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The Question Concerning Technology

"nihilism" means that Nothing is befalling Being. Being is not coming into the light of its own essence. In the appearing of whatever is as such, Being itself remains wanting. The truth of Being falls from memory. It remains forgotten.

Thus nihilism would be in its essence a history that runs its course along with Being itself. It would lie in Being's own essence, then, that Being remain unthought because it withdraws. Being itself withdraws into its truth. It harbors itself safely within its truth and conceals itself in such harboring.

In looking toward this self-concealing harboring of its own essence, perhaps we glimpse the essence of that mystery in the guise of which the truth of Being is coming to presence.

According to this, metaphysics itself would not be merely a neglect of a question still to be pondered concerning Being. Surely it would not be an error. Metaphysics, as the history of the truth of what is as such, would have come to pass from out of the destining of Being itself. Metaphysics would be, in its essence, the mystery of Being itself, a mystery that is unthought because withheld. Were it otherwise, a thinking that takes pains to hold to Being in what is to be thought could not unceasingly ask, "What is metaphysics?"

Metaphysics is an epoch46 of the history of Being itself. But in its essence metaphysics is nihilism. The essence of nihilism belongs to that history as which Being itself comes to presence. However, provided that Nothing in whatever manner also points toward Being, the determination and defining of nihilism from out of the history of Being might well at least indicate antecedently the realm within which the essence of nihilism can be experienced in order to become something thought that concerns our thinking. We are accustomed above all to hearing a false note in the name "nihilism." However, when we ponder the essence of nihilism as belonging to the history of Being, there is at once something dubious in simply hearing a false note. The word "nihilism" indicates that nihil (Nothing) is, and is essentially, in that which it names. Nihilism means : Nothing is befalling everything and in every respect. "Everything" means whatever is, in its entirety. And whatever is stands there in


46. A self-withholding.


Martin Heidegger (GA 5) The Word of Nietzsche: 'God Is Dead'