Nostalgia

Author(s): Scott Alexander Howard

Source: Analysis , OCTOBER 2012, Vol. 72, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2012), pp. 641-650
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Committee

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 Nostalgia
Scott Alexander Howard

Nostalgia has become a popular topic of study across various disciplines. It

usually taken for granted in these discussions that we know what we a
talking about. In this article, I argue against two dominant accounts of t
nature of nostalgia put forward by philosophers and other writers in th
humanities and social sciences. These views assume that nostalgia depends
in some way, on comparing a present situation with a past one. Howeve
neither does justice to the full range of recognizably nostalgic experienc
available to us - in particular, 'Proustian' nostalgia directed at involuntar
autobiographical memories. While the immediate purpose of this article is
clarify the intentionality of a paradigmatic but neglected emotion type, c
tain episodes of Proustian nostalgia also raise questions about how to eval
ate emotions that are self-consciously directed at non-veridical memorie
I will conclude by briefly considering this issue.

1. 'Time comparison' accounts of nostalgia

To begin with, three general notes must be made about the scope and a
sumptions of this discussion. None is controversial. First, I will treat nos
gia as an occurrent emotion or affective experience, rather than simply
fascination with the past. Second, I will be concerned with nostalgia as it
brought about by the kind of memory which at least 'appears to be
"reliving" of the individual's phenomenal experience during that earlie
moment' (Brewer 1996: 60). Several names for this form of memory ha
been proposed, but the most enduring designation is episodic, coined b
Endel Tulving (1972). Because my focus is on episodic (and so person
memories, I will ignore the sense in which the longing to experien
bygone eras is sometimes referred to as nostalgia. Third, I take nostalgia
be among those emotions which necessarily have cognitive content: rough
the implicit or explicit thought that the object of one's episodic memory
both unrecoverable and desirable. Thus, the content of nostalgic emotio
episodes is an amalgam of the particular object of the memory, and th
attitude of desire towards it.1
Any adequate view of nostalgia will acknowledge that it involves a fe
difference between past and present: the very irretrievability of the past
salient in the experience. However, many accounts claim that there must be a
more specific difference between the past and the present. These accoun

1 This basic characterization is compatible with the views on nostalgia's necessary conditio
that I dispute in this article.

Analysis Vol 72 I Number 4 I October 2012 I pp. 641-650 doi:10.1093/analys/ansl05

© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust.
All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]

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642. I SCOTT ALEXANDER HOWARD

identify the operative difference in the respective attributes or qualities of two

temporally distant states of affairs. I will call such accounts 'time comparison'
accounts and consider two versions, naming each after the necessary condi
tion it stipulates for episodes of nostalgia. The naiveté requirement demands
that there be a particular discrepancy in knowledge between the past and the
present. The poverty of the present requirement claims that nostalgia involves
an evaluation that the past was preferable to the present. The phenomena to
which these accounts appeal are familiar, and indeed present in some nostal
gic experiences. However, neither is necessary for nostalgia in the manner
that is typically believed, even when the particular nature of the nostalgic past
is an important factor in the experience.

2. The naiveté requirement

The past-directedness of nostalgia encourages characterizations of the experi

ence emphasizing the importance of hindsight. For example, Richard Moran
claims of '[n]ostalgic or wistful forms of imagination' that

it is part of their essence to capture a sharp sense of the difference

between the world as represented by the naive state of mind of one's
former self and the (then) unappreciated truth about the transience of
that former world. (1994: 91)

On this view, a necessary condition for nostalgic memories is that they be

directed at times when one was unaware of the impermanence of one's
surroundings. This theme is echoed by Susan Stewart, according to whom
the nostalgic person 'dreams of a moment before knowledge and self-con
sciousness' (1993: 23). Likewise, Svetlana Boym concludes her long study of
nostalgia with the claim that we are 'nostalgic for a time when we were not
nostalgic' (2001: 355), a state of mind not yet initiated into loss. I will call
this the naiveté requirement.
It is true that expressions of nostalgia often describe gazing back across
this particular epistemic gap. Likewise, episodes of nostalgia typically involve
a perception of transience. But there is less reason to believe that the transi
ence of the former world must necessarily have gone unappreciated. In fact,
we should doubt an account of nostalgia that demands that there be a dis
crepancy between past naiveté and present wisdom. The reason comes out of
the fact that we can imagine the present as the subject of a future memory:
one can be aware of the impermanence of one's present surroundings. The
question is then just whether it is possible to nostalgically remember experi
ences which featured such awareness. There is no reason to think this is
impossible: indeed, it would be odd if, simply by reflecting on a moment's
transience, one thereby inoculated it against future longing. But then it is
implausible that nostalgia depends on the future self's superior awareness of

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 NOSTALGIA I 643

the past's impermanence. This common view of nostalgia's conditions fails to

capture the full range of genuinely nostalgic experiences. The naiveté require
ment can appear to be definitional when our crop of examples is limited to
memories of innocence - especially those which portray early childhood. But
once we recognize that nostalgia is not so limited, the requirement seems
ill-fitting.

3. The poverty of the present requirement

A more plausible time comparison account holds that nostalgia must be

motivated by the felt deprivation of the older self: in some respect, nostalgia
involves a judgement that the past was better. I will call this the poverty of the
present requirement. On this view, the intentional object of nostalgia is ne
cessarily a past regarded as preferable to the present.
The idea that nostalgia essentially involves a negative evaluation of the
present and a more positive evaluation of the past enjoys broad interdiscip
linary consensus. For example, Robert C. Roberts claims that in nostalgia
there is 'a disadvantageous comparison that embitters the present' (2003:
280). Historians Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw claim that nostalgia
requires 'some sense that the present is deficient' (1989: 3). The sociologist
Fred Davis holds that nostalgia depends on the belief that 'things were bet
ter...^« than now'' (1979: 18). And literary theorist Linda Hutcheon
writes that for the nostalgist,

The simple, pure, ordered, easy, beautiful, or harmonious past is

constructed (and then experienced emotionally) in conjunction with
the present - which, in turn, is constructed as complicated, contami
nated, anarchic, difficult, ugly, and confrontational. Nostalgic distan
cing sanitizes as it selects, making the past feel complete, stable,
coherent, safe... in other words, making it so very unlike the present.
(2000: 195)

On all of these views, what is necessary for nostalgia is that the desirable
features of the past appear to be compromised or lacking in the present.
Typically, the foregoing account is accompanied by a further assumption
that nostalgia imaginatively projects desirable features onto the past, rather
than represents qualities which the past possessed. In Hutcheon's terms, the
nostalgic past is not recollected but constructed in accordance with present
needs. When packaged with this view, the poverty of the present requirement
yields an intuitively appealing story about nostalgia's psychology: first, one
makes a negative assessment of the present, and then, aided by a selective
memory, one flees to an idealized and imaginary past. Coupled with the
projectionist assumption, then, the poverty of the present requirement is a
cornerstone of the received wisdom about nostalgia.

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644 I SCOTT ALEXANDER HOWARD

4. Proustian nostalgia

With another model of nostalgia before us, we may begin to assess its co
gency. In particular, it should be asked whether there are, or could be, epi
sodes of nostalgia that do not involve regarding the past as a time preferable
to the present, in any respect relevant to the experience. I will argue that the
central mnemonic phenomenon described by Proust - nostalgic involuntary
autobiographical memories, most famously triggered by a tea-soaked mad
eleine - does not fit with this model. Instead, the Proustian phenomenon
points away from such an analysis.2
At the forefront of a recent boom in involuntary memory research is the
work of cognitive psychologist Dorthe Berntsen. According to Berntsen, the
involuntary memories described by Proust typically have the following main
characteristics:

(1) They involve the spontaneous recovery of a forgotten scene.

(2) The scene is usually (though not necessarily) about a remote event,
such as from childhood.
(3) Their retrieval is heavily cue-dependent, without the influence of any
motivation to remember the scene, such as one's current conditions.
(4) They are typically activated by sensory cues.
(5) They involve a strong sense of reliving the past.
(6) They are accompanied by a strong feeling of joy. (2007: 26-27)

What returns in these involuntary memories is not just one forgotten sensa
tion associated with the present-day cue, but, as Proust's narrator Marcel
describes it, the 'whole instant of my life on whose summit they rested' (1970:
226).3 It is the feeling of a vast context restored by a particular sensation that
affords Marcel such profound happiness, even when it is bittersweet: 'the true
paradises are the paradises we have lost' (1970: 228).4
Berntsen's list overlooks one last characteristic of this experience, which is
its typical ephemerality. In contrast with the notion of indefinitely long rev
eries - lucid dream-tours of one's past - Proust notes that the memories have
their special quality only 'during the second that they last' (1970: 234). This
is significant, because it rescues his experience of nostalgic involuntary mem
ories from idiosyncrasy. Figuring in its fleetingness, the Proustian experience

2 To be clear, what I am calling 'Proustian' nostalgia is not intended as a literary or his

torical reading of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. As I explain below, Proust describes a
widespread psychological phenomenon, which is helpfully illustrated by his well-known
example.
3 Richard Wollheim offers a nice example of this synecdochical effect: he writes that the
memory of 'a single picnic with tomatoes and small curly leaves of basil and the crunch of
salt can signify a complete Tuscan summer' (1984: 100).
4 See Epstein 2004 for an account of the neurological underpinnings of these mnemonic
experiences.

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 NOSTALGIA I 645

is of a piece with cases of nostalgia described by others. For example, in a

poem called 'Nostalgia', Jan Zwicky refers to the emotion as a 'sudden lurch /
a kind of memory/shock' (2004: 50). And in another poem called 'Nostalgia',
Charles Wright describes both the phenomenon's spontaneity and its transi
ence: 'Always it comes when we least expect it, like a wave... I Brilliant and
sea-white, then sinks away' (2002: 36). Proustian nostalgia, then, is not
confined to Proust, and while it is aptly described by novelists and poets, I
do not take it to be a rarified phenomenon. What I call Proustian nostalgia is
a familiar emotional experience with the above characteristics.

5. Proustian nostalgia as a counterexample to the poverty

of the present requirement

Proustian nostalgia is unmotivated, fleeting, involuntary, and, as I will

describe below, capable of being self-consciously directed at bad memories.
Nostalgia with these characteristics serves as a counterexample to the poverty
of the present requirement. In other words, the psychological conditions and
processes involved in these episodes of nostalgia tell against the intentional
object that the poverty of the present model supposes the emotion type must
take.
The first characteristic of Proustian nostalgia that clashes with the poverty
of the present model is that it is unmotivated. Importantly, motivations are
not the same as cues. As described by Berntsen, a motivation is some pre
existing state of the subject - such as a need or desire - which plays an
enabling or causal role in triggering a memory. Findings from six studies
summarized in Berntsen 2009 corroborate Proust on the role of chance en
counters by indicating that specific environmental cues are in fact the most
common triggers of involuntary memories. Since we are not in control of the
majority of stimuli with which we come into contact, this result 'underscores
the accidental nature of involuntary autobiographical memories' (2009: 90).
On the other hand, nostalgia as it is described by proponents of the poverty
of the present requirement is the paradigm of a motivated experience.
A definitive feature of the view is that nostalgia is a response to a felt de
privation in the present. Such a view, therefore, seems badly equipped to
capture the unmotivated nature of Proustian nostalgia, which relies on acci
dental memories. And even when Marcel's nostalgia has the apparent func
tion of ameliorating his gloom, the emotion is still brought about by chance
rather than design.
The fleetingness of Proustian nostalgia provides a second reason to suspect
that the poverty of the present requirement is spurious. This can be seen by
considering whether, on the poverty of the present model, we would expect
nostalgia to be ephemeral. If nostalgia were necessarily a matter of being
dissatisfied with the present and thus escaping to the chapter of one's auto
biography brushed with the brightest gilt, it is unclear why the escape should

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646 I SCOTT ALEXANDER HOWARD

be terminated so abruptly. On that picture, we might expect to see nostalgists

languishing in their memories; but in Proustian nostalgia, the world in which
they allegedly seek refuge quickly vanishes. In other words, here too the
poverty of the present account seems at odds with this phenomenon.
Third, the very involuntariness of Proustian nostalgia - so obvious it is
easy to overlook - sits uneasily with nostalgia as depicted by the poverty of
the present model. The fact that the model treats nostalgia as having a fairly
straightforward rationale (rejection of one thing and consequential embrace
of another) makes it fit naturally in a voluntaristic paradigm. But building
assessment, comparison, ranking and rejection into the experience sits awk
wardly with Proustian nostalgia's absence of intention. Furthermore, the
poverty of the present requirement is typically accompanied by some version
of a projectionist thesis, suggesting that nostalgia edits the past in order to
make of it a rosy inversion of the present. Yet it is not clear how to square the
designing of such a fantasy with Proustian nostalgia's spontaneity and
surprise.
It is true that Proustian recollections of experiences are qualitatively dif
ferent from those experiences as they were originally lived through; but the
poverty of the present model assumes that such differences are part of a
deliberate fantasy. The model thus seems better suited to accommodate com
plex imaginative undertakings than nostalgic experiences in general. In fact,
given the motivations and needs attributed to the nostalgist on this model, it
is mysterious why the nostalgist would look backward to an unrecoverable
past at all, rather than forward to a Utopian future that they might also
construct.

A final feature of Proustian nostalgia presents a different kind of ch

to the poverty of the present model. This is Proustian nostalgia's abilit
directed at a past which was experienced as negative at the time. A
Landy observes, Marcel experiences the same emotion when he rem
'not just the happy times but also mundane and even traumatic m
(2004: 215). According to Berntsen, the fact that the memories are
cessarily happy shows that their affective quality 'does not in any tran
way derive from the remembered scene itself (2007: 27).
The diagnosis implied by the poverty of the present model is that no
for the bad is a matter of the nostalgist isolating a selected featur
remembered time, and expunging or whitewashing the context. In
however, the badness of the objects of some nostalgic memories is
guised, even salient, feature of the memories themselves. Notoriously,
precious little that is 'edited out' of Proust. Instead, the representat
provoke the emotional response are described in exhaustive detail
ently unbowdlerlized. Landy notes that even the famous madeleine

summons up nothing more than Aunt Leonie's room on a Sunday m

ing, a scene laid out in all its tedious and bathetic detail over six

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 NOSTALGIA I 647

pages prefaced by the broad disclaimer 'to live in, Combray was a trifle
depressing'. (2004: 215)

And yet the onset of this memory gives Marcel a shiver of pleasure.
There is nothing necessarily incoherent about the statement, 'I see how bad
it was at the time, but I now long for it.' However, what is required by the
poverty of the present model, in cases of self-aware nostalgia for the bad, is
for the nostalgist to hold something more specific: 'I see how bad it was at the
time, but I now regard it as a preferable time to the present.' For the poverty
of the present requirement to make good its claim, it would have to be true
that in every case of Proustian nostalgia for bad times, the present vantage
point, from which one retrieves the memory, is judged to be even worse. That
might happen sometimes, but, in the light of the spontaneity of the phenom
enon, it seems too implausible to think that it always will. And whenever the
moment of retrieval does not seem worse than the remembered past,
Proustian nostalgia will be a counterexample to the poverty of the present
requirement.

6. Conclusion and evaluative implications

I have argued against two prevalent assumptions about nostalgia: first, that it
always targets past innocence or naiveté, and second, that it always targets a
past regarded as preferable to the present. Where these theses stumble is in
their neglect of variety: they mistakenly make requirements out of mere forms
the phenomena can take. Thus, it can be perfectly accurate to call one's
longing for the superior past 'nostalgia', but it is inaccurate to call nostalgia
'longing for the superior past'. Instead, I believe that a fairly loose charac
terization of nostalgia's intentional objects is the only one that can be given.
What is targeted in episodes of nostalgia are memory representations of an
unrecoverable past, seen, at least in the moment, as meriting desire. Beyond
that, the emotion is more distinctive for its bittersweet affective character
than for the sort of past it is directed towards, or the relationship that obtains
between that time and now.
The phenomenon of self-aware Proustian nostalgia for the bad raises fur
ther puzzles of its own; I will close by mentioning one that concerns its
evaluative implications. Nostalgia is among a relatively small class of emo
tion types that tend to be considered categorically inappropriate, in one sense
or another.5 While the aim of my argument has not been to vindicate nos
talgia, my conclusion does reveal the spuriousness of one common reason for

5 'Inappropriate' is, of course, ambiguous between several grounds for censuring an emotion
type (see D'Arms and Jacobson 2000); I take it that the general bad reputation of nostalgia
is ambiguous in this way. See Howard 2012 for a more detailed treatment of these issues
as they pertain to a related emotion type.

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648 I SCOTT ALEXANDER HOWARD

denigrating it. Whatever else may be objectionable about nostalgia, it is not

essentially a form of deliberate escapism.
Even this modest defence of nostalgia may seem revisionary. I am inclined
to see it as unsurprising: like other emotion types, it could be that nostalgia
admits of appropriate and inappropriate episodes, depending on the circum
stances. However, the evaluative status of self-aware Proustian nostalgia for
the bad might be significantly more counterintuitive.
In self-aware Proustian nostalgia for the bad, something about the memory
strikes the nostalgist as non-veridical. The nostalgist knows the past in ques
tion was unpleasant at the time, but in memory it is altered by certain effects:
for example, the memory has acquired a gold patina, or it seems to be an
uncanny distillation of a whole time period. Neither effect strikes the
self-aware nostalgist as true to the quality of one's experiences at the time
when those memories were encoded. Yet they are part of what is targeted by
nostalgia. The emotion seems to be directed precisely at the 'fictional' fea
tures of the memory image - things which one recognizes to be not inside the
scene on the other side of the window, but drawn onto the glass.
In this way, self-aware Proustian nostalgia for the bad gives rise to the
much-discussed paradox of fiction, only outside of the usual context of art
spectatorship. The canonical problem asks how audiences can feel things for
people or situations in artworks that they know to be fictional: Anna
Karenina, for example, or some menacing slime. Here, the same puzzle
arises between the rememberer and the memories she regards as
non-veridical. When the self-aware Proustian nostalgist longs for bad
times, she suspects that those times are being presented in some aestheticized
fashion by her memory, and longs for them anyway. Thus, just as we may
ask how audiences can have feelings in response to events they believe are
fictional, we may ask how the nostalgist can feel desire in response to a
memory they believe to be relevantly altered.
However we might resolve the paradox of fiction in this context - that is,
whichever way we explain how such nostalgia comes about - there is at least
intuitive support for the judgement that these emotional episodes are unfit
ting. Nostalgia strikes us as inappropriate when it is directed at an image of
the past that diverges substantially from the real one. The fact that the nos
talgist suspects this discrepancy only seems to make things worse. It seems
plausible to think that self-aware Proustian nostalgia for the bad is the model
of an inappropriate emotion.
Yet this evaluation might be premature. As we have seen, in self-aware
Proustian nostalgia for the bad, the fictional or aestheticized features of the
memory are part of the intentional object of the emotion. But the more that
the remembered past diverges from reality, the less the emotion's standards of
fittingness might be beholden to the actual past. Such nostalgia, we have seen,
is analogous to emotions directed at artworks. And an emotion directed at an
artwork can be fitting even when the same emotion, directed at what that

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 NOSTALGIA I 649

artwork represents, would be unfitting (compare the feelings that are fittingly
directed at paintings of massacres with those directed at the massacres them
selves). So, if the analogy with emotions about fictions is as strong as
it seems, nostalgia could be protected from unfittingness just where it
looks the most guilty - that is, when it is knowingly directed at an aestheti
cized past.
This potential vindication of self-aware Proustian nostalgia for the bad is
just one surprising result of taking nostalgia more seriously than it has been.
The philosophy of emotions has so far neglected emotions directed at auto
biographical memories.6 What the various permutations of nostalgia suggest
is that an adequate account of past-directed emotions will have to confront
difficult issues raised by dominant reconstructive theories of autobiograph
ical memory - and in particular, by emotions directed at memories midway
between veridicality and confabulation.7

University of Toronto
170 St. George Street
Toronto, ON, Canada MSR 2M8
[email protected]

References

Berntsen, D. 2007. Involuntary autobiographical memories: speculations, findings, and

an attempt to integrate them. In Involuntary Memory, ed. J. Mace, 20-49. Oxford:
Blackwell.

Berntsen, D. 2009. Involuntary Autobiographical Memories: An Introduction to the

Unbidden Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Boym, S. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic.
Brewer, W.F. 1996. What is recollective memory? In Remembering Our Past: Studies in
Autobiographical Memory, ed. D.C. Rubin, 19-66. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

Chase, M. and C. Shaw. 1989. The dimensions of nostalgia. In The Imagined Past:
History and Nostalgia, eds. M. Chase and C. Shaw, 1-17. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
D'Arms, J. and D. Jacobson. 2000. The moralistic fallacy: on the 'appropriateness' of
emotions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61: 65-90.
Davis, F. 1979. Yearning For Yesterday. New York: Free Press.
Debus, D. 2007. Being emotional about the past: on the nature and role of past-directed
emotions. Noûs 41: 758-79.

See Debus 2007. A notable exception to this trend is Goldie 2012.

For discussions about these issues, I am grateful to Ronald de Sousa, Jennifer Whiting,
Jennifer Nagel and Richard Moran. Thanks also to an anonymous referee for several
helpful suggestions.

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650 I ROBERT HOPKINS

Epstein, R. 2004. Consciousness, art, and the brain: lessons from Marcel Proust.
Consciousness and Cognition 13: 213—40.
Goldie, P. 2012. The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Howard, S.A. 2012. Lyrical emotions and sentimentality. Philosophical Quarterly 62:
546-68.

Hutcheon, L. 2000. Irony, nostalgia, and the postmodern. In Methods for the Study of
Literature as Cultural Memory, ed. R. Vervliet, 189-207. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Landy, J. 2004. Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moran, R. 1994. The expression of feeling in imagination. Philosophical Review 103:
75-106.

Proust, M. 1970. Time Regained. Trans. A. Major. London: Chatto and Windus.
Roberts, R.C. 2003. Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Stewart, S. 1993. On Longing. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Tulving, E. 1972. Episodic and semantic memory. In Organization of Memory, eds.
E. Tulving and W. Donaldson, 381—403. New York: Academic Press.
Wollheim, R. 1984. The Thread of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wright, C. 2002. A Short History of the Shadow. New York: Farrar.
Zwicky, J. 2004. Robinson's Crossing. London, ON: Brick Books.

Seeing-in and seeming to see

Robert Hopkins

1. What is it to see some thing or scene, O, in a picture, P?

Gombrichians offer the following answer:

(a) Our experience of ordinary pictures comprises both (i) visual experi
ence of P and (ii) visual experience as of O. (Lopes 2005: 39-40;
Kulvicki 2009: 387-88; Newall 2011: 40)
(b) In such cases, (i) and (ii) occur simultaneously. (Lopes 2005: 31;
Kulvicki 2009: §4; Newall 2011: 25)
(c) Our experience of some pictures, trompe l'oeils, comprises (ii) in the
absence of (i). (Lopes 2005: 39-40; Newall 2011: 26-27)
(d) When pictorial experience comprises both (i) and (ii), we are not
tempted to believe that O is before us. We are tempted to believe
only that P is. (Lopes 2005: 30; Newall 2011: 24-25)
Thus at the heart of seeing-in lies (ii), seeming to see the depicted object. In
the case of ordinary pictures, this is the difference between seeing the marks

Analysis Vol 72 I Number 4 I October 2012 I pp. 650-659 doi:10.1093/analys/ansll9

© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust.
All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]

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