The Ancients' Ironic Nostalgia

All is said, and we come too late after more than seven thousand years of men thinking', wrote La Bruyère at the beginning of Les Caractères (1688). 1 The vacuity of the present, the fullness of the past, the writer's apparent recognition that he cannot be an author but only repeat, or glean, fragments from antiquity -all these traits mark La Bruyère, like his fellow Ancients, as nostalgic.By remarkable coincidence, at the moment Les Caractères appeared in Paris, the term nostalgia was created by an obscure Swiss physician, Johannes Hofer.Hofer's book, Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe appeared in Basel.Homesickness, or Heimweh, was a malady well known in popular culture, but it had previously not been given medical recognition until Hofer described it as a disease of the imagination. 2Forming the word from the Greek nostos and algos ('return' or 'travel' and 'pain'), Hofer emphasized the characteristic symptoms of the victims he had seen but also gave a 'Greek', and therefore scientifically dignified, translation of the Swiss folk name for the condition. 3 It seems strange that the longing to return to a lost home, a longing that mobilizes memory and imagination, should have entered intellectual history at the very moment when Europe saw writers in significant numbers take up their quills to extol the glories of ancient civilization and its literary culture.The Ancients of the Quarrel -Boileau, La Bruyère, Huet, Bouhours, the Daciers, Longepierre -may indeed, according to a very influential recent critic, have won the Quarrel. 4 Is there anything useful in the concept of 'nostalgia' that can contribute to understanding the Quarrel and its outcome?Can an understanding of this term allow us to situate early-modern culture with respect to the culture of the early twenty-first century, a postmodern or post-postmodern one?The longing for the past might not have received such rapid recognition if Hofer had not had an ear for euphonious names.He considered using the alternative philopatridomania.The name he chose suffered the fate of many medical, and particularly, psychological terms.Its use spread outside of the original medical context and its meaning became broader and looser.'Its success has, in the end

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Byzantine Studies and History · Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy

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