Philosophy's Nostalgia

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 the inquiry that follows, 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 that 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 10 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.