ABSTRACT
There are two ways in which one may look critically at a tradition: from within or from the outside. In this article, I intend to do it the first way. Raising the sort of questions that I will be asking already implies a certain estrangement from that tradition, but at the same time I do so not in order to find the faults or limitations which may characterize it, but with a view to continuing and creatively advancing the traditional modes of thinking. Living outside the country where that tradition developed and still has deep roots, and exposed to a powerful and temporally and culturally more relevant mode of thinking, one runs the risk of being an over-hasty, shallow, and even arrogant critic of a long and hallowed tradition. One gathers the illusion of being free, free from all tradition, and thus justified in critiquing one's own. But if that sense of freedom is illusory, this critique is superficial. If the critic claims to be free from all traditions, he will be forgetting what Gadamer has so poignantly reminded us: that he will be thinking from within a new tradition, for example, the tradition of (modern) rationalism.
