 The claim that the hermeneutical experience of truth is conditioned by tradition is not reducible to historicism or the historicist project of determining, say, what an artist or an author took to be true through a reconstruction of the historical context of the artwork or text under consideration. Quite to the contrary, the hermeneutical experience of truth concerns something that holds true for our own existence. Rather, then, the hermeneutical experience of truth is conditioned by tradition in the sense that it is limited and made possible by the historical transmission of meaning. The claim that the hermeneutical experience of truth is conditioned by tradition stresses the sense of the etymological origins of the word ‘tradition’ in the Latin trāditiōn- (stem of trāditiō), a handing over, delivery or handing down of knowledge (OED 2020, “tradition, n.”). This claim also stresses the sense of Gadamer’s German term for tradition, Überlieferung, which, translated literally, means a ‘delivering over.’ In this, the hermeneutical experience of truth involves belonging to a historical tradition. Contrary to a common misconception of Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics, traditions are not monoliths. Traditions are more like processes—idiomatic, dynamic, and evolving—that, to borrow from Whitman, “contain multitudes” (Whitman, Song of Myself, Sec. 51). Accordingly, to belong to a tradition is not first to possess an identity derived from a cultural or ethnic heritage; it is, rather, to be a participant in a movement of handing down, delivering over.