Philosophy's nostalgia

Jeff Malpas

pp. 87-101

in: Hagi Kenaan, Ilit Ferber (eds), Philosophy's moods, Berlin, Springer, 2011

Abstract

What is wrong with nostalgia? How and why has it come to be the case, as it surely has, that to say of a philosophical position that it is "nostalgic' is already to indicate its inadequacy? In this essay I examine nostalgia both as a mood or disposition in general, and as a mood or disposition that is characteristic of philosophical reflection. Part of this inquiry will involve a re-thinking of the mood of nostalgia and what that mood encompasses. Rather than understand the nostalgic as characterised solely by the desire to return to a halcyon past, the nostalgic will be explored through the connotations suggested by its Greek etymology as precisely a longing for the return home – a return that cannot be achieved – a form of homesickness, and so as discomfiting rather than comfortable, as bringing with it a sense of the essential questionability of our own being in the world.