In opposing foundationalism to antifoundationalism, recent political theory betrays its blindness to a third alternative. As suggested by the most influential critics of Kant, the ground of meaning and normativity is neither the human mind—or autonomous constructions of reason—nor historically given forms of life, but the interaction between them, that is, the human openness to the intelligibility granted us by “the things themselves.” This paper articulates that ground in its historical genesis, as it arises in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's defense of a classical conception of reason against modern rationalism, and further developed by Edmund Husserl and the young Leo Strauss. I argue that critics and followers of Strauss have forgotten the phenomenological grounds of his thought in the “fundamental problems” arising from the structure of human experience.