Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Himself and the Ashram
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35
His Life and Attempts to Write about It
The
Terminology of His Writings
Sublate
“It claims to stand behind and supersede, to sublate and to eliminate every other {{0}}knowledge....”[[Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 487.]]
“Sublate” means originally to remove: it implies denial and removal (throwing off) of something posited. What appeared to be true, can be sublated by a greater truth contradicting it. The experience of the world can be sublated by the experience of Self, it is denied and removed; so the experience of the Self can be sublated by the experience of Sunya; it is denied and removed.
[Note
by a correspondent:] “Hegelian philos. (rendering G.
aufheben, used by Hegel as having the opposite meanings of ‘destroy’ and
‘preserve’). See quotation: ‘Nothing passes over into Being, but Being equally
sublates itself, is a passing over into Nothing, Ceasing-to-be. They sublate not
themselves mutually, not the one the other externally; but each sublates itself
in itself, and is in its own self the contrary of itself.’ (Vide,
Oxford English Dictionary.)”
Hegel could not have used the word “sublate” as he wrote in {{0}}German.[[{{SA}}Aufheben, if that is the German word, must mean the same as the Latin word subtollere p.p. sublatus, to heave up and off, or throw, from which “sublate” is taken. — Sri Aurobindo]] I do not know what word he used which is here translated by sublate, but certainly it does not mean both destroy and preserve, nor in fact does it mean either. Being passes over into Non-being, so it sublates itself, changes and eliminates itself as it were from the view, becomes Non-being instead of being; but so also does Non-being, what was Non-being passes over into being; where there was nothing, there is being; nothing has eliminated itself from the view. This, says Hegel, is not a mutual destruction by two contraries each of which was outside the other. Being inside itself becomes nothing or Non-Being; Non-Being or Nothing equally inside itself passes into being. They do not really sublate or drive out each other, but each sublates itself into the other. In other words it is the same Reality that presents itself now as one and now as the other.
31 July 1944