Skaitījums un iedalījums: kas kuram pakārtots
Authors:   Latvijas Universitāte, Gediņa Linda 
Published: May 2022

It seems obvious that numbers are abstractions. That we primarily experience the world as a lifeworld, hence, as “before”, “after”, “before”, “with”. That is why I chose to talk about the division of space through the work of art, with time playing a role. The subject matter is quantum as a matter of synthetically a priori description and philosophically legitimate justification, I will express it in the language of Heidegger’s hermeneutic-phenomenological philosophy: existence is time, where time is understood in the sense of having “already been” (bewandt) – that is, experienced and therefore understood, and because of this understanding or significance involved in the world-worldly relations of “before-then-after”. Accordingly, the theme defined by Heidegger’s ontology as the ontology of Western Christian cultural anthropology is: the primary mode of time is existential lived time. That means to speak of time as of “already was” and in terms of a certain purposiveness. Is it to speak of death? So, regarding art it is very difficult to say something new when everything has already been said and already has been, and hence, for the most part, boring. What remains: repetition? a photographic aesthetic? the undermining of the learned bond between signature and image? – thus redefining the meaning and understanding/interpretation of perceptual metaphoricity. By making it emphatically one’s own, adapting it to one’s own understanding and environment, without trying to preserve the [possible] original meaning, sense, and reason. The possibility of art to remain genius art is the perspective of the new vision. What makes something interesting is the way in which it is presented; even the most familiar. – And isn’t it? – Plagiarism is the negative extreme of this thesis. Can such repetition and subversion be seen as worthy of the monkey described by Kandinsky: the monkey turns the pages of the book as he bends over it and looks absorbed in his reading, “but the movements have no inner meaning”. There is also a similarity with Heidegger’s description of the supposed experience of death: you understand something by judging how it happens to another, e.g., how it looks like. Sensitivity to one’s surroundings, inner experience, does not much distinguish a human being from an animal. Nor are there states of feeling, in which man can approach the experience of death. For Heidegger, one of the states closest to death is fear, when participatory engagement with the world closes, but so is boredom (Langeweile). Boredom often comes from too much of the world, satiety. Hence, the temporal role of the work of art, or its effect on spatial division – opening and preserving the space of the individual’s performative freedom and possibilities for successful involving action – would also be to prevent boredom, thus preserving, opening up different ways of accessing the world and distancing death – the closing of the world to human participation, just as in fear. The existential-ontological aspects of performative freedom would then be characterized, as follows: one should ask about the place of morality, meaning, consciousness and spirit, as well as possibility (modality) in the surroundings allowed by the various existing explanations and the behaviour, action, environmental organization. The role of modalities should be particularly emphasized, assuming that possibilities are extensions of actual spatial events, or in other terminology, places of [static location], which transgress the limits of behaviouristics and include imagination, morality, art, meanings of meaning as equivalent components of spatial formation, thereby negating naturalism in the mechanistic sense.