omission. Precisely in the way it takes place, the authenticity of nihilism is not something authentic. To what extent? Nihilism takes place as metaphysics in its own inauthenticity. However, such inauthenticity is not a lack of authenticity but its fulfillment, because it is the default of Being itself and because it devolves upon Being to see that the default remains entirely itself. The authenticity of nihilism historically takes the form of inauthenticity, which accomplishes the omission of the default by omitting this very omission. What with its unqualified affirmation of beings as such, it does not and cannot get involved with whatever might concern Being itself. The full essence of nihilism is the original unity of its authenticity and inauthenticity.
If therefore nihilism is experienced and brought to concepts within metaphysics, metaphysical thought can treat only the inauthenticity of nihilism, and that only in such a way that the inauthenticity is not experienced as such but is explained according to the procedures of metaphysics. The omission of the default of Being as such appears in the shape of an explanation of Being as value. Reduced to a value, Being is derived from the being as a condition for it as such.
Nihilism—that there is nothing to Being itself—always means precisely this for metaphysical thought: there is nothing to the being as such. The very path in to the experience of the essence of nihilism is therefore barred to metaphysics. Insofar as metaphysics in every case decides for either the affirmation or the negation of the being as such, and sees both its beginning and its end in the corresponding elucidation of the being from its existing ground, it has unwittingly failed to notice that Being itself stays away in the very priority of the question about the being as such. In staying away, Being abandons the thinking of metaphysics to its own nature, which is precisely to omit the default as such and not to involve itself in the omission. Insofar as such thought, which has become historical as metaphysics, belongs in its essence to Being itself, insofar as it thinks on the basis of the unconcealment of the being as such, the inauthenticity of nihilism is also determined by Being itself.
Inauthentic nihilism is inauthenticity in the essence of nihilism, precisely insofar as nihilism fulfills authenticity . A difference unfolds in the essential unity of nihilism. The inauthenticity of nihilism is not