Historical consciousness, tradition and upbringing

This paper, which addresses the question of the relation between tradition and upbringing, assumes a conception of the person as a being with two fundamental characteristics: imperfection (incompleteness) and a capacity for being perfected by upbringing and education. Upbringing is then necessarily founded on tradition, on the continuity of generations - it is an introduction to a world which is older than all its current occupiers, and at the same time aims to prepare the young for a new life of their own in different conditions. The hermeneutical analysis of the connections between an historical consciousness, subject to a critical perspective on all that is handed down, with a tradition understood as the passing on of what has been received, makes a permanent claim on the upbringer and on upbringing. One of the possible ways of meeting this claim is presented by Gadamer in his conception of "legitimate prejudices", which bridges the divide between historical consciousness and tradition and, in addition, exploits the tension in upbringing we have mentioned.