closer look it already became clear that even in the linguistic form the σύνθεσις-διαίρεσις schema could not be carried through.

“The chalkboard is not black,” is indeed a separation. [141] But are the words in this sentence any more separated or any less synthesized than in “The chalkboard is black”? The “not” that separates and denies does not leave the sentence in pieces. Rather, as a moment in the statement, the “not” itself is possible only because “blackness” has been related to and synthesized with “chalkboard.” As easy and seductive as it is to focus on the expressed sentence and its linguistic form, we must avoid that. Or whenever it enters the field of logic, we should treat it merely as proof of how speaking qua statement can become an expressed statement (and this particular expression), and of how much linguistic formation is determined by specifically logical moments concerning speech as the showing of something as.

But we must be just as careful with “attribution” and “denial,” as if these forms of expression were almost abbreviations of “synthesis” and “separation.” We now know that synthesis and separation cannot be divided and lined up with affirmation and denial. Rather, they are themselves inseparable in every affirmation and every denial.

In short, it is a matter of understanding a phenomenon that in itself is both synthesis and separation, one that is prior to linguistic relations of expression and to their attributions and denials, a phenomenon that, on the other hand is what makes it possible that λόγoς can be true or false, revelatory or covering-over.

But again, where can we get some guidance for understanding what constitutes the basic structure of λόγoς qua statement? Aristotle himself, apart from an important indication (which is, again, all too vague) fails to provide the information. He and the Greeks, as well as the later tradition, neglected to really inquire into this structural phenomenon. Linking-together and separating are the structures that basically clarify what the statement or judgment is. Unfortunately the question of analytic and synthetic judgments has gotten mixed in with this interpretation so that the confusion is huge [142] —and in the apparently perfected and secure science of logic basically nothing has been clarified.

To stay with Aristotle for a moment: he never got away from his orientation to speech. For the Greeks that would be impossible. And yet, as we will soon see, his work on the structures of σύνθεσις and διαίρεσις, and on their relations to the true and the false and to κατάφασις and ἀπόφασις, are certainly not as clear as the way we worked them out above. Of course, once we get clear on the σύνθεσιςδιαίρεσις structure and understand it in its origin, we can understand certain indications that Aristotle gives for clarifying this structure.

The problem has been posed here and elsewhere in a less than explicit way. Nonetheless we should not allow an essential indication, as