essence is nothing human. It is the abode of the advent of Being, which as advent grants itself an abode and proceeds to it, so that precisely as a result "There is I / It gives Being."* The essence of nihil ism in the history of Being takes place as the history of the secret. The essence of metaphysics proceeds as the mystery.
The essence of nihil ism is an enigma for thinking. This has been admitted . However, the admission does not belatedly and of itself yield something that it was previously able to enjoin for itself. The admission merely places itself in insistence; that is, into the tarrying inherence in the midst of the self-veiled truth of Being. Only through such insistence is man capable of maintaining his essence as the one who, in his essence, thinks.
When thinking dispatches itself into thought, it stands already in the admission of the enigma of the history of Being. At the moment thinking thinks, Being has al ready been intended for it. The mode of this primordial summoning is the default of the unconcealment of Being in the unconcealed being as such.
For a long time, thinking did not heed this. That prevented it from discerning that the phenomena of nihilism in the ordinary sense are unchained by the release of Being. Such release surrenders the default of the unconcealment of Being to an omission through metaphysics, which at the same time and in a concealed fashion prevents the advent of self-concealing Being. Insofar as nihilistic phenomena emerge from the release of Being, they are evoked by the predominance of the being itself, and they in tum effect the disjunction of the being from Being itself.
In the occurrence of the default of Being itself, man is thrown into the release of the being by the self-withdrawing truth of Being. Representing Being in the sense of the being as such, he lapses into beings, with the result that by submitting to beings he sets himself up as the
* So dass "Es"—demzufolge und nur so—"das Sein gibt." The translation tries to capture both the idiomatic and the literal senses of the German Es gibt—"there is," "it gives." Note that Heidegger's formulation of the Es gibt throughout these pages differs from his later interpretation of Ereignis. The present formulation tends to equate the "It" with Being, whereas Heidegger's final efforts leave the "It" of the granting unnamed. Yet these pages too voice the suspicion that the word Being names the enigma inadequately, and that the word may therefore have to be surrendered.