Traditions cannot be understood directly in themselves as they do not exist any more for themselves and by themselves once their time and space are over. The dream of Humanists and Enlightenment of deciphering the original meaning of texts by following established protocoles of rules and procedures is vanished for ever. Similarly traditions cannot ever be retrieved in themselves, in their initial or literal meaning. They can exist only in our present once they are trans-lated, that is to say, incorporated and embedded into our world view, codes and systems of cognition. An inter-pretation is therefore required to realise the fusion of horizons of meanings.
Language can make sense in another independant act of speech only.
The history and life of a tradition is conditioned by its dependance from an interpretative appropriation. This gives a tradition a new existence. A dead tradition, the one which could not be inter-preted or find some one to own it, appears only as a linguistic reiteration of its pristine form. That pure handing down of a cultural form falls actually in a semantic vacuum, alike those deserted monuments that keep their initial identity, an identity of cultural corpse. The critique of Tradition ought therefore to focus on methods and strategies of interpretation and the hermeneutic situation to which given methods and strategies accomodate.