Metaphysics and Nihilism brings together two Martin Heidegger treatises written in different periods: The Overcoming of Metaphysics from 1938–39 and The Essence of Nihilism from 1946–48. Although the texts are not formally or chronologically a single work, they converge on a shared problem. Each examines the claim that nihilism belongs to the essence of metaphysics when metaphysics is considered through the history of being.
For Heidegger, overcoming metaphysics is a decisive historical experience, not a simple rejection of earlier philosophy. Metaphysics reaches an extreme form when beings appear subject to unlimited production and control, a condition he describes through the predominance of manipulation. In this condition, the abandonment of beings by being becomes visible even as the conceptual tradition remains unable to think being itself.
The second treatise approaches the problem through Nietzsche's declaration that God is dead. Heidegger links the killing of God to the will to power and to the treatment of being as a value posited by that will. Because being remains unthought within this framework, metaphysics reveals itself as nihilism proper. Read together, the essays clarify the relation among technological manipulation, value-making, Nietzsche, and Heidegger's effort to think beyond the inherited limits of metaphysics.