a "factual" priority independent of the intention of the lecture? Above all, how about the determination of Being as ground?
Presencing, presences~ in all metaphysical concepts of Being, speaks in all determinations of Being. Even the ground as what already lies present, as what underlies, leads, when considered in itself, to lasting, enduring, to time, to the present.
Not only in the Greek determination of Being, but, for example, also in the Kantian "position" and in the Hegelian dialectic as the movement of thesis, antithesis and synthesis (here again a beingposited) the present speaks, the priority of presencing makes itself known (cf. Nietzsche II, pp. 3II ff., further: Wegmarken 1967, pp. 273 ff. "Kant's Thesis on Being").
These intimating references show a priority of presence which has its say in all formulations of Being. How, in what manner this determination is, what the meaning of the priority of presence making itself known is, is still unthought. The priority of presence thus remains an assertion in the lecture "Time and Being," but as such a question and a task of thinking: to consider whether and whence and to what extent the priority of presence exists.
The first paragraphs of the lecture continue following the sentence just cited: "Presencing, presence speaks of the present." This is ambiguous. On the one hand, it can be understood to mean that presencing as presence is thought in relation to the perceiver and his repraesentio. The present would then be a determination resulting from presencing and would name the relation of presencing to perceiving man. On the other hand, it can be understood to mean that—quite generally—time speaks from presencing. Here it remains open how and in what manner. "Being is determined as presence by time." This second meaning is what the lecture intends. However, the ambiguity and the difficulty of the exposition of the problem—thus the fact that in the first sentences we have to do not with an inference, but with the first groping around in the thematic realm—tends to lead to misunderstandings whose removal is possible only by continually keeping the theme of the lecture as a whole in view.