Certainly, when I was writing “Systematically misleading expressions,” I was still under the direct influence of the term “ideal language,” a doctrine that gave a number of logical forms that could be unearthed by scraping the earth that covered them. I do not believe, especially today, that this is a good method. I don`t regret following this path, but I`m glad I left it behind. (In Rorty 1967, 305) `6.8` The analysis of an idea as it was made before was indeed nothing more than to free it from the form in which it had become familiar. Breaking an idea in their original elements is going back to their moments, which do not have the form of the given idea, but which represent the direct property of the self. This analysis, however, is merely a reflection that is itself familiar, solid and inert findings. But what is so separate and non-real is an essential moment; Because it is because concrete divides and turns into something non-real that it moves. The activity of dissolution is the power and work of understanding, of the most amazing and powerful power, or rather of absolute power. The circle that remains enclosed in itself, and how the substance keeps its moments together, is an immediate relationship that is therefore not surprising.
But that an accident as such, detached from what surrounds it, what is bound and which is really linked only in its context with others, should acquire its own existence and its own freedom – it is the immense force of the negative, it is the energy of thought, of pure self. Death, if we want to call it non-reality, is precisely the most terrible thing, and keeping what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lack of strength, beauty hates understanding to ask her what she can`t do. But the life of the Spirit is not the life that recoils from death and remains intact by devastation, but the life it endures and keeps there. It will only gain its truth if it finds itself in a total dismemberment. It is this power, not as something positive, that turns a blind eye to the negative, as if we say of something that it is nothing or evil, and then, after having done so, turn away and move on; on the contrary, the mind is this force only by looking the negative in the face and lingering with it. Staying with the negative is the magical power that transforms it into being. This power is identical to what we used to call the subject which, by the provision, replaces an existence in its own element, abstract immediacy, that is, immediacy which is hardly and is therefore an authentic substance: the being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside it, but which is that mediation itself. (PS, “Preface,” No. 32, 18-19) What has contributed to the dominant misunderstanding of the nature of philosophical analysis, as well as everything but everything, is the fact that sentences and questions that are truly linguistic are often expressed in a way that renders them factual. A striking example is the thesis that a material thing cannot be in two places at once.
This sounds like an empirical phrase and is constantly invoked by those who want to prove that it is possible that an empirical sentence is logically safe.