About

At the beginning of the 21st century, the boundary line between the past and the present has become increasingly vague. Far from being the horizon of a new future, the current century has spawned an increasingly retrospective set of tendencies, motivated in part by the fruition of social media, but orchestrated at large by a sense of the present as being a deficient time. In the midst of this temporal ambiguity, a new wave of political ideologies emerged promising to take back control of things and make things great again. The language of populism (from both the left and right) has given rise not only to division and violence, but also to an affirmation of the past as a marker of how things ought to be. In parallel, a global pandemic known as Covid-19 forced countless populations to stay at home, avoid other people, and take sanctuary in the recollection and consumption of better times.

Against this backdrop, nostalgia has become an important but overlooked emotion in both societal and conceptual terms.

There are at least two reasons for this neglect. First, nostalgia is inherently and essentially an ambiguous concept. This ambiguity is evident in both nostalgia‘s historical development and its intellectual understanding. Historically, nostalgia has been paired with homesickness, such that there is often an overlap between each concept (cf. Rosen 1975). The ambiguity between nostalgia and homesickness has led to a muddled understanding of nostalgia as a separate emotion (Illbruck 2012; Matt 2011). Furthermore, nostalgia‘s ambiguity is central to its very nature; alongside involving a combination of sorrow and pleasure, nostalgia can be classified as an act of remembering and an emotion. Given this manifold ambiguity, specifying what is unique to nostalgia can be difficult and this difficulty has likely played a role in deterring substantial philosophical investigation (cf. Casey 1987). The second reason for the philosophical neglect of nostalgia concerns its place in the history of ideas. Throughout the 20th century, nostalgia has been stigmatized in philosophy as marking a "retrograde return to sameness" (cf. Casey 1987, Levinas 1969) and an indicator of "inadequacy" in philosophical thought (Malpas 2011). For these reasons, nostalgia has received limited attention especially compared to other affective states such as anxiety and depression.

In response to these questions, the project posits the following central hypothesis: Phenomenology can play a vital role in identifying the salient structures of nostalgia as well as accounting for how the contemporary idea of nostalgia has been shaped historically.