Human experience of space develops earlier than and grounds the sense of time

Evidence

That perception and the mastery of space and time are tightly linked to one another is incontestable. Yet if these categories count for Kant as given a priori, for Durkheim they appear as a historically and culturally variable social construct, although one individuals in any given society cannot avoid. In what follows I hold that, with respect to the modernization process, space and time do not have the same status. It is incontestable that the experience of space has both phylogenetic and ontogenetic priority over the experience of time. If the former more strongly suggests a Kantian a priori, the latter displays in far greater measure the characteristics of sociohistorical variability. Ontogenetically there can hardly be any doubt that the sense of space and the spatial orientation of the child develop much earlier than the sense of time. In virtue of the force of gravity and the physical order of the sense organs and limbs, the distinctions between above and below and between in front of and behind are directly embodied (due to the symmetrical construction of the body, the difference between right and left is, in contrast, an artificial synthetic achievement that children learn much later and sometimes master only incompletely). Over against the primary spatial distinctions, temporal orientations, i.e., the capacity to estimate temporal distances or the duration of events, are essentially more complicated and abstract and are first learned much later. The sense of time is only fully developed in the period of adolescence. Phylogenetically the priority of space lies in the fact that perceptions and concepts of time develop in accordance with changes in spatial qualities: the locally observable differences between day and night and between the seasons, along with the natural and social rhythms connected to these, are the starting points for the determination of time and the development of a temporal vocabulary. Thus in cultural development time is always in the first place local time, determined by the position of the sun and the seasonal development of nature at a specific location. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 141

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that the spatial sense of right-versus-left is an ‘artificial synthetic achievement’ children master late is a striking empirical assertion worth verifying against developmental psychology.
• XREF: Connects to Durkheim’s social construction of categories (already highlighted in prior books) and to the sociology-of-knowledge literature. — connects to: Space adds nothing to being but is continuously spatialized through the For-itself’s ekstatic temporalization — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 590

Broader Connections

• Space adds nothing to being but is continuously spatialized through the For-itself’s ekstatic temporalization #corroborates (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 590