Part Two of “Translating Heidegger translating Wesen” explores the implications of our indiscriminately eschewing rather than discerningly embracing the Latinate cognates of (the incipient esse in) essentia to address what I refer to in Part One as the “seemingly insurmountable translation difficulty” that Heidegger has bestowed upon his interpreters through his exposition of the enigma of ‘Wesen = essentia, οὐσία’ and ‘Wesen ≠ essentia, οὐσία’. So what are the little-heard-of consequences for any venture toward an English rendition of this enigmatic configuration in his texts that, with a well-intentioned doffing of the hat to just one aspect of Heidegger’s other-than-metaphysical being-historic interpretation of the enigma of “das Wesen” within his own German language and thinking, yet without thinking through it, takes part of the ‘Wesen ≠ essentia, …’ side of the full sway of the said configuration all-too-literally? How so? By resorting to an English rendition of the German language of “das Wesen” (and alas, some but not all of its cognates and compounds) that, while hastening to advance Heidegger’s retrieval of the retreating verbal character of this language in the German original (the incipient wesen in ‘Wesen(heit)’), is deliberately selected for being not cognate with Latin essentia, as proposed, among others, by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary in their Translators’ Foreword [pp.xxxi-ii] to Mindfulness*, their first-time-in-English licensed translation of Heidegger’s 1938/1939 “second major being-historical treatise” [p.xiii] Besinnung (GA66)**.
My critical appraisal of [Besinnung auf] “the word mindfulness itself, which”, as Emad and Kalary point out in their Translators’ Foreword [pp.xxiii-xxv], “appears in the title as well as throughout this translation as the English rendition of Heidegger’s word Besinnung”, is contained in the Afterword to (Part Two of) this essay under the heading “Translating Heidegger translating Besinnung”.
* Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006
** Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe Volume 66, Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1997
Part Two of my inaugural essay for this venture in appreciative thinking after Heidegger was first published at http://www.archessenzing.com on 30 December 2020.