Aufhebung — Central German term in Hegelian dialectics, usually rendered in English as sublation (and also as supersession or overcoming). Its conceptual force comes from the ambiguity of the verb aufheben, which in ordinary German means both to cancel and to abolish and, at the same time, to keep and to preserve — and further to lift up or raise. Hegel deliberately exploits this threefold simultaneous sense: (1) to negate — to cancel or abolish the prior moment; (2) to preserve — to retain what was true in it; (3) to elevate — to integrate it into a higher level of determination. For this reason Aufhebung is never mere destruction: what is sublated survives as a moment within a richer totality. This logical-real movement articulates the entire Science of Logic (1812–1816) and the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807): each figure of consciousness is sublated by the next — not simply discarded but preserved and transformed within a more concrete configuration. The paradigmatic example, at the opening of the Logic: the opposition between being and nothing is sublated in becoming (Werden), which contains both as vanishing moments. Here one sees the difference between Hegel’s determinate negation — which yields a positive result — and abstract negation, which merely annihilates. Aufhebung thus distinguishes dialectics both from the fixed contradiction of formal logic and from a merely additive synthesis: the point is not to combine opposites but to show that contradiction is the motor of the concept’s development. Marx takes up the term and inverts it materially: dialectical overcoming is realised in history and concrete social relations, not in the autonomous movement of Spirit.
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