[401] What is still called for is commentary on an historical issue, something which I believed to be all but obvious in the elaboration of Being and Time, but which was barely taken into account in the responses to Being and Time. Therefore, in view of your “problem” of self-interpretation, I will specifically highlight it.
When comprehending Being and Time, it may count as an important step to see that by approaching the Being-question in Dasein, subjectivity is left behind. But this insight remains a half-measure so long as one does not duly consider that along with subjectivity the determination of Being as objectivity and objectification in consciousness is also abandoned. Said more clearly: The confrontation with Aristotle that preceded the writing of Being and Time let Being be experienced in advance as presence [Anwesenheit]. Presence as such provided the hint into the time-character of Being, which still needs to be inquired into. This issue is expressed so decisively in the Introduction to Being and Time, p. 25ff., that the discourse of “Being” is thought in terms of presence throughout the entire treatise. Presence-at-hand and readiness-to-hand are modes of presence. Even the Being in “There-Being” [Da-sein] is, as ekstatic, a multifaceted presence to . . . what is present. The projection of Being, i.e., the understanding of presence, does not make presence into an issue for Dasein; only understanding and the opening of the horizon of understanding do so. In advance, what remains decisive for Dasein is dependence on what is present [das Anwesende], admittance into presencing [das Anwesen]. So long as one still thinks Being as the objectification of intentional consciousness, however, then the understanding-of-Being suddenly becomes a constitution of Being and a positing of Being. “Being is the transcendens pure and simple” (p. 38). This sentence provides a meaning of “transcendental” that differs fundamentally from that of Kant or Husserl. “Every disclosure of Being as the transcendens is transcendental knowledge” (Ibid.). Presence [die Anwesenheit] is never and in no way something present [ein Anwesendes]; in this respect, it is [402] the nothing. But thinking is in a position to draw itself closer to presence as such only on the way over the understanding-of-Being, while the Being-question needed to work itself out of idealistic, transcendental philosophy, which was historically demanded at the time of the emergence of Being and Time, and it needed to detach itself from that. It was a tricky path, however, which at the time was not so clear to me as it is today after forty years.
To the basic experience of Being as presence, which comes from Aristotle, belongs the view into ἀλήθεια as a character [Charakter] belonging to Being itself (Being and Time, p. 213). From the beginning, ἀλήθεια has had for me an ontological meaning and not an epistemological one. Therefore, ἀλήθεια may not be translated with “truth” (see Ibid., p. 219 at the bottom) because with this term, people today readily suggest that it means evident correctness and certainty. Later talk about the “truth of Being” is thus misleading. Yet what will one not do when they need to have enough things to say? This is just as great a need today as it was decades ago.