Abstract

Dear old things have a warm and bittersweet taste that is distinct from other tastes related to oldness like cold antiquity or sweet-and-sour recollections. This hitherto unnamed taste ought to be called nostalgia, because nostalgia today means an affectionate feeling for the past felt about a thing at hand, as its definitions in recent English dictionaries show. Nostalgia as defined above is an agreeable feeling conveyed through the senses. Since it is equivalent to what aesthetics has called the aesthetic or an aesthetic category, nostalgia deserves a due place in the discussion of aesthetics. Recognition of nostalgia as a theme of aesthetics is expected to contribute much to this discipline. Its primary contribution lies in aesthetic's enlarged scope, because our knowledge of feeling and perception advances through it. Its secondary benefits include encouraged specialized investigations into the expression of nostalgia in works of art and avoided political exploitation of nostalgia by revealing the fictitious character of the "past"