fundamental experience says that the being is a being as will to power in the mode of the eternal recurrence of the same. As a being in this form, it is not nothing. Consequently, nihilism, to the degree there is supposed to be nothing to beings as such, is excluded from the foundations of such metaphysics. Thus—it would seem—metaphysics has overcome nihilism.
Nietzsche acknowledges the being as such. Yet, in such an acknowledgement, does he also recognize the Being of beings, and indeed It itself, Being, specifically as Being? He does not. Being is determined as value and is consequently explained in terms of beings as a condition posited by the will to power, by the "being" as such . Being is not acknowledged as Being. Such "acknowledging" means allowing Being to reign in all its questionableness from the point of view of its essential provenance; it means persevering in the question of Being. But that means to reflect on the origin of presencing and permanence and thus to keep thinking open to the possibility that "Being," on its way to the "as Being," might abandon its own essence in favor of a more primordial determination. Any discussion of "Being itself " always remains interrogative.
For representing, which in value thinking aims at validity, Being is already outside the horizon of the questionability of the "as Being." There "is" nothing to Being as such: Being—a nihil. However, if we grant that beings are thanks to Being, and that Being never is thanks to beings; and if we also grant that Being cannot be nothing in the face of beings, then does not nihilism also, or perhaps first of all, put itself properly into play where not only is there nothing to beings but also nothing to Being? Indeed. Where there is simply nothing to beings, one might find nihilism, but one will not encounter its essence, which first appears where the nihil concerns Being itself.
The essence of nihilism is the history in which there is nothing to Being itself.
Our thinking, or better expressed, our reckoning and accounting according to the principle of noncontradition, can hardly wait to offer the observation that a history which is, but in which there is nothing to Being itself, presents us with an absolute absurdity. But perhaps Being itself does not trouble itself about the contradictions of our thought. If