founded on his essence, which as the locale of Being in turn rests on Being itself.
In that way man, as the one who thinks, can relate himself to beings as such. Thinking therefore brings Being in the form of a being as such to language. Such thinking is metaphysical. It does not repudiate Being itself, but neither does it keep to the default of Being as such. Of itself, thinking does not correspond to the withdrawal of Being. However, the twofold omission of repudiation and correspondence is not nothing. Rather, it happens not only that Being as such stays away, but that its default is thoughtlessly misplaced and suppressed by thinking. The more exclusively metaphysics gains control of the being as such and secures itself in and by the being as the truth "of Being," the more decisively has it already dispensed with Being as such. Being is the condition of beings, posited by the being as such, and as this condition is one value among others.
The default of Being itself is expressly, if unknowingly, misplaced in its default by the nature of metaphysical thinking, as thinking in values, whereby the very misplacing does not know itself as such. The nothing of Being itself is sealed in the interpretation of Being as value. It belongs to this sealing that it understand itself as the new "yes" to beings as such in the sense of the will to power, that it understand itself as the overcoming of nihilism.
Thought in terms of the essence of nihilism, Nietzsche's overcoming is merely the fulfillment of nihilism. In it the full essence of nihilism is enunciated for us more clearly than in any other fundamental position of metaphysics. What is authentically its own is the default of Being itself. But insofar as the default occurs in metaphysics, such authenticity is not admitted as the authenticity of nihilism.* Rather, the default as such is precisely what is omitted in metaphysical thought, and in such a way that metaphysics omits even the omission as its own act. The default is covertly left to itself by means of the
* "Authenticity" here translates das Eigentliche. Heidegger's prior references to der eigentliche Nihilism us have been rendered as "nihilism proper." It is still the issue of what is proper to nihilism as such that Heidegger explores here, even if the requirements of English compel a return to the problematic renderings "authenticity" and (for das Uneigentliche) "inauthenticity."