"To sublate, and the sublated (that which exists ideally as a moment), constitute one of the most important notions in philosophy. It is a fundamental determination which repeatedly occurs throughout the whole of philosophy, the meaning of which is to be clearly grasped and especially distinguished from nothing. What is sublated is not thereby reduced to nothing. Nothing is immediate; what is sublated, on the other hand, is the result of mediation; it is a non-being but as a result which had its origin in a being. It still has, therefore, in itself the determinate from which it originates".

ChatGPT said:

That’s a beautiful and dense passage — straight from Hegel’s Science of Logic, and it captures one of his most crucial moves: the idea that to sublate (aufheben) means neither simple destruction nor simple preservation, but a dialectical transformation that carries its past within itself.

Let’s unpack it carefully.

When Hegel says something is sublated (aufgehoben), he means three things at once:

1. It is negated — the old form ceases to exist as it was.

2. It is preserved — the essence, the determinate content, is retained.

3. It is elevated — taken up into a higher, more mediated form of being or thought.

That’s why he warns against confusing sublation with nothingness. Pure nothing is immediate, an absence without determination. But what is sublated is a negation that retains its own history — it is a mediated non-being, full of memory and residue.

For example, when you outgrow a childhood belief, that belief doesn’t vanish into nothing. It becomes sublated within your new understanding — it survives as a moment within a higher synthesis. You no longer hold it in its naive form, but it continues to structure your perspective in a mediated way.

This is why Hegel insists that philosophy progresses by preserving in negation — each concept is overcome but remains active as a moment in the total movement. The result (the “non-being”) is not empty; it’s a non-being that knows where it came from.

So, when he says:

"It still has, therefore, in itself the determinate from which it originates"

— he means that every negation in thought (or history) contains the trace of what it negated. Nothing is simply abolished; everything that has truly been thought remains as an inner moment of the living whole.

Would you like me to show how this plays out in materialist or psychoanalytic terms — for instance, how Marx or Lacan reinterpret this logic of sublation?

You said:

How does Marx reinterpret this logic of sublation

ChatGPT said:

Excellent question — because Marx both inherits and inverts Hegel’s logic of sublation (Aufhebung), making it serve a materialist rather than idealist dialectic.

Let’s trace it step by step.

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1. Hegel: Sublation as ideal development

In Hegel, sublation is a movement of Spirit (Geist). Contradictions are internal to thought or concept (Begriff), and history unfolds as the self-development of Idea. Each stage (say, being → essence → concept) is negated, preserved, and elevated within a higher form. The real world, for Hegel, is the embodiment of these ideal movements.

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2. Marx: Turning Hegel “right side up”

Marx famously says he “turned Hegel on his head”:

“The mystical shell must be removed from the rational kernel.”

He keeps the dialectical structure of sublation—the idea that contradictions generate movement, and that the new carries the traces of the old—but he relocates it from the realm of concepts to the realm of material social relations.

For Marx, sublation happens in history through praxis, not through the self-movement of the Idea.

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3. Example: Feudalism → Capitalism → Communism

Each social form negates but preserves the one before it.

• Feudalism is negated by capitalism — the personal, hierarchical bonds of feudalism are dissolved into impersonal exchange relations.

• But capitalism sublates feudalism in the Hegelian sense: it abolishes its specific structure while retaining certain moments — exploitation, dependence, and the extraction of surplus, but in abstracted, commodified form.

• The contradiction between labour and capital then gives rise to communism, which is not a return to pre-class society, but a higher-order resolution that contains within itself the historical memory of both feudal and capitalist relations.

Thus, in Marx, “what is sublated” doesn’t vanish: the labour, alienation, and contradictions of earlier modes of production persist as determinate moments within the new.

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4. Sublation as historical mediation

For Marx, sublation is material mediation. It’s not just thought grasping its past, but labour transforming social reality. Every economic form contains within it the negated but active residues of earlier forms—legal, moral, and ideological.

This is what he means when he says (in the Grundrisse):

“The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape.”
Each later form allows us to read the earlier one because the earlier survives, sublated, in the later.

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5. The critical twist

Unlike Hegel, for whom sublation is reconciliation (Spirit realizing itself), Marx’s sublation is non-reconciliatory. It is a movement of contradiction, driven by material conflict, class struggle, and alienation. There’s no metaphysical closure—just the possibility of transforming the conditions that produce contradiction.

So, Marx reinterprets sublation as:

the material negation and transformation of historical forms, where the past persists as determinate residues and contradictions within the present, awaiting further practical overcoming.

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Would you like me to connect this to how Marx’s reinterpretation influenced later critical theorists — say, Adorno’s notion of negative dialectics or Benjamin’s dialectical image (both of which are reactions to the limits of sublation)?