Most of What You Call Thinking Is Not Thinking — It Is Inheriting
Nietzsche’s first and most sustained target in Beyond Good and Evil is not morality. It is the philosophers who believe they are deriving morality from reason while actually rationalizing inherited prejudices.
The book opens with a challenge to the dogmatists — philosophers who have built elaborate systems to justify conclusions they held before the reasoning began. The system is constructed after the verdict. The argument is the rationalization. The conclusion was never in doubt because it was never genuinely examined — it was inherited from religion, from culture, from the specific historical moment, and then dressed in the language of reason to make it appear derived rather than assumed.
Nietzsche extends this beyond professional philosophy immediately. Every person who has not examined the origin of their values is doing the same thing — inheriting a moral framework installed by their culture, their family, their religion, and their historical moment, and then experiencing that framework as self-evident truth rather than as one possible configuration among many.