A note on nostalgia. The part emotions play in creating identity and meaning.

Listening to the music of The Advisory Circle has been a fascinating experience for me. It’s a style of music which produces, quite deliberately, a profound sense of nostalgia. But what is nostalgia all about?

I strongly believe that emotions are much more than merely feelings. An emotional experience, I believe, contains a set of information about both who we are and what the world is about.

For example, if someone ate all the biscuits in my biscuit tin, I may experience a feeling equating itself to that of anger or annoyance. That emotion contains a direction; it is about a particular thing, and therefore my consciousness becomes ‘about’ the thing towards which I feel an emotion.

Secondly, that emotion is experienced because my mind equates the event to certain values- it expresses the emotion of anger when it determines that a feeling of anger is appropriate to a situation. Further, this means that eliciting one emotion over another means that I have decided what the situation means, or is about. In this way, when I have feelings, I impute certain values into the world, or schematize my experience of the world onto a certain structure of meaning.

In this way, I believe that emotions are the source of our belief in any meaning of life which we take to be the case. Life may have meaning, or it may not, that is beside the point, our emotions, in this case, don’t tell us how the world is, they tell us how we think and feel the world is, or how it is to us.

But what of the particular emotion we call nostalgia? I believe that the question of nostalgia is connected deeply to the question of identity.

Who we are is, in part, a matter of the experiences we have had throughout our lives. Whether that is entirely who we are is another debate, and not relevant here. But it is undeniable that it is partly true, at the very least, that our experiences form us as individuals.

One further point is that those experiences are a matter of continuity; what order they have happened in our lives matters to us because they formed who we were at that particular point in time, and they would have had a different effect on us, had those experiences happened at different points in time.

Now, when I experience a feeling of nostalgia, I feel an emotional connection to a prior moment in my life or culture. It can be a happy feeling, or a lachrymal one, usually it’s a mixture of the two; nostalgia is a happy enough emotion, but it does have a flavor of longingness about it.

This is an important element to consider. When we experience nostalgia, we feel a need to relive a certain moment in our life, or at least feel a fondness for it.

This makes the memory of a certain point in our life feel more prominent to us, solidifying it with greater prominence as an aspect of who we are.

When a memory or experience presses on our mind with such emotional imperative, it directs our actions in congruence with how that emotion makes us feel, or, to put it more exactly, in congruence with the feeling which accompanies that emotion. This means that the feeling of the emotion of nostalgia forms us retrospectively, by giving greater prominence to some memories more than others, but it is also retroactive in that our perspectival experience of the past informs our future direction in life.

The metaphysical implications of emotions become obvious here- our emotions are constitutive of our existential occupation of, and movement through a space in time, and our life.

The mind, we are all too aware, is prone to confabulate, we misremember moments of the past, and many other such details. Our memory, despite its incontrovertible role in the formation and development of our identity, finds its shortcoming in its inevitable fallibility.

Nostalgia, I posit, is the truly solidifying element in crystallizing our identities. Memories change, but feelings are consistent. I do not mean that our feelings about a certain thing remain the same, but that nostalgia always feels like nostalgia, happiness always feels like happiness, anger always feels like anger.

A memory of the past needs not be consistent with the facts of the past to be formative of our identity; the emotion merely needs to be consistent with the memory, and since the emotion must inherently be partly what characterizes that memory, it (the emotion) therefore will intrinsically be consistent with it (the memory) because it was intrinsically generative of the experiential content of the memory.

We will always experience nostalgia about certain things. These things, on a metaphysical level, are for the most part arbitrary. What matters is that we have the feeling of nostalgia about something. In this way, we experience the correct emotions to propositionally assert meanings veridical to our selfhood within our memories, regardless of their correctness; but also to who we are at any moment in time. The role of nostalgia binds our bundle of nebulous memories in such a way that identity coheres.

We experience a longing for the past because we are inherently driven to construct ourselves from our memories. This shows that we are, at least in part, our memories exactly because we are inherently disposed to make ourselves from them.

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