Abstract

Tradition comes from tradere: to hand down. It recalls the continuity of generations, what is handed down by one member to another, even the heritage of handicraft. The image of handing down expresses physical proximity, immediacy — one hand should receive from another. Such immediacy is the more or less natural relation of a familial sort. The category of tradition is essentially feudal, just as [Werner] Sombart called feudal economy traditional. Tradition is opposed to rationality, even though the one took shape in the other. Its medium is not consciousness but the pregiven, unreflected and binding existence of social forms — the actuality of the past; unintentionally this notion of binding existence was transmitted to the intellectual/spiritual sphere.