Denial as the basis of evolution

Time leaves its footprints on the story line...

Imagine yourself as a fetus that develops into a baby, child, teenager and walks through adulthood and into old age.

At each stage, your story is built individually within the historical context in which you are inserted. Years, decades and centuries are marked by their idiosyncrasies.

Collectively, history is also made at different times. Hegel called "Zeitgeist" or "Spirit of Time" that which constitutes and characterizes a period. Let us not think here of the supernatural, but something like a mental constitution.

Our reality, according to the Hegelian perception, goes through stages, as well as the organic beings that inhabit it, however, only the human being is capable of acquiring greater awareness as it develops. Thus, animals are born, grow and die, but only humans have to deal with the science of their finitude.

And this is how reality takes shape as mentality/spirit as history progresses, when man — increasingly — becomes aware of himself.

The development of reality takes place in the successive stages that make up the eras and assign us partial truths. Partial because history has not yet reached its end and its totality is the sum of the fractional truths of succeeding epochs.

Hegel used a metaphor about the behavior of philosophers towards history:

"The Owl of Minerva takes flight at twilight fall".

It is when a certain period ends and the epochs pass. For, during its trajectory, time leaves its footprints on the line of history; your gait. Thus, partialities add up on the way to totality.

Now, let's go back to the beginning of this text and the denial of ourselves. Hegel gives us three steps to explain the patterns found in history.

Thus, then, 1) the human being, as a baby, asserts himself and develops by denying the fetus stage, leaving intrauterine life towards the world. 2) The child, in order to evolve and assert himself, necessarily denies his baby stage when he begins to have autonomy in his steps and at the beginning of speech. And so, successively, 3) in adulthood, towards maturity and old age towards the corporeal end.

Between "affirmation", "denial" and "denial of negation", history builds itself, progresses and reassembles the pieces of the evolutionary puzzle.

As for the phrase that gives the title to this reflection, another concept will emerge: that of Aufhebung. Such a proposition by Hegel encompasses negation, conservation and elevation.

Note that negation is inherent in us and precedes conservation, for we say that we conserve ourselves by considering the fact that we remain human. Continuing with Hegel's theory, in the sequence we rise – through the transformation of what we were – into what we are.

Based on this context, we found that the progressions occur in an organized and standardized way. Reality accompanies the movement of history and the denial of ourselves is done in a natural and fundamental way for our evolution as unique beings, immersed in a collectivity that also denies, conserves and elevates. Anyway... walk. All embedded in the story.

I invite you to reflect on denial from another perspective. Evolving, in the various aspects of humanity, is in the act of leaving the cocoon of ignorance and continuing amidst the learning that is presented to us, through our experiences. It is impossible to deny what is gone as a form of oblivion, since the present and the future are built on the beams of the past.

Change requires negation, without completely abandoning the past to – finally – raise the steps of the evolutionary ladder.

Is that you? What were you forced to deny about yourself to achieve personal elevation?

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Marcelo Kassab.

Writer and Dental Surgeon.