A number of modern thinkers - from Yeats to Bataille - self-consciously choose an archaic, pre-modern 'episteme'; choose it for the cognitive and imaginative sparks thereby generated, for its oppositional and aggravational force. They stubbornly cling to their point of archaic negativity in the face of the overwhelming positivity of the new life world, and attempt even to interpret the New with the creaky conceptual machinery of the Old. Bataille's cosmology - a finite, bound world of humours, energies; his insistence on categories and oppositions borrowed from the world of religious orthodoxy and feudalism. The more dubious example of Pound's resurrection of 'usury'.
Of course, one cannot 'chose' tradition. Or rather, the very fact of being 'chosen' changes and infects the thing itself. For the last thing such archaic systems were was chosen. They were the very framework within which choices were made, the very inner substance of choice. To cling to such systems, therefore, always involves an act of stubborn and eccentric defiance wholly exterior t of he systems themselves.
Tradition is precisely the inherited, enduring, pre-conscious background to belief. To choose it is to negate it, and those who do choose it live in an impossible place, absurd yet defiant, standing haughtily on thin air.
These writers and thinkers are not answering tradition, but answering the New by quoting and tarrying with tradition. They would defy the New but have only the Old. Using old names, old tokens of interest only to the lexical and conceptual numusmatists, they try and lay their hands on and name what is lacking in the present.