Abstract
While nostalgia has been the subject of some philosophical treatment (especially in the phenomenological tradition), I think new findings in the psychological literature and new historical investigations call for a re-interrogation of this phenomenon. My argument is that philosophical reflection, as well as findings from empirical psychology, gives us strong reasons to think that: (1) Nostalgic experiences can be divided between typical nostalgic experiences that are positive and strengthen our sense of narrative identity by connecting us to an idealized past that we have a sense that we have lived. These typical nostalgia experiences are affectively bittersweet (though more sweet than bitter) and, as psychological literature attests, seem to arise in the wake of a crisis—and from this crisis, nostalgia attempts to make us feel at home in the world again. (2) In contrast to typical forms of nostalgia, there are what I call atypical forms of nostalgia; in these cases, the experiences are often negative, and they connect us not to a past that we have lived but to one that we wished to have lived. This form of nostalgia leads not to a strengthening of narrative identity but a weakening of it, and a feeling of grief for the world in which we could not belong.
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Notes
This is not a term that Casey uses, but I take the idea to be a natural development from his thought.
For a brief discussion of this mode of typicality see Steinbock (1995: 125f.).
For the idea of empirical typicality that is operationalized in this essay, I draw from Erica G. Hepper et al. (2012: 102–19), This study examines lay conceptions of nostalgia using a prototype approach. The prototype approach focuses on identifying the central and peripheral features of a construct based on the subjects’ responses. The central features of nostalgia, based on this data, are 18 in number. See p. 106 for the chart listing them.
The retrospective anchor is what ties the nostalgic experience to a sense of pastness. In the typical cases of nostalgia, this is done by the self-presence of memory—the sense that the nostalgic experience is the memory of an event that I had experienced during a previous time. But additionally, this anchor could also function in a nostalgic experience in which this self-presence is absent. In this case, what anchors this experience to the past would not be self-presence but features of the remembered or imagined content itself—the time in which I never lived but that I am nostalgic for, contains aspects to it that situate it in the past.
Some might argue that to have a nostalgic experience just is to have a memory with a nostalgic atmosphere. That is, there can be no nostalgia-memory wherein there is no nostalgic atmosphere at all, and that all nostalgic presentations are directed to the memory world as a whole and not to any particular recollected objects given in the memory; this is a complicated question, but I think it could be the case that while all nostalgic experiences must have some nostalgic affect within the mnemonic atmosphere, this need not be the dominant atmosphere of the memory itself. often an atmosphere is “layered” or complex so that one might have a nostalgic afterglow experience from the memory within an atmosphere that is not predominantly nostalgic in itself.
About this distinction two things must be said: (i) this distinction itself may not be concordant with Husserl’s theory. (ii) The home-locus is the general term I use for aspects of the objective world insofar as it “gives off” a sense of familiarity, normality, and, perhaps, security. Nonetheless, within a general home-locus it may be that there are some places that are “more” home than others—the childhood room in the hometown may be more home than the local recreation center Hence, there can be a general home-locus—the hometown, and more specific home-loci that “fall” under it.
In my view, the homeworld, home-condition, and home-locus are all given simultaneously in most of our experiences. The homeworld and home-condition speak of the same experience from the “subjective” and “objective” side, hence these terms are analytically distinguishable, but not, for the most part, distinguished in our experience.
Distress appears, in particular, to be a prime nostalgia trigger: see Tim Wildschut et al. (2006: 975–93) for more on this.
There is, of course, an alternative view to this one (see Crowell 1999: 86). Crowell argues that
nostalgia reveals a discontinuity between the I and the temporality that it is often identified. Nostalgia, on.
Crowell’s view shows us that the self cannot be completely narrativized. I think (1) this view is not backed.
by the empirical literature on, nostalgia and (2) I think that this view does not attend enough to the.
fact that nostalgia, in typical cases, is a positive experience. As to the first point, the narrative unity thesis.
has received support by Routledge (2016: 34–37). As to the second above point, if nostalgia is primarily.
concerned with loss and disunities in the self, why is it that the emotion is experienced as more sweet than bitter—more positive than negative? I think some of the valid intuitions of Crowell’s account can be.
incorporated into my account of atypical nostalgia below, but I hold that this discontinuity lies not in the.
self as such but between the self and different worlds in which it identifies.
The above section owes much to Fisher (2013: 28), though he did not apply his cultural-historical insights to the experience of nostalgia as such. Developing a fully historical or “generative” phenomenology of nostalgia would be too much for this small essay but for another interesting historical and cultural analysis of nostalgia see Lasch (1991, Chap. 3).
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