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the predominant reference for the tradition of liberal education in the twentieth century.However, it does not need to be the only one, particularly since the kind of traditionrepresented by this liberal education has not yet been recognized fully as relevant. 12 Thisalso means that the situation concerning our thinking is still rather confused.In comparison to Heidegger, we don’t take the pure project of transcendence (thepossibility of existence) as a prerequisite of the possibility of historicity and historical lore.We think that transcendence must be itself integrated into the understanding of tradition.The pure project of transcendence should be understood as a trans-dimension of traditionitself. Besides, it is here not a question of a transcendence of the transcendence, or of atranscendence about a transcendence, but of an openness, which occurs in itself (theworld) and beyond itself (man) in the sense of active historicity.As we have previously established that the negativity which invades the living-world,cannot be heard from the position of transcendental reason, it is imperative for us not toapprehend this negativity on the basis of the “finiteness of the Dasein in us.” Thus wecouldn’t agree, for example, with the much debated claim of the Italian philosopherGianni Vattimo, who asserted that Heidegger has went right to the roots of nihilism as aspirit-historical negativity, with his thesis of the finiteness of Dasein. Nihilism no doubtdoes annihilate the finiteness of the human existence, as Heidegger argued in his Beingand Time. But from the point of view of existential analytics it would not be possible, forinstance, to interpret the phenomenon of the dehumanization of victims as an obviouscynicism of the totalitarian systems of our century, or again, as an audio-visual manipulationof the media, which latter seems quite inoffensive to us in comparison with theformer example.In this context, we would still have to bear in mind how nihilism stands with thephenomenon of historicity in the epoch of the salutis gratia historical-being change inHeidegger’s thought after Being and Time, when Heidegger actually arrives at the rootsof Nietzsche’s nihilism. We are confronted here with another problem. It seems that thehistorical negativity regulates at least the entire meaning of an era of being. Therein,tradition turns literally into nothingness. Heidegger interprets this an-nihiliation positively,in the sense of the consolidation of Being itself into nothingness. The question of such anappropriation of the philosophical tradition, as well as European humanity and here theefficient (auswirkend) historicity still remains open. Heidegger acts ambiguously towardtradition. He simultaneously approves and refuses it as the “end of history,” which herecan be spontaneously justified in a post-modern situation (ie., after World War II). If wewant to avoid discarding the tradition of European humanity in its philosophical tradition,be this elimination ideological, interpretative, or informative (which, strictly speaking, isagainst what Heidegger tries to achieve), then we must work out its access to itselfappropriately. Husserl tried, with his Erneuerungsbemühungen, alongside Heidegger, whoalso tried, by reflecting on a new start for European humanity, with the aim ofovercoming the crisis of the notion of tradition. Although they both failed, the fact thatthey persisted and dwelt on this subject forces us to try to figure out a new approach tothe phenomena of historicity and tradition, out of the foundations on which they bothlabored. In doing so, we cannot allow ourselves to be led along a path which would aimfor a modernistic pretension of a radical reformation, or for a post-modernistic pretensionof starting all over and anew. A novel and clear understanding of the historical traditionis already leading us to a new and different historical concept of tradition.12Otherwise the decline in the teaching of Latin and Greek (in particular) would not be as advancedas it in fact is.197