Sublation

To sublate and being sublated (the idealized) constitute one of the most important concepts of philosophy (Hegel 2010, 81/21.94).

The importance of the concept of sublation [Aufhebung] in Hegel’s philosophy cannot be understated. It is a notion that is virtually omnipresent in Hegel’s entire systematic oeuvre and plays a chief role in the dialectical determination of ideas and concepts.

However, despite its pivotal significance, it does not receive direct treatment in The Science of Logic, Hegel’s major work on logic and metaphysics, apart from a remark that follows the development of becoming. The remark in question, however, is instructive given its context and illustrates the essential three-pronged structure of sublation.

While sublation enjoys common usage in the German language, there is no direct equivalent in English. And so sublation has become something of a highly technical term that is most often used in Hegelian scholarship. This is unfortunate, since the speculative element in the word itself never natively manifests to the thinker, and one must continuously bring together disparate meanings into this rather awkward term.

Semantics

The German aufheben has a twofold meaning, Hegel writes. On the one hand, it means to to keep or to preserve. On the other hand, it means to cause to cease or to put an end to. In addition to these two, there is a third meaning, which is to lift up.

To preserve something, Hegel notes, has a negative tinge to it because to preserve something one must undermine its immediacy in order to retain it. One might say that to keep something may mean to hold on to it or secure it, but thereby lose its innocence. “That which is sublated is thus something at the same time preserved, something that has lost its immediacy but has not come to nothing for that” (Hegel 2010, 82/21.94). It can be seen already how the meaning of keeping here cannot but entail negation, thus justifying the move from preservation to ceasing. This slippage from one idea to the other is exactly the dialectical thread Hegel puts under the magnifying glass.

Hegel praises words in language that have such double-meanings and notes the Latin tollere, which serves as the root for the English “toll” (payment) and “extol” (praise). In particular, he notes the deficiency with tollere that its positive determination only goes as far as “lifting up”, whereas aufheben enjoys the additional notion of preserving.

However, Hegel does not directly state the three meanings of sublation, even though they are all implied in the text. This lack of stating it expressly appears puzzling given that his own usage relies heavily on it.

Structure

What is sublated does not thereby turn into nothing. Nothing is the immediate; something sublated is on the contrary something mediated; it is something non-existent but as a result that has proceeded from a being; it still has in itself, therefore, the determinateness from which it derives (Hegel 2010, 81/21.94).

Sublation in Hegel’s philosophy primarily concerns a special state of being. It is a determinateness that signifies something is no longer immediately what is was, but is understood as a moment of a context. Despite being something mediated in this way, it nonetheless contains the the “determinateness from which it derives”, which can be understood as a genealogy of its dialectical development. Put differently, in being sublated, the matter in question is no longer solely grasped in its own terms, but included in the terms of another.

For example, to say that being is sublated in becoming means that being is no longer understood in its immediacy but as a moment of the context of becoming—more precisely, as coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be.

But why is something sublated? Because a dialectic movement took place where something is no longer the something that it had immediately presented itself as. Put differently, the matter at hand is not what it is. However, dialectical movement alone is not sufficient to understand something as sublated. Being vanishing into nothing does not thereby sublate being. To be something sublated, by contrast, entails a mutated state of the category that contains its immediate state as negated. Sublated being explicitly shows that being in its immediacy is negated, but precisely in that negation retains a reference to the immediacy as it was.

Diaception (Niklas)

In sublation, a double view necessarily exists. On the one hand, sublation expresses that a concept has turned out to be a moment of another. On the other hand, however, sublation also expresses a trace to a past conception; putting it terse, a concept has turned out to be a moment of another. One can understand this difference in terms of scopes: an absolute scope and a relative scope.

Consider the example of being. In its sublation, pure being is rendered, paradoxically, a moment. A moment in the conceptual evolution of being whereby it was initially simple and pure but is now one among many.

In more practical terms, that something is sublated means that it longer retains the absolute conceptual scope at hand but is relegated to a certain part of it. However, being in this partial state does not eliminate its initial immediacy altogether but keeps it precisely as negated. The immediacy is negated, but the trace back to it is retained.

The former thus holds a relative scope and the latter currently holds the absolute scope. Despite holding a relative scope, being nonetheless contains the trace to its original immediacy, and so we can say that it “points” back to its immediacy. And it can only “point” to this immediacy because it is exactly unavailable to it (were being not sublated, it would be immediate and there would be no mediation where any “pointing” would take place).

To be something sublated, by contrast, entails a binding between its immediate state and its mediated state, or between its absolute- and relative scope. Diaception is the grasping of this binding, or holding in view both the absolute and relative scope of a category.

Diaception does not posit that anything immediate remains in sublation. When Hegel writes that, “what is sublated does not thereby turn into nothing. Nothing is the immediate; something sublated is on the contrary something mediated;” (Hegel 2010, 81/21.94), diaception does not run counter to this statement because it concerns the mediation involved. The mediation that has resulted in sublation, which in turn necessitate duality in the state of a category.

In the context of existence, for example, where being and nothing are understood to be in a unity, being has its immediate state negated—there is no pure being—but in being negated it is no less kept. Sublation entails diaception and thus implies development of a category.

Sublation and Truth (Niklas)

The development of a category in sublation is what Hegel refers to when he says that something has become understood in its truth. A category or thought underwent an internal dialectical transition through which it turned out to be something else—not something completely different (the being of existence still shares something with pure being, its ancestor, so to speak), but also not something entirely identical.

The new sublated state refers back to its absolute being, and refers to it as negated, whereby it is simultaneously retained. It is this intense binding that grants something to be seen in its truth: a primordial state that was internally incoherent whose incoherence reforged it to this current state.

In this way, truth, in light of Hegel’s thinking, is never something purely immediate but the result of a development. Or, put differently, the truth is always mediated even if it is immediate – it has to be a mediated immediacy. It is a context made up of sublated moments, and whose conception understands that these moments were at one point totally unbounded, in their boundlessness utterly failed, and found themselves renewed in this multi-dimensional sphere as self-bounded moments.

Further Commentary

Houlgate

Stephen Houlgate reads sublation as fusing two processes into one. The first process involves negating something while the second process involves preserving something. But what is specifically negated is the “simple immediacy – or purity – of something” (Houlgate 2022, 153). For that reason, since what is sublated is no longer purely and immediately itself, Houlgate writes that “it must be thought together with its negation” (Houlgate 2022, 153). In this respect, it matches what Hegel writes: “something is sublated only in so far as it has entered into unity with its opposite” (Hegel 2010, 82/21.95).

Houlgate points out that while being and nothing are sublated in becoming, this sublation is strictly incomplete. The sublation here is only partial because “each vanishes into its pure other, and their immediacy, or purity, is thus not thoroughly negated” (Houlgate 2022, 153). Viewed differently, the immediacy of each vanishes so completely that there is no remnant which could be considered a moment. By contrast, in determinate being (existence) the immediacy is thoroughly negated and “each is present only as united with its opposite” (Houlgate 2022, 153).

Houlgate notes further three things about sublation. In the first place, sublation is not an operation performed by us—human thinkers in time—on concepts or determinations of being. “It occurs”, Houlgate states, “when we render explicit what a category is implicitly, but it is made necessary by the category itself” (Houlgate 2022, 153). Categories are thus not sublated by us, but as the case of being and nothing shows:

They do not sublate themselves reciprocally – the one sublating the other externally – but each rather sublates itself in itself and is within it the opposite of itself (Hegel 2010, 81/21.93).

In the second place, sublation does not presuppose a unity into which categories are sublated (or sublate themselves), but is, “the process through which such a unity emerges” (Houlgate 2022, 153). Speculative thought is presuppositionless thought and that entails that no determinate conception of being or rules of thought are presupposed in advance, which includes the very notion that a category will be sublated (or indeed sublated into a unity). If something emerges, it will be unforeseen by the process of sublation.

In the third place, sublation entails that categories necessarily change their logical structure. For example, being and nothing are initially pure and immediately themselves, begin to shed that immediacy in becoming, and finally lose their purity in existence where each is understood to be in an inseparable unity with its other. As Houlgate writes, “The process of sublation is thus one in which categories lose their immediacy, form a unity with their opposites and thereby transform themselves logically into new categories” (Houlgate 2022, 154).

With regards to Houlgate’s second point, there is a discrepancy with the idea that sublation does not presuppose a unity when Hegel states that “something is sublated only in so far as it has entered into unity with its opposite” (Hegel 2010, 82/21.95). Insofar as something is sublated—or being sublated—there must be a unity involved. However, insofar as a category is thought in its immediacy, there is at that point no indication whether or not a sublation will take place; or if a dialectical movement does occur, then, following presuppositionless thinking, one cannot presuppose whether that is part of a process of sublation (whereby the immediacy is turned into a moment). Therefore, not presupposing a unity seems to belong to speculative thought rather than specifically sublation.

Bibliography

Authors
Filip Niklas (2024)

Editors
Mert Can Yirmibes (2024), Ahilleas Rokni (2024)