Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly: SEYN

Near the end of Contributions Heidegger remarks that, by writing Seyn   instead of Sein, he wants to "indicate that [Sein] here is no longer thought metaphysically." Thus he elucidates the specific way in which these words, Sein and Seyn, with their frequent appearance throughout Contributions, are to be understood. But how do we reflect this understanding in translation?

Heidegger uses the eighteenth-century orthography of Sein, i.e., Seyn, in order to indicate that, when he writes Sein, he means the way Sein is grasped metaphysically and, when he writes Seyn, he means the way Sein is no longer grasped metaphysically. In both cases, then, he is dealing with one and the same Sein and not  , as it were, with Sein differentiated from Seyn: He intends no opposition. Accordingly, to use two different words for translating Sein and Seyn-e.g., "being" and "beon" - would increase the danger of carrying too far a simple orthographic device. [1] It suggests too much of a "division." Thus we realized (a) that translating Seyn with a new English word is misleading, in indicating too great a delineation, and (b) that, if available, an orthographic device is enough for drawing attention to Seyn.

Considering the fact that both Sein and Seyn are pronounced in exactly the same way and that the difference between these words is noticeable only in writing, we decided to use the English word "being" for translating Sein and to hyphenate the same word as "be-ing" for translating Seyn. In this way we have two English words, being and be-ing, that, like Sein and Seyn, are pronounced in the same way but written differently. Thus we are able to avoid using a "new" word for Seyn-like beon-which could be misunderstood as standing in opposition to "being." For, distinguishing Seyn from Sein is not the same as creating an opposition between them. (It should be noted, however, that, as F.-W. von Herrmann   writes in the Editor’s Epilogue, "The alternating spellings "Seyn"and "Sein" ["be-ing" and "being"] were left unchanged, even where the matter at hand   is "Seyn" ["be-ing"] and not "Sein" ["being"] and where Heidegger here and there, apparently during the writing, did not consistently maintain the different spelling." We have made the same decision and consistently translated "Seyn" with "being" and "Sein" with "being.")