Being itself had to be what it is by grace of a lack of contradiction in human thought, then it would be denied in its own proper essence.
Absurdity is impotent against Being itself, and therefore also against what happens to it in its destiny—that within metaphysics there is nothing to Being as such.
More essential than reckoning with absurdities is finding out to what extent there is nothing to Being itself in Nietzsche's metaphysics.
Therefore, we say that Nietzsche's metaphysics is nihilism proper. But does Nietzsche need us with our hindsight to calculate such a thing against his th inking? In describing the way Nietzsche himself sees the various forms and stages of nihilism,* we touched on the concluding sentence of note 14 (dated 1887) from The Will to Power, which runs: "'Nihilism' as ideal of the supreme powerfulness of spirit, of superabundant life—partly destructive, partly ironic." However, the "recapitulation," which has been cited already, begins (WM , 617): "To stamp Becoming with the character of Being—that is the supreme will to power."
Such thinking-that is, thinking Becoming as the Being of the totality of beings , th inking "will to power" in terms of the "eternal recurrence of the same"—is what the spirit of Nietzsche's metaphysics achieves as the ideal of its supreme powerfulness. It therefore corresponds to the supreme form of "nihilism." In that Nietzsche's metaphysics th inks a complete revaluation of all previous values, it completes the devaluation of the highest values hitherto. In this way, it belongs "destructively" within the course of the prior history of nihilism. But insofar as the revaluation is carried out expressly in terms of the principle of valuation, such nihilism pretends to be what it no longer is in its own sense: as "destructive," it is "ironic." Nietzsche understands his metaphysics as the most extreme nihilism; indeed, in such a way that it is no longer even a nihilism.
* The reference here is not to the lecture course on "European Nihilism" but is presumably to the essay "Nietzsche's Metaphysics," which also refers to WM, 1 4 and 617. (Cf. NII, 281-82, 288, and 327, included in Volume III of the present series.) The references below to " justification" and, indeed, to all five "major rubrics" of Nietzsche's metaphysics seem to refer to that essay.