That the separate philosophical ideas are not anything optional or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other, that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as the collective members of the fauna of a Continent—is betrayed in the end by the circumstance: how unfailingly the most diverse philosophers always fill in again a definite fundamental scheme of POSSIBLE philosophies.
There is no such thing as an isolated philosophy. All philosophies are relative to one another. The tradition is grounded in an evolution, relating-to and connected-with the contextual familiarity within the age from which it sprung.
Under an invisible spell, they always revolve once more in the same orbit, however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in definite order the one after the other—to wit, the innate methodology and relationship of their ideas. Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.
At first glance, philosophies appear diverse. Each uses its own terminology and concepts to discover so-called truth. Despite their differences, they all originate from the same “invisible spell": the drive to recapture the primordial roots from which it grew. Philosophy is not a discovery, it is a remembering of the most basic concepts.
The wonderful family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is easily enough explained. In fact, where there is affinity of language, owing to the common philosophy of grammar—I mean owing to the unconscious domination and guidance of similar grammatical functions—it cannot but be that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and succession of philosophical systems, just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation. It is highly probable that philosophers within the domain of the Ural-Altaic languages (where the conception of the subject is least developed) look otherwise "into the world," and will be found on paths of thought different from those of the Indo-Germans and Mussulmans, the spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately also the spell of PHYSIOLOGICAL valuations and racial conditions.—So much by way of rejecting Locke's superficiality with regard to the origin of ideas.
What is one of the most basic concepts? Language.
Philosophies founded on similar languages share similar patterns of thought. Language provides the foundation out of which philosophy grows. Nietzsche argues that a study of language can explain why certain philosophies exist (and why other philosophies do not!).
For example, Ural-Altaic languages (which do not define subject/object relationships) will most likely devise alternative philosophies to those of the Germanic tradition. And not only philosophies, but value systems. Maybe our cultural circumstance can be attributed to the grammatical function of languages.
Language is also dynamic. "...I mean thanks to the unconscious rule of leadership of the same grammatical functions..." Our language today is not random. Our grammar, words, definitions are the result of a highly dynamic genealogy of power relations between drives over time (see Aphorism 019).
In 1689, John Locke published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which attempts to explain the origin of ideas. He argues that all ideas come from experience, and language resulted as the attempt to communicate these ideas. Nietzsche is claiming the opposite: values and ideas resulted from language.
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