ABSTRACT
While the Greek etymology of analysis means “dis-solution,” analysis as a thinking practice (which has been theorized since the ancient times, initially in the realm of geometry 1 ) involves the related idea of a “breaking up” 2 : the first experience of it may be considered that of a child breaking a toy to understand its internal structure, and the way it works. Modern thought has reinforced this “decompositional” conception of analysis, which “found its classic statement in the work of Kant at the end of the eighteenth century” and “set the methodological agenda for philosophical approaches and debates in the (late) modern period (nineteenth and twentieth centuries).” (Beaney, 2012) 3 Hegel asserted the importance of analysis within the movement of thinking itself:
Analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, did anyhow consist in nothing else than doing away with its character of familiarity. To break up an idea into its ultimate elements means returning upon its moments, which at least do not have the form of the idea as picked up, but are the immediate property of the self. Doubtless this analysis only arrives at thoughts which are themselves known elements, fixed inert determinations. But what is thus broken up into parts, this unreal entity, is itself an essential moment; for just because the concrete fact is self-divided, and turns into unreality, it is something self-moving, self-active
(Hegel, 1910: 30).