ABSTRACT
The ‘double transition’, here, takes on acute significance. While others may refer to it as
‘double negation’, this has the tendency to be connoted with the abrogation of things,
whereas it is a transition that preserves and overcomes. As Hegel (1999, p. 126) expresses it,
the movement is one in which the former is ‘preserved in the later. . . subordinated and sub-
merged’. Later, Hegel is even more explicit about its importance when he insists that it is
only by means of this ‘double movement’ that ‘difference first gets its due’. This is because
only when both sides are distinguished and observed in their own part, that they are seen as a
unity in the totality: by merging their one-sidedness, the unity is prevented from being one-
sided (1999, p. 295). If sublation (Aufheban) is seen in these terms, then perhaps its affinities
to Daoist notions of complementarity within contradiction may be more readily recognizable.
