Concept Clinic: "Aufhebung"

The cancel-preserve-elevate secret behind truth-telling transformation

The most shameful moments of our past can become the foundation of a future strength - but only if we tell them to another person.

This is the transformative logic of AA’s Step 5. The recovering alcoholic has spent Step 4 cataloging everything they can think of that they resent and fear and every major relationship that has broken down along the way. Step 5 is where the recovering alcoholic lays all of this out for their sponsor, disclosing every little piece of their past that might be weighing them down. Disclosing their past to another human being is relieving and liberating - the events themselves remain unchanged, but the meaning we make of those events becomes completely different, changing from a story of shame to a story of belonging.

This is Aufhebung in action. Aufhebung is a term coined by the philosopher Hegel, and it is notoriously slippery to define. It generally gets translated into English as “sublation,” but that word is barely friendlier. The key to Aufhebung is that it braids three verbs into one motion: it means to cancel, to preserve, and to elevate, all three interwoven in one action.

It’s sort of like climbing up a ladder with a limited number of rungs. Imagine taking a rung out from way below you and inserting it above you - the useless rung behind you is gone, transformed into a useful rung ahead of you. The raw material of the rung is the same, but everything else about it is different.

Hegel thinks that human consciousness develops in the same way. An idea, a political order, or an individual stage of life reaches its limits and cracks under its own contradictions (becoming cancelled). Its best insights are not discarded but are conserved and renewed (being preserved). Finally, the whole unit is re‑mounted at a higher vantage where the previous tensions are visible, forgiven, and integrated (being elevated).

And then the new unity itself becomes the field of the next breakdown and transformation.

Crucially, this cancel‑preserve‑elevate process is not the work of a lonely, solitary hero. Hegel insists that recognition by another consciousness is what starts, drives, and finishes the job. Private insight can start the renovation, but shared acknowledgment is what locks the new rungs of the ladder in place.

This interplay of canceling, preserving, and elevating isn’t just theoretical -it’s exactly what happens in Step 5 of AA. First comes cancellation: we drag whatever has rotted in secrecy into the daylight and declare ourselves ready to let it go. Letting it go doesn’t mean throwing it away. Instead, we preserve its usable insights - the patterns, motives, and wounds we discover that can inform wiser choices and a new identity. Reading the inventory to a sponsor means offering the reclaimed material for inspection and communal transformation. Guilt is neither excused nor fetishized, but is instead raised into mutual understanding. Sponsor and sponsee now stand one spiral higher, able to survey the story together without drowning in it. This is why the sponsor is not merely a passive listener but an active catalyst. They provide the crucial 'recognition' that Hegel identified as the final, necessary ingredient to lock the transformation in place.

Through this work, he lowest, most isolated moments of our lives become the very things that bring us closest to others and which give us the empathy and insight necessary to lift up the next person who needs help.

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Takeaway: Our stories are recycled and reclaimed, never forgotten, never permitted to prove our unworthiness to anyone.

Practice prompt. Think of one memory that still feels like dead weight. Write a sentence or two that (a) admits it was harmful, (b) names the sliver of truth or strength it revealed, and (c) imagines how that sliver could bring about something good - how it might deepen your appreciation for the good things in your life and better set you up to uplift someone else.

As a simple example, if you’re looking at a time that you lashed out in anger you might write (a) 'That outburst hurt someone I care about,' (b) 'It showed me I need to pause when I’m upset,' and (c) 'That pause could help me listen better and support others.'

Then share that sentence with another person, or even just yourself in the mirror.