larger process.
The Difference Between Circles
Not all circles are vicious. This matters for understanding what Hegel means by sublation.
A vicious circle is uninformative—you end up exactly where you started, having learned nothing. But there's another kind of circularity: the spiral that returns to its starting point at a higher level. Think of a coiled spring seen from above; it looks like a circle, but it's actually ascending.
When we re-enter familiar questions—about identity, consciousness, knowledge, freedom—we don't simply repeat old answers. We return with everything we've gathered along the way. Each pass through the circle deepens our understanding, adds nuance, reveals previously hidden dimensions.
This is reflexivity in its positive sense. Our consciousness reflects on its own origins, discovers how thoroughly it's shaped by others, and emerges from this discovery changed. We understand ourselves as always-already social beings, our most private thoughts bearing the imprint of public language and shared culture. This recognition doesn't trap us; it liberates us. We stop seeking some impossible pure individuality and instead discover our actual individuality in and through our relationships.
Marx Turns Hegel Upside Down
Karl Marx famously claimed to have found Hegel standing on his head and set him right-side up.
Hegel understood sublation as the self-realization of Geist—usually translated as "Spirit" or "Mind," though neither English word quite captures it. History, for Hegel, was Spirit coming to know itself through the dialectical development of human consciousness and institutions. The real subject of history was this universal Mind working itself out through particular peoples and events.
Marx kept the dialectical structure but inverted its basis. For Marx, the driving force of historical change wasn't Spirit realizing itself through material conditions—it was material conditions, particularly the relations of production, working themselves out through conflicts between classes.
This inversion transforms what sublation means in practice. When Hegel talks about the French Revolution sublating previous political forms, he's describing how Spirit achieved a higher level of self-awareness. When Marx talks about capitalism sublating feudalism, he's describing how one system of class exploitation gave rise to its own contradictions, which were resolved (preserved and transformed) in a new system—one that generates its own contradictions in turn.
Marx acknowledged that Hegel's dialectics contained a "rational kernel" worth preserving. But he insisted that Hegel had mystified this kernel by treating concrete social relations as expressions of abstract Spirit. The capitalist's exploitation of the worker isn't a moment in Mind's self-development; it's a real relationship between real people, grounded in who controls the means of production.
In Marx's hands, sublation remains the logic of historical change—but the change is driven by class struggle rather than spiritual evolution. The proletariat's revolution won't just negate capitalism; it will sublate it, preserving the productive forces capitalism has developed while transforming the social relations that have made those forces instruments of exploitation.
Never a Simple No
Perhaps the deepest implication of Aufheben is what it says about negation itself.
We're used to thinking of "no" as final, complete, absolute. Something exists or it doesn't. A proposition is true or false. You're either in or you're out. But sublation suggests that genuine negation is never so clean.
To truly overcome something—an idea, a social system, a stage of personal development—isn't to erase it but to work through it. The sublated content remains present in what supersedes it, like the child preserved in the adult, the acorn in the oak. Hegel's word carries, as one commentator put it, "transcendental overtones no other word does."
This has practical implications. Revolutionaries who think they can simply negate the old order discover that it persists in unexpected ways. Individuals who believe they've entirely overcome their past find it returning in disguised forms. Sublation suggests we'd be wiser to ask not "how do we get rid of this?" but "how does this get transformed?"
Every ending is also a beginning. Every cancellation preserves what it cancels. Every lifting up is also a putting down. This is the strange, productive tension that Aufheben names—a word that captures in its everyday contradictions something essential about how change actually works.
Never any simple "No." Always a teleological "perhaps."