The world in our experience has both spatial and temporal quality. For Kant, space and time could not have been derived from experience because they are the condi- tions of experience: space and time are a priori to experience. Thus, “time is a nec- essary representation that grounds all intuition” (Kant 1787/1956, 78). Underlying this conceptualization is the acceptance of the Cartesian division of body and mind, where the former has spatial attributes. In the preceding sections, I show – herein following the transactional approaches of Mead and Whitehead – that the distant object and the physical object persisting in time emerge from and are qualities of occasions that also have subjective form (experience). This is an immediate result of the extended nature of events, whereby events are actual because of properties that manifest themselves as spatial relations (Whitehead 1919). The very notion of object permanence, which is permanence over time, signals that the question of time in experience is related to the permanent object in and of experience.
In the genetic epistemology underlying Piagetian psychology, some aspects of the Kantian and Cartesian presuppositions are retained, creating logical contradic- tions internal to the theory. Most fundamentally, this psychology presupposes space even though conceptions thereof are the results of experience. Thus, the notion of space is said to be the result of a “coordination of changes of positions” (Piaget 1970, 59). But positions can only change if space is presupposed. Similarly, time is
the result of a “coordination of movements or speeds” (59), which is a conception that presupposes a permanent object that remains the same in displacement and thus has speed as a quality. Piaget follows Isaac Newton and Immanuel Kant in accept- ing that space can be considered independently of the objects it contains, and, thereby accepting Cartesian notions: pure geometry as the science of independent space. He differs in taking up from science the idea of the irreversibility of time.
Time, because of its ties to speed, is a function of its contents, which implies that it is “not only a physical reality but also a psychological reality” (60). Piaget distin- guishes his approach from Newton and Kant in a third point, which has conse- quences for his psychology, but consequences that turn out to be fallacious. He assumes that humans apperceive a whole geometric figure in an instant and as a whole, but that we cannot apperceive duration because at its end, the beginning can- not be perceived. The first part of this assumption was shown to be false in Chap. 2, where the notion of the percipient event is introduced; and the second part, which presupposes a point-like approach to time, makes no sense in the context of the social quality of sequential phases of events that include the infant’s initiations that have consequences for how it feels (e.g. crying and well being when the giraffe-toy is returned to its hands). It is false in the face of the analyses that show how we experience passage from immanent past to immanent future, a phenomenon referred to as specious present.
As soon as we move from the ontology of things to the ontology of events, our conclusions are different. This is so because “the relation of extension … exhibits events as involving the becomingness of nature – its passage or creative advance – by means of its properties which issue in temporal relations” (Whitehead 1919, 61).
The break in the act that leads to the permanent object, as seen in the preceding section, is the same break that also leads to the sense of time. If there is no perma- nent object, then there cannot be a Newtonian-Cartesian sense of motion, which presupposes a permanent object that is displaced or displaces itself in a fixed space.
Even change, as we commonly understand it, requires the sense of a permanent object – most fundamentally, the earth as unmoving ground (Husserl 1940) – that appears differently in situations related by succession.
In Chap. 3, a description is provided for the relation between antecedent phases of events that make for the conditions of those phases events that succeed them. The event is a social phenomenon, involving different individuals doing their parts to make the event happen. In this chapter, for example, I show how infants participate in producing social acts as their part of the joint work initiates other phases in recur- rently occurring successions of evental phases. Thus, the infant cries or drops the toy, and the mother returns it into the hands of the child; or the infant gazes in the direction of the mother, gazes at the distant objects, and the mother pushes the objects up close (which does not change their nature as distant objects). The active kittens developed a sense of the distant object, which manifests itself in their choice of the less-steep incline for a descent or a blinking in the eyes when a fist quickly approaches their face. Passive kittens did not exhibit this behavior, which supports the hypothesis that the distant object does not exist for them. But even though we observe recurrent behavior in the {organism | environment} unit, we must not think
that participating in the recurrent production of evental succession means that there is a sense of time. Before that, and although “one specious present or duration merges in another through absence of change and effort, and balanced attitudes answer to these situations, the pulses of existence will succeed one another without permanence, identity, or thinghood” (Mead 1938, 329, emphasis added). Motion cannot be the passage of things until the thing is recognized as permanent object.
We note above that object permanence is the result of perceived recurrences of successive occasions – i.e. (micro-, phases of) events. Such recurrences are charac- teristics, recognition that precisely is the object. Thus, “the awareness of an object as some factor not sharing in the passage of nature is what I call ‘recognition’”
(Whitehead 1920, 143). The permanent object is an abstraction (character) that serves as link between different events (situations). Although the active kitten’s motion bring it into contact with the edge or the lesser slope, it will not have a merg- ing of the remembered contents of a percipient event before approaching the feature with the contents of the current percipient event; it will not have the sense of an object in or feature of the environment as having permanent character in the face of its own changing experiences as a consequence of its motion. Instead, in the case of the animal or the infant described above, there is an adjustment to distances and to successive phases of the social act, which, to the reflective observer (i.e. scientist) precisely constitutes such a permanent object. Prior to the permanent object or per- manent character (e.g. color), there cannot be sameness even though there are habit- ual adjustments in different situations. Such characters and objects, before being permanent, pass; they are “happening, coming into being and going out” (Mead 1938, 331) but do not presuppose the passage of permanent objects.
Important for thinking about learning environments is the sense of time that we have in and as part of experience. When wrapped up in something very interesting, like the fourth- and fifth-grade students I studied during their participation in an engineering curriculum, the sense of time is gone. It is not just that time flies: all sense of time may disappear. The phenomenon also exists during meditation and Zen experience, both of which are characterized by the absence of a making present again – i.e. representing – the present. We have related experiences when we are wrapped up in an intense conversation while driving along on a trip only to come to a sudden realization that we do not remember anything about the environment, whether we passed other vehicles, pedestrians, or cyclists, whether there were any special features in the environment, and so on. In such situations, we are but events among other events without conscious awareness as a cogredient. Here, too, the absence of the permanent object and the absence of time go together.
This last point has consequences for how cultural psychologists of education think about their phenomena, such as about learning from reflection in/on action or learning in/from experience. To learn from some experience, this experience has to be present even though it is past. It has to have the form of “an experience” (Dewey 1934/2008), which has a definite beginning and ending. For this reason, an experi- ence can be had only after the fact. An experience, which is the presence of a past experience as an object of current reflective experience, implies the temporal delay between “Being” (-as-event) [Ger. Sein] and the reflective object, a thing, which
(phenomenological) philosophers designate by the term “beings” [Ger. Seiendes].
Conscious awareness thus implies the existence of a distant object permanent across time. Near the end of his life, Vygotsky had come to see in consciousness a more pressing topic for psychology than that of thinking. In his own work, he only got “to the threshold of a problem that is broader, more profound, and still more extraordi- nary than the problem of thinking … to consciousness” (Vygotsky 1987, 285). In an event-oriented transactional approach, consciousness has to be theorized as event rather than as a thing or as the presence of things in awareness. We do not know where the investigation of the problem would have led Vygotsky, but we do know – from the quotations on the last page of his book – that he was taking up some ideas from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. These authors defined consciousness in even- tal terms: “Consciousness never can be anything else but conscious Being, and the Being of humans is their real life process” (Marx and Engels 1978, 26). Although Being is an event, it tends to be treated as a thing. To prevent such treatment, we may resort to the expression Being-event or being-as-event [bytie-sobytie], thereby man- ifesting the need to mark the nature of Being as something alive (Bakhtin 1993).
Thus, consciousness being conscious Being, Being-as-event, we arrive at conscious- ness itself as event. Consciousness is not a thing, not a state, but an event cogredient in the passage that it co-constitutes. It is part of, and reflects, the real life process of human beings.