Aufhebung in a Career
When Hegel spoke of Aufhebung,
he gave us a word that refuses to stay in a single box.
Three meanings at once:
to cancel.
to preserve.
Contradictory on the surface,
but for Hegel it was the motor of history —
the strange force that lets the old die
while carrying its spirit forward into the new.
Traditionally, philosophers read this as spirit’s journey.
As history, as reason unfolding itself.
A grand movement, a teleology of Geist.
But I want to drag the word somewhere smaller.
Closer.
Into the rhythm of a working life.
My own career.
Take this welfare office where I sit today.
Paper stacks tilting.
Forms shuffled endlessly.
Absurdities dressed as procedures.
In six weeks it will be gone.
My contract expires, and by the first meaning of Aufhebung,
it is cancelled.
Finished.
Nothing more.
And yet — I feel no bitterness.
In the second sense, it is preserved.
Every encounter remains with me.
The refugees still carrying the war inside them.
The migrants wrestling with a system that both feeds and disciplines.
The Swiss who let slip their quiet tragedies.
Even my co-workers, the ones I liked and the ones I did not.
They remain, every one of them,
stored in me like layers of sediment.
Then comes the third sense.
Lifted up.
What felt heavy in the moment —
bureaucracy that drained me,
the endless testing of boundaries —
is altered by distance.
It enters a larger pattern.
It becomes something more than the days themselves.
Experience.
Wisdom.
Even a strange kind of gratitude.
Here I break with Hegel.
For him, Aufhebung belonged to history’s great spiral.
Freedom at the end of reason’s road.
For me, it is intimate.
It is how I look back at each chapter of my life.
Mike’s Kitchen in Germiston.
Kerem Shalom.
The narrow streets of Lamu.
Bangkok traffic, weaving through on a bicycle.
All the people I met,
all the dead-end jobs:
construction, security, places that seemed pointless at the time.
None of it is lost.
It is cancelled,
preserved,
elevated.
And here, at last, I add my own.
A fourth sense.
Verinnerlichung — interiorization.
Not only lifted up but drawn inward.
Made part of me.
Every trace woven into the fabric of who I am.
Every fragment metabolized until it is mine to carry.
So I shift Hegel’s concept away from history’s teleology,
into the spiral of one human career.
Each job ends,
each job leaves its trace,
each job, in the long run, raises me higher
and deeper
at once.
That is why I can say,
as I fold my laundry
and think about this expiring contract:
I’m glad it ends.
But I’m also glad it happened.
The contradictions do not erase each other.
They are Aufgehoben.