XX. The Influence of Language on Our ThinkingNietzsche diagnoses the cause of the rationalist bias in favor of “thinghood” to the origins of language. Language originated when psychology was in its more rudimentary form. There is everywhere a doer and a doing for instance. The doer is the Ego and the cause is the will. This initial notion of an ego is generalized to that of substance, which is the origin of the concept “thing.” Philosophers later found that the categories of “thinghood” can be handled with security, and so they made them apriori, since experience contradicts them. The final result of the error was the claim that because we have reasons, humans must belong in the divine realm of “being.” “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar” says Nietzsche.
