of its independence, does not drag it into the sphere of mere lived experience, and does not degrade it to the role of a stimulator of such experience.* Preserving the work does not reduce people to their private experiences, but brings them into affiliation with the truth happening in the work. Thus it grounds being for and with one another as the historical standing-out of human existence in relation to unconcealment. Most of all, knowledge in the manner of preserving is far removed from that merely aestheticizing {GA 5: 56} connoisseurship of the work's formal aspects, its qualities and charms. Knowing as having seen is a being resolved; it is standing within the strife that the work has fitted into the rift.
The proper way to preserve the work is co-created and prescribed only and exclusively by the work. Preserving occurs at different levels of knowledge, with always differing degrees of scope, constancy, and lucidity. When works are offered for sheer artistic enjoyment, this does not yet prove that they stand in preservation as works.
As soon as the thrust into the awesome is parried and captured by the sphere of familiarity and connoisseurship, the art business has begun. Even a painstaking transmission of works to posterity, all scientific efforts to regain them, no longer reach the work's own being, but only a remembrance of it. But even this remembrance may still offer to the work a place from which it joins in shaping history. The work's own peculiar actuality, on the other hand, is brought to bear only where the work is preserved in the truth that happens through the work itself.
The work's actuality is determined in its basic features by the essence of the work's being. We can now return to our opening question: How do matters stand with the work's thingly feature that is to guarantee its immediate actuality? They stand so that now we no longer raise this question about the work's thingly element; for
* This is precisely the complaint that Heidegger levels against Nietzsche's notion of will to power as art—not in the 1936-37 lecture course on Nietzsche but in notes sketched during the year 1939. To some extent the whole of the present essay may be viewed as a response to the Nietzschean Wille zur Macht als Kunst.—ED.