true, of course, that Aristotle did not pursue the analytical question as far as the problem of which phenomenon within the structure of the λόγος is the one that permits and indeed obliges us to characterize every statement as synthesis and diaeresis.
Along with the formal structures of 'binding' and 'separating'—or, more precisely, along with the unity of these—we should meet the phenomenon of the 'something as something', and we should meet this as a phenomenon. In accordance with this structure, something is understood with regard to something: it is taken together with it, yet in such a way that this confrontation which understands will at the same time take apart what has been taken together, and will do so by Articulating it interpretatively. If the phenomenon of the 'as' remains covered up, and, above all, if its existential source in the hermeneutical 'as' is veiled, then Aristotle's phenomenological approach to the analysis of the λόγος collapses to a superficial 'theory of judgment', in which judgment becomes the binding or separating of representations and concepts.
Binding and separating may be formalized still further to a 'relating'. The judgment gets dissolved logistically into a system in which things are 'co-ordinated' with one another; it becomes the object of a 'calculus'; but it does not become a theme for ontological Interpretation. The possibility and impossibility of getting an analytical understanding of σύνθεσις and διαίρεσις—of the 'relation' in judgment generally—is tightly linked up with whatever the current status of the ontological problematic and its principles may be.
How far this problematic has worked its way into the Interpretation of the λόγος, and how far on the other hand the concept of 'judgment' has (by a remarkable counter-thrust) worked its way into the ontological problematic, is shown by the phenomenon of the copula. When we consider [_ga] this 'bond', it becomes clear that proximally the synthesis-structure is regarded as self-evident, and that it has also retained the function of serving as a standard for Interpretation. But if the formal characteristics of 'relating' and 'binding' can contribute nothing phenomenally towards the structural analysis of the λόγος as subject-matter, then in the long run the phenomenon to which we allude by the term "copula" has nothing to do with a bond or binding. The Interpretation of the 'is', whether it be expressed in its own right in the language or indicated in the verbal ending, leads us therefore into the context of problems belonging to the existential analytic, if assertion and the understanding of Being are existential possibilities for the Being of Dasein itself. When we come to work out the question of Being (cf. Part I, Division 3),1 we shall thus
1 This Division has never appeared.