Renowned banking analyst Dick Bove is calling on Bank of America to break itself up. In a Friday report, he dutifully backed up this idea with the sorts of numbers Wall Street types often use to show the bank's different components are worth more separate than together.

Much more interestingly, he also cited BofA's failure in living up to the teachings of 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Mr. Hegel is best known for his work on dialectics, which says that an event, for instance the Protestant Reformation, triggers an forceful opposing event (the Counter-Reformation), and eventually the phenomena combine, or synthesize, to produce an improved state of being. (In fact, Catholic and Protestant Europe did learn to live together, more or less agreeably). By the way, this school of thought was an important foundation for Karl Marx.

Mr. Bove, a Rochdale Securities analyst who clearly has read up on Idealist philosophers, says that BofA fails to meet the Hegelian test.

"In a Hegelian cycle, events keep returning to the same place. However, that position is always higher and somewhat better than in the prior cycle due to the accumulated wisdom gained from prior cycles," he wrote. "However, [BofA] shows no evidence of having learned anything from the past cycles….It gets back to the same position but at a lower point in the cycle."

Although he didn't cite Nietzsche's concept of the eternal recurrence, Mr. Bove may well have had that in mind when pointed out that last year BofA's stock was trading for the same price it fetched in 1982 and its dividend payout appears to be the same.

In a best of all possible worlds—a phrase coined by 18th century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz—Mr. Bove argues that BofA's different businesses would be spun off as independent entities. These newly independent companies, surely stocked with the sort of Ubermenschen in management that Friedrich Nietzsche would appreciate, would lead shareholders to greater heights than BofA could. Mr. Bove pegged BofA's break-up value at $53 a share.

An analyst for some 40 years, Mr. Bove is known for his forthright views that distinguish him from many other analysts, though sometimes his work resembles Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker.

A BofA spokesman had no comment.