Every powerful critical idea is the product of a particular interpretive situation: we could even say, with considerable simplification, that it is the product of a prejudice. Every cultural moment develops its own critical myth (or prejudice), and reasons and interprets within the limits of this horizon. Often it needs only a short time for the myth to wither, the prejudice to decay; we realize that its claims, born of a particular historical perspective and valid only in part, were too high, and that it was not content to accept only this partial validity.
But when a critical myth fades away, not everything is doomed to disappear. There are still positive traces, still a residual value which, once appropriately adjusted and corrected, can be recuperated. To achieve this, a more powerful interpretive system must arise which absorbs the error within a new perspective. Whatever survives the testing may become a new instrument of interpretation, perhaps one destined to last forever – or at least for a little longer (this is how progress is made).