Commentary on the Philosophy of Right, Chapter 4
A Clarification on Sublation
What is most often misunderstood about Hegel’s method is the concept of sublation (Aufhebung). To sublate, for Hegel, means three things at once: to negate, to preserve, and to raise to a higher stage. This is not rhetorical ornamentation but decides what the architecture accomplishes and what it does not.
Whoever reads sublation as annihilation — as the disappearance of what is sublated into a higher unity — is drawn into a whirl of spurious consequences. Then, in the logic of essence, the logic of being would have to have disappeared; in the concept, essence; in ethical life, abstract right and morality. In fact, however, the earlier determinations continue to be at work in the later ones as moments. Whoever enters into a contract still retains the determinations of abstract right; whoever lives within a family is not thereby a lesser person; within the state, private property remains what it is, alongside and within the political community.
Sublation is thus integration with the difference preserved. This is not a detail but constitutive for the whole philosophy of right — and it will become relevant when, at the end, we speak of different stages of ethical life.