My essay proposes an hypothesis regarding the evolution of one "idiom" of human language, namely, philosophical discourse. The feature of this discourse that I focus on is the prevalence of "high level" abstractions, such as "being" and "cause," and the question addressed is: Why should such an ability have evolved in humans, that is, what value for species survival might it have had? Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that philosophical abstractions are vestiges of primitive and outmoded ways of understanding the environment; and Ludwig Wittgenstein regarded such discourse as an aberration of "ordinary language" resulting from using that tool of culture and survival in inappropriate ways.I also argue that philosophical discourse is language used in a dysfunctional or aberrant way. However, I criticize Nietzsche's theory for not adequately accounting for the survival value of these "abstractions' for an earlier stage of human development (granted their dysfunctional present use), whereas I criticize Wittgenstein's theory for failing to adequately explain how this aberrant use of human language occurs (granted the survival value of its "ordinary" use).Drawing upon the work of the psychologist Eleanor Rosch, I argue that the capacity for, and use of, abstraction played a role in the evolution of human language, but with respect to "middle level" abstractions, for example, to be able to think of and speak of "deer" or "bison" rather than either a particular instance of one, on the one hand, or "animal" or "thing," on the other. By being able to deal with the environment in terms of classes of things, evolving humans were able to 'summarize" information about the environment and responses to it that allowed for easier learning and more rapid responses.Thus we would expect that human evolution favored cognitive and linguistic capacities for abstraction, but only to a certain level of abstractness. Thus we would also expect that high level abstractions such as are common in philosophical discourse should not be favored by human evolution, and that they are therefore an aberrant manifestation of these cognitive and linguistic abilities.