Sublation
from 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit
A contradiction is not a dead end but a pressure that produces a third position containing both sides, cancelled as they stood and preserved in what they were driving at.
- Active
- from 1807
- Where
- Jena
- Also
- Aufhebung
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Continental procedures
What it is
Aufhebung is a German word meaning at once to cancel, to preserve and to lift up, and Hegel uses all three senses simultaneously. A position develops until it generates a contradiction it cannot contain; the contradiction is resolved by a further position in which the original is both abolished and kept.
The crucial claim is that the movement is driven from inside. The contradiction is not imported by a critic; it is what the position produces when followed out properly.
How it works
Take a position and state it at its strongest. Follow it out until it produces a difficulty it cannot resolve on its own terms. Find the position that resolves the difficulty by containing both the original and what it could not accommodate. Show that the original survives in the new position in altered form.
The last step is what separates this from mere replacement. If nothing of the original is preserved, the position was abandoned rather than sublated.
The moves, in order
- State the position at its strongest
- Follow it out until it generates a contradiction on its own terms
- Identify what the contradiction requires of any resolution
- Find the position containing both the original and what it excluded
- Show the original preserved within it in altered form
The procedure
Proposition The shared-access arrangement is not a compromise between the two positions.
- The first position: the track is the grazier's, since it is on his title and he maintains it. Stated at its strongest, this rests on the principle that responsibility for upkeep grounds control.
- Followed out, it generates a difficulty it cannot resolve: the reason the track needs the upkeep it does is the tourism traffic to the falls, and on the same principle those users' contribution to its condition grounds a claim of their own.
- The second position: the track is a public way by long use. Stated at its strongest, this rests on the principle that established use grounds entitlement — which, followed out, would entitle users to a track nobody is obliged to maintain, and the entitlement would consume itself.
- What any resolution must do is hold both principles: upkeep grounds control, and use grounds entitlement.
- The access agreement does exactly that. The grazier retains title and control of works; users hold a right of passage conditional on a levy that funds the upkeep. The grazier's principle survives as control of works; the users' survives as the right of passage.
Therefore The agreement is not a middle point between the two claims but a third arrangement in which each original principle is preserved in altered form and neither survives as it was stated.
This is the test of sublation rather than compromise. In a compromise each side gives up part of what it wanted; here each side's underlying principle is fully honoured and neither side's original demand survives intact.
What it is good for
Disputes where both parties are working from a genuine principle rather than an interest, and where the principles collide. It produces settlements that hold because neither principle was defeated.
Where it fails
The third position is found, not derived. Nothing in the method generates it, and Hegel's own transitions are argued about precisely because readers cannot see why this successor and not another. The dialectic is reconstructive: it makes sense looking backwards and predicts nothing looking forwards.
Its deeper problem is that it can absorb any objection. A criticism becomes the contradiction that drives the next stage, which makes the system unfalsifiable in a way that is easy to mistake for depth. Popper's charge that dialectic is immune to refutation by construction is crude about Hegel and hard to answer.
And the direction is assumed. That contradiction produces something higher rather than mere collapse is a substantial claim about how things go, and Hegel's grounds for it are theological in origin however secular the vocabulary.
Common misconceptions
That it is thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Hegel almost never uses those words; the formula comes from Fichte via Chalybaus and is a schoolroom simplification that misses the point, since the second moment is generated by the first rather than opposed to it from outside.
Where it came from
The Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807 and the Science of Logic, though the movement is present throughout Hegel and never reduced by him to a formula.
What became of it
Inverted by Marx into dialectical materialism, mocked by the analytic tradition, and revived repeatedly — most recently by Brandom and Pippin, who read it as an account of normativity rather than metaphysics.
Lasting influence
Marx, Kierkegaard, the Frankfurt School, existentialism and most of what followed in continental philosophy define themselves in relation to it.
Why it still matters
Alive in political theory and in any account of how positions develop through conflict.
Put another way
An argument that ends with both parties holding something neither brought.
Texts
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
The master-slave section is the most read and the most self-contained demonstration of the movement.
Where to start
Read the master-slave section with a good commentary alongside. Nobody reads the Phenomenology unaided and nobody should try.
The surprising bit
The formula everyone knows it by is not Hegel's, and the person who supplied it was a minor historian of philosophy nobody now reads.
In their own words
The truth is the whole
Who held it
Alexandre Kojeve
Connections
- Relies on
- Platonic dialectic
- Influenced
- Dialectical materialism, Immanent critique
- Parallel to
- Platonic dialectic
The verdict
A profound description of how positions actually develop, and no method at all for working out what comes next.