Philip Y. Kao PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

It will be useful now to venture into a discussion of time, and how certain philosophical
approaches can help us re-examine various caregiving practices and regimes. The issue
of time, as a philosophical concept, and not necessarily an emic conception of time as
being something that one is up against, is rarely articulated or apprehended in a longterm
care facility. Time and the temporal nature of human experience, and how this
experience is itself experienced by older and ageing residents, receive very little direct
attention. It is often said that old age is a foreign country, especially for young people
who often fumble to access its customs, language and ethos. Part of the problem,
especially in the western context of a long-term care facility, lies with the fact that our
everyday metaphysics presupposes that persons live through time, rather than in time.
Do human lives take place through or in time? Is there any difference? The philosopher
Henri Bergson argued for a philosophy of mobility, of becoming and change, enabling
time to be rethought independently of any spatial presupposition. Bergson argues that
science treats time as a succession of states unfolding before a pre-existing space. When
we count the number of things like sheep, houses over a landscape, or the number of
years someone has lived, we are dealing with a pre-imagined horizon of space. But what
is this space?
Before diving any further into Bergson, a few words on the anthropological treatment of
time, with a nod towards phenomenology, will help orientate the reader. Edmund
Husserl’s treatment of time, and more specifically his postulation of internal time
consciousness, deals with how time and the experience of time appear to human
consciousness (Husserl 1966). For Husserl and those aligned with phenomenology, even
non-temporal objects presuppose time. In Tacoma Pastures, the issue is not that ageing
is experienced as something spatial, but that ageing becomes a spatial project. In Alfred
Gell’s treatment of time, the subjectivity of time (A-series) connotes the way that events
and change are indexed to a tensed existence, involving the past, present, and future
(Gell 1992). In contrast to this, Gell draws from Husserl’s ‘psychology of phenomenology’
in order to aid his discussion of B-series time. B-series time orders events in accordance
with what comes ‘before’ and what comes ‘after’; B-series may be the ‘real’ and more
‘scientific’ time, but it latches itself to A-series time, thus enabling human perception. We
cannot directly access B-series time, because it is untensed, and “[…] because all our
mental life, our experiences, beliefs, expectations, etc. are themselves datable events,
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