Despite this constant awareness of the reality and fundamental position of the Seiende as thing-in-itself, despite his apparent realization that the otherness of the Seiende is somehow a controlling factor in our encounter with things, Heidegger at no time squarely confronts the problem of the otherness of the thing as otherness. The lack seems even more acute when we have penetrated the fourfold erection of the thing to the source of all meaning, even in Seienden revealed in the past: it is only the projection of Dasein which can be the source of the “other’s” meaning—i.e., a source that is not other at all! Heidegger renders great service to contemporary thought by warning us against a naive realism that would ignore the inevitable coloration of the thing by the interpretative intentional horizon within which we encounter it, and against a transcendental idealism which, denying access to the thing-in-itself, would destroy the possibility of our proceeding beyond positivism without succumbing to arbitrary subjectivism. He nevertheless leaves us without the principles of a solution to this twofold problem.
P. 229