Bestand ordinarily denotes a store or supply as “standing by.” It carries the connotation of the verb bestehen with its dual meaning of to last and to undergo. Heidegger uses the word to characterize the manner in which everything commanded into place and ordered according to the challenging demand ruling in modern technology presences as revealed. He wishes to stress here not the permanency, but the orderability and substitutability of objects. Bestand contrasts with Gegenstand (object; that which stands over against). Objects indeed lose their character as objects when they are caught up in the “standing-reserve.” Cf. Introduction, p. xxix. (QCT p. 17)
“Constant reserve” renders Bestand. Cf. QT 17. Bestand does not here have the fully developed meaning of the “standing-reserve” present in that chronologically later essay, but does already approach it. “The constant reserve of what presences,” i.e., of what is as such, that the will to power needs for its own preservation and enhancement, becomes, when viewed with regard to man as accepting and accomplishing the dominion of the will to power, that which must be made secure as available for man. Heidegger speaks later in this essay of a making secure of “the stably constant reserve of what is for a willing of the greatest possible uniformity and equality” (p. 102); and the constant reserve is secured that it may be used as a secure resource for every aspect of man’s life (p. 107). Here must lie close at hand for us the thought of the standing-reserve as the undifferentiated reserve of the available that is ready for use. In keeping with this, Heidegger’s discussion of man under the dominion of the will to power has a close parallel in his discussion of the rule of Enframing in the modern age. Cf. also p. 100 below, QT 19 ff. (QCT p. 84)