In this paper, I analyze a philosophical preoccupation that is shared by Husserl’s transcendentalism and Merleau-Ponty’s “existential” phenomenology : the thematization of the foundations of worldly experience. Through his “archeological” method, Husserl sheds light, in the Cartesian Meditations, the different strata of meaning that subtend the phenomenon of the concrete world. If this description begins with the philosophizing ego that thematizes its own experience, it ultimately leads to the transcendental ego which reveals itself to be the epicenter that possibilizes and subtends the world in its being-as-such. Far from radically opposing this thesis, Merleau-Ponty stays loyal to Husserl as he accepts that the world only acquires sense through its givenness to a consciousness, but he nonetheless suggests that philosophy is able to attain the stratum of the world’s experience that precedes the acquisition of its sense. This paper argues that this yearning for a pre-objective primordiality has its source in Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of specific late works of Husserl.