The Child in the World: Embodiment, Time, and Language in Early Childhood

6. Because We Are the Upsurge of Time: Toward a Genetic Phenomenology of Lived Time

S I X Because We Are the Upsurge of Time Toward a Genetic Phenomenology of Lived Time CLOCK TIME AND LIVED TIME Einstein’s Question At a conference in Davos during the late 1920s, Albert Einstein posed a set of questions to the philosophers and psychologists who were present: “Is our intuitive grasp of time primitive or derived? Is it identical with our intuitive grasp of velocity?” Jean Piaget, who was in the audience, heard the questions and set out to investigate how children understand time (1970, ix). He wanted to reply to Einstein by contributing data about the developmental unfolding of the child’s conception of time. In the following years, he experimented in his laboratory with children’s grasp of motion, sequencing, succession, simultaneity, and synchronization, and he also interviewed children about the concept of age.1 Piaget devised a set of ingenious experiments and interviews to test children’s understanding of synchronization and temporal duration (1970). In his laboratory he constructed two parallel tracks on which two toy snails (Yellow and Blue) could be moved forward, their velocity (speed) and stopping points controlled by the experimenter. Both snails started at the same point and time, moving at different but continuous velocities, which meant that Blue stopped further down the track (D1) than Yellow (C2). When Piaget asked the younger children if the snails stopped at the same time (“before or after lunch”), they insisted that 127 Yellow had stopped first because Blue “went on longer because it was further” (87). Even when he made Yellow move from B1 to C1 while Blue was already stopped at D1, the children still insisted that Yellow had stopped before Blue because Blue “went on longer.” The children obviously understood time as a function of spatiality and insisted that something that covered more ground also must have taken longer to get there. The younger children equated time and space, understood duration as the distance traversed, saw time as tied to specific events and locations , and experienced it as discontinuous. After concluding his research in the 1940s, Piaget (1970) reported his findings as a reply to Einstein’s questions. Here is a summary of the main points: 1. Children initially confuse the temporal order with the spatial order and duration with the path traversed. In the beginning, time is localized and discontinuous. 2. The concept of time is not given to primitive intuition but needs to be constructed during childhood through an operational synthesis by which the child abstracts time from its qualitative context. 3. Children’s conceptual understanding of abstract and uniform time coincides with their conceptual understanding of abstract and uniform velocity (which means that velocity, as well, is not intuitively grasped by all human beings but derived). 4. When children achieve concrete operational thinking in middle childhood (they “decenter,” that is, can hold more than one observation in mind, and they can reverse their thinking process), time becomes homogenous and continuous, even on the qualitative plane. Without “operational time,” time remains discontinuous and local. Piaget gives us the impression that in the course of “normal development ” all children achieve operational time and set aside the more primitive “egocentric” time of their earlier years. The achievement of an abstract , homogenous, continuous time that is valid for all locations, all people, and forever is, according to Piaget, the inevitable trajectory of child development. Beginning with Piaget’s own research and writing, in this chapter we will unearth children’s experiences of lived time, which often resist and undermine operational time. We will look at the different ways the present , the future, and the past come to children and challenge Piaget’s view that the homogenous and continuous time of physics rules the temporal understanding of adult human beings. 128 CHAPTER SIX Lived Time and the Alphabet When we look at cultural time concepts we find that time, as it is lived by human beings, is not homogenous: it flows differently in different places. As Eliade (1954) has shown, most indigenous peoples inhabit a cyclical, mythical time that is regenerated, together with the life force of the culture, through recurring ritual acts. Here time is experienced not as a line going from past to present but as a circle in which the past returns eternally, and the future cycles backward into a mythical present . Time is experienced in a dynamic interchange with the flow of spatial presences. Sunlight and...