Atavism#
Summary#
Nietzsche uses atavism to describe how philosophical ideas are not autonomous inventions but ancestral inheritances. Philosophizing is characterized as “atavism of the highest order,” a remembering and homecoming to an ancient common-household of the soul from which ideas originally grew. This explains the family resemblance among Indian, Greek, and German philosophies, which share grammatical structures that unconsciously guide similar patterns of thought.