Words such as das Seiende, das Seiendste, seiender, and seiend. Whereas das Seiende appears quite frequently in the text, other variants of this word appear infrequently. An unsurpassable philosophical precision in translation — if such were ever achievable — would demand that we uniformly render das Seiende with “a being.” However, realizing that such precision is not achievable in translation, we exercised two options. For those cases where the philosophical meaning would be otherwise totally compromised, we opted for translating das Seiende with “a being.” In all other cases we translate das Seiende with “beings” in order to maintain a uniform level of readability. But the reader should bear in mind that throughout this translation “beings” is used as a word whose point of reference is “a being’s restoration in the other beginning,” which is to say that our choice of “beings” is not to be taken as a generalization of all “beings.”
When Heidegger uses das Seiendste, seiender, and seiend in Contributions, he does not assume a chain of beings and its inherent hierarchy. Although these words bring to mind the Platonic ontos on and the Thomistic maxime ens, what is to be disclosed by them is called in the Contributions “restoration of beings.” Thus our renditions of these words with “most being” and “more being” are to be taken not in the sense of a series of superlatives but as indicating restoration of beings. (p. xxiii-xxiv)