The German word Aufhebung has a double meaning: to cancel and to preserve. Hegel uses it to name the movement by which a determination is both negated and retained at a higher level. Nothing is simply thrown away; the content is sublated into the next moment.

This is why Hegel says that the result of the dialectic contains the preceding moments. The concept does not leave its stages behind as dead history; it carries them within itself as superseded. The labour of the concept is this repeated sublation: each form shows its one-sidedness and passes over into its other, and the whole is the system of these transitions.

To read Hegel without grasping Aufhebung is to see only a series of contradictions. With it, one sees the rhythm of thought itself—the way in which philosophy does not discard its past but thinks it through.