26 The most common understanding of what Nietzsche means by ‘nihilism’ is confined to these further senses of the term. Thus Bernard Reginster, who rightly places the diagnosis and overcoming of nihilism at the centre of Nietzsche’s project, nonetheless defines the theme of nihilism as ‘despair over the unrealizability of our highest values’ (Reginster 2006: 51). But this despair is a late result of the more fundamental nihilism that wills nothingness, the nihilism that, as Nietzsche describes it, is at the heart of Platonism–Christianity and its secular successors and that neither takes its highest values to be unrealizable nor is in any despair over them. On the contrary.