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Sublation is an English term used to translate Hegel's German term Aufhebung. The German word Aufhebung literally means "out/up-lifting."

In Hegel, the term Aufhebung has the apparently contradictory implications of both preserving and changing (the German verb aufheben means both "to cancel" and "to keep"). The tension between these senses suits what Hegel is trying to talk about. In sublation, a term or concept is both preserved and changed through its dialectical interplay with another term or concept. Sublation is the motor by which the dialectic functions.

Sublation can be seen at work at the most basic level of Hegel's system of logic. The two concepts Being and Nothing are each both preserved and changed through sublation in the concept Becoming. Similarly, determinateness, or quality, and magnitude, or quantity, are each both preserved and sublated in the concept measure.

For Hegel, history, like logic, proceeds in every small way through sublation. For example, the Oriental, Greek and Roman Empires, in which the individual is ignored or annihilated, then recognized, then suppressed by the States, are both preserved and destroyed in the German Empire, which - for Hegel - placed the individual in harmony with the State.

At the level of social history, sublation can be seen at work in the master-slave dialectic. ^[1]

Hegel approached the history of philosophy in the same way, arguing that important philosophical ideas of the past are not rejected, but both preserved and changed as the subject develops.

In Hegel's view, in reflective philosophy one can always find another thing upon which some "absolute" ground relies, eg, with Fichte's ultimate ground, the "I," or "ego," one can immediately see that this relies upon the "non-I." The "non-I" allows Fichte to distinguish what he means by the "I." Reflection is circular, as Fichte unapologetically acknowledged.

For Hegel reflective thought, because of its circularity, is to be avoided since it leads to going around the same problems again and again for each generation of philosophers, a philosophia perennis. Instead Hegel calls upon speculative thought: the two contradictory elements are held together, uplifted, sublated, without them completely destroying each other. Speculative thought seeks to avoid the idealism inherent in reflective thought and allows him to think in concrete terms about how things work out in the real world and in history.

Whereas in Hegel, sublation shows the movement of Geist, often translated as mind or spirit, Marx identifies it as the manner of development of material conditions. See dialectical materialism.

1. ^ "Hegel: The Difference Between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of Philosophy" (New York: Ridgeview Pub Co 1978).

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