Abstract

In several of his early lectures and also in Being and Time, Heidegger rejects the traditional conception of “cultural objects” as objects comprising a primary layer of natural thing-reality and a secondary, subjective layer of value, opposing it a concept of “meaningfulness” as an immediate sense structure of situational life-experience. In opposition to the traditional concept, often associated in a more or less overt fashion with Husserl himself, Heidegger stresses that the foundational relationship we are dealing with here is actually directed the other way around: meaningfulness is not founded in natural reality, but instead the latter already presupposes the former. The present article aims to question this heideggerian critique by analyzing the concept of „foundation“ employed by Husserl and by tracing it’s evolution from the Logical Investigations to several later notations from the 1930’s, in order to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the term.