Abstract

The issue of tradition represents is of fundamental importance today as it implies both practical and existential problems: the crisis of Modernity, or the downfall of post-Modern age, exemplifies the semantic slip or rift that the notion of tradition has in it. One of the most important philosophers of the XXth century, Jacques Maritain, shows the specificities of his time. His thought, as a consequence, is characterized by the need for a strong historical commitment and for the necessary mediation of Modernity and tradition. According to Maritain, tradition represents the occasion for new and authentic freedom, since there is no freedom without tradition, that is, without an hypothesis of work which is in principle able to detect and welcome the new exigencies of each epoch. Maritain addressed the problem of tradition in many different fields, f.i. aesthetics, education, science, morals, politics, religion etc. In particular, aesthetic experience and intuitive fruition and creation of artistic beauty are a crucial instance of the dialectical dynamic of tradition, as they prove to be able to interact with the needs of Modernity and, at the same time, to give them a new birth in the light of a superior constitutive unity. Maritain defends the sempiternal preciosity of being because tradition is the treasure of being. In it, the different levels of reality and of hum a agency are recomposed together thanks to the analogia entis and to the principle of subalternation