Manufacturing Nostalgia: Paula Sweeney on Longing for How Life Once Felt

  Woman in Front of the Setting Sun, by Caspar David Friedrich (1818), via Wikimedia Commons

Think of a time in your life when the world seemed riven with golden possibility. Music flowed. Optimism surged. Bright energy fizzed in the air.

Everyone you knew was alive and nearby. You could go out and do whatever you liked. Chat in the pub for hours. Stroll along the river. Laze about in each other’s front rooms.

The days seemed endless. The nights, too…

What a contrast to the present: those good old days, when things were simpler, freer, more hopeful, more true.

If my aim with these opening sentences has been successful, then right now you may be experiencing a small feeling of nostalgia.

I’ve pressed play on the movie of your life, and produced a montage of wistfulness and longing: sepia-drenched images of past glories flicker in your mind, soundtracked by an old, slow song.

O youth! O innocence! What made those times disappear? Will we ever get them back?

Maybe now I’m going a bit far, but you get the general idea. I’m inviting you to rhapsodize the past at the expense of the present – and for the philosopher Paula Sweeney, this is a key example of how nostalgia can be manufactured.

‘Sensory’ and ‘sentient’ routes to nostalgia

In her 2020 paper Nostalgia Reconsidered, Sweeney distinguishes two routes to nostalgia: ‘sensory’ and ‘sentient’. The sensory route is when nostalgia washes over us without warning, independently of our will, arising from some kind of sensory trigger.

A certain scent, sound, or sight carries us off into memory: round the headland on a coastal walk I glimpse an expanse of beach, wind-whipped waves smashing into cliffs, gulls wheeling overhead – and suddenly I am a child once more, peeking out from a waterproofed hood on a rainy seaside holiday, hushed by the cobalt scene before me.

This kind of nostalgia is unpredictable and uncontrolled. The world is a jumble of cues that hurl us down memory lanes, without the input of our wills.

But not all nostalgia is like this: nostalgia can also be consciously invoked. As with how I opened this article, people can invite us to reflect on how times have changed. They can present us with a bittersweet banquet of past images, figures, events, values...

This kind of ‘sentient’ nostalgia is often motivated, Sweeney notes. Invoking nostalgia produces an emotional energy that can then be harnessed as a force for action, and those doing the harnessing aren’t always noble in intent.

Marketers exploit nostalgia to sell retro products and experiences: When did the world get so complicated! Here, enjoy a little slice of a simpler time.

Perhaps more worryingly, politicians use it to acquire power: Remember how good things used to be? I will restore your former glories.

An interesting feature of sentient nostalgia, Sweeney observes, is that it can move us even if we didn’t personally live through the past that’s being evoked.

Imagine your parents’ homeland was destroyed by war, for example. They raised you in a new country but talked often of their former lives, sculpting temples of memory in your imagination. You might feel nostalgic for a home you never had, longing for a lost childhood that should have been yours, but never will be.

If we can feel nostalgic for experiences we’ve never actually had, however, then doesn’t that raise questions about the nature of nostalgia itself?

If not actual events of the past, then what are we really longing for?

Nostalgia is not a desire to re-live the past, but simply an emotional response to change

We tend to think of nostalgia as past-directed, as tied to a particular memory or cluster of memories, and as the longing to return to that former time or place in our minds that – crucially – is now irretrievable. On this characterization, the wistful pang of nostalgia arises from realizing that we can never get those times back.

But Sweeney thinks this conventional picture of nostalgia doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The object of nostalgia is not the actual history of past times or places, she suggests, but the feelings we’ve come to associate with those times and places.

Yearning to literally re-experience the past is actually nonsensical, she points out.

Say I feel nostalgia for a particular Christmas morning from childhood. What do I really feel wistful about here? Do I wish to be transported back to that exact time and place?

Let’s play that out. Say I’m thrown back in time and wake up to snow outside, twinkling lights on the street, and presents from Santa Claus under the tree. Would this resolve my feelings of nostalgia?

Well, if I’m re-living it as my adult self, then that meta-awareness would impact my consciousness in such a way that I wouldn’t really be re-experiencing the feelings of childhood at all. Perhaps it would actually make me feel more nostalgic than ever: so near yet so far.

So maybe it’s that I want to experience it all again as a child, for the first time, without the knowledge that I’m re-living it.

But then what would be the difference between that and my current situation? As Sweeney observes,

a re-experiencing of the original event in exactly its original form would be indistinguishable from the event itself with the inevitable outcome that we are left only with the original event.

If nostalgia were just a desire to re-experience the past, then it would rest on an impossible demand. We can’t re-experience an event for the first time, because if it was genuinely like the first time then it wouldn’t be a re-experience.

To rescue the coherence of nostalgia here, Sweeney suggests we should see it not as the desire to re-experience the past but simply as an emotional response to change.

What I’m really wistful about, Sweeney thinks, is not that I lack the ability to time travel and re-live my life; what I’m truly longing for is the unique, complicated emotional mix of excited-happy-fearful that those childhood Christmas mornings gave me, the feelings of innocence and wonder and awe. That’s what I miss: how I used to feel.

When we construe it like this, Sweeney notes, we see that

nostalgia is not to be thought of as an irrational desire to re-experience but as a rational desire to take a break from the experiences of the present and to seek refuge in previously felt emotions.

And, importantly, if nostalgia is a longing for previously felt emotions rather than previously lived experiences, this means its target is not as irretrievable as we might initially think.

As Sweeney puts it:

the emotional responses experienced in one’s past are not as obviously irretrievable as the events of one’s past are.

I can’t go back to my childhood Christmas mornings, but to prevent myself from becoming forever lost in nostalgia perhaps there are things that I could do, now and in future, that could make me feel once more as a child does on Christmas morning.

At the very least, there will be politicians and marketers who might promise me that such emotional restoration is possible.

Can we really hope to reproduce previously felt emotions?

But perhaps we might wonder: are past emotions, tied up as they are with past people, places, and times, really replicable as we move through life? Can the same texture of feeling really be created? Isn’t there something irretrievable about how I felt on Christmas morning?

Maybe there is a certain openness and possibility to youth that cannot be replicated as branching futures collapse into the narrow rivulet of the past.

How could we ever feel the same as we did back then, when a dense ball of dreams has unraveled to leave in its wake only a loose, fraying thread of memory?

Perhaps there is a purity of feeling in childhood that adulthood can only ever imitate, so diluted does happiness become, as we move through life, with various sadnesses and longings and fears.

This may be one of the many perks of spending time with children: one makes contact with emotions undiluted by time. We get to witness, and in some sense re-experience, feelings we suspected were no longer ours to have.

A more positive spin on this is that aging lends depth to our emotions. Any happiness we have now, for instance, occurs within the context of prior losses, failures, and knowledge of impermanence. That doesn’t necessarily dilute or diminish our joy, so much as grant it a new, perhaps enriching, dimension.

Who’s promising to restore our past?

Whatever we conclude about our ability to recover past emotions, Sweeney’s point is simply that the irretrievability of past events doesn’t by itself explain what nostalgia is or why it moves us. Rather than a desire to recover the actual happenings of the past, Sweeney suggests nostalgia is primarily about recalling prior feelings.

To feel young again! To feel free! To have your whole life ahead of you, full of power and possibility!

Whether or not those feelings can ever truly be revived, it’s little wonder that we are often seduced by the promise that they could be.

We know it’s not possible to recreate life exactly as it was; the animating force of nostalgia is the wish to recapture how life felt, to break from the present to find solace in the sanctuary of the past.

If someone vows to actually restore us to this golden past, however, and we feel stirrings of nostalgia when they do so, then it’s probably worth considering the motives of this person, whether they could possibly deliver on their promise, and what they might want from us in return.

What do you make of Sweeney’s analysis?

• Do you think her distinction between ‘sensory’ and ‘sentient’ nostalgia is useful?
• Do you agree that nostalgia is primarily about recalling prior feelings, rather than wishing to re-live previous events?
• Do you think it’s possible to feel nostalgia for a past we didn’t personally experience?
• Where in society do you see nostalgia being used to motivate certain actions?
• How has nostalgia played a role in your life? Do you often get lost in the past? Or does the past not feature much in your present?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related Philosophy Breaks:

• Galen Strawson: Our Lives Are Not Stories
• Heidegger: We Are Time Unfolding (and our Time is Finite)
• Thich Nhat Hanh on Healing the Wounds of the Past
• Kierkegaard: Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards, But It Must Be Lived Forwards
• Michael Cholbi on Grief, Identity Crisis, and What We Learn from Loss
• Mono No Aware: Beauty and Impermanence in Japanese Philosophy
• Finding Rapture in the Humdrum: Cultivating Wonder for Everyday Life

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