Justin Chen
Phil. Modern Art
TA: Des Hogan
Due 11/11/02

Whose Shoes? The Place of Reality and Truth in Heidegger

Heidegger’s treatment of Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes is central to the development of his theory of the work of art. Up until the passage in which he describes the significance of that particular painting, Heidegger devotes the majority of his text to fleshing out the basic terms that he will use to argue his case—“thingly character,” material, form, equipment, work, and, eventually, art. Yet these words seem to exist in a sort of theoretical vacuum, unrelated to one another in any way—that is, until the onset of Heidegger’s almost reverie-like contemplation of the peasant woman’s shoes and their ability to create their “own world.” Heidegger declares that “the art work lets us know what shoes are in truth” (665), a statement that represents the first unequivocal invocation of a normative concept that has until this point merely been hinted at by phrases such as “thingliness of the thing” and “equipmentality of the equipment.” (1) The wording “in truth” resonates of the Kantian “Ding an sich,” and it instantly begs the notion of some sort of “truer” world that exists beyond what we see in everyday life.

Furthermore, that Heidegger’s flight of fancy is crucial to his and our understanding of the definition of the work of art is clear, for he claims that “it is in this process of the use of equipment that we must actually encounter the character of equipment,” and that “the equipmentality of equipment first genuinely arrives at its appearance through the work and only in the work” (665). That is, Heidegger’s discussion of the shoes in Van Gogh’s painting is crucial for equating the concept of equipmentality with that of the work of art, as well as for fleshing out a more complete picture of the relationships that exist between the various theoretical terms established earlier in the essay. Heidegger then uses this understanding of the fundamental nature of equipmentality that arises from a correct viewing of a work of art to argue that art can hearken back to some detached world or context—“In the vicinity of the work we were suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be” (665).

The concept of the creation of a “world” is central to Heidegger’s theory of art. In the extended descriptive passage that directly follows his elliptical and melodramatic “And yet—” phrase, Heidegger does his best to represent the various rustic images that the painting conjures up within his imagination. The shoes’ “rugged heaviness” represents to him “the accumulated tenacity of [the woman’s] slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind” (664). While this is a very poetic image, clearly much of its substance actually derives from Heidegger’s own extrapolations. Nowhere in the painting is there any indication that the shoes are worn primarily in a field, let alone a wind-swept one. Heidegger’s creativity waxes even greater when he begins to discuss “the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls” and “the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field” (664). Again, within the painting itself lies no indication of lonely paths, ripening grain, or wintry fields. Yet the point seems not to be that Heidegger has been unusually perceptive and discovered secret clues within the painting that point to its true subject, but rather that the painting itself conjures up these images of the “world of the peasant woman” (664).

Indeed, Heidegger argues, “perhaps it is only in the picture that we notice all this about the shoes. The peasant woman, on the other hand, simply wears them” (664). The shoes themselves hold no especial significance, for they are ordinarily only appreciated and used for their basic function as equipment. Instead, it is the artist’s ability to represent the shoes in such a way as to invoke in the viewer these thoughts of the frozen, fertile earth and ultimately “the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death” (664) that represents true art. Such a work, exemplified by Van Gogh’s painting, fully reveals the equipmental nature of the shoes, which in turn allows the “entity [to emerge] into the unconcealedness of its being” (665). That is, argues Heidegger, “in the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work” (666). Again, there is a strong sense that art gives mankind access to some essential quality of matter that is not necessarily always apparent in “real life.”

This is all very interesting, if rather replete with jargon, but what happens if, as Meyer Shapiro has shown, Heidegger missed the boat completely, and the shoes did not belong to a peasant woman at all, but rather (as seems to be the case) were actually just the house shoes of the artist himself? These new facts at first seem disturbing for the philosophical framework being developed, since it then appears that all of the poetic images that Heidegger conjured up were in fact completely fictitious—if the shoes did not actually belong to a peasant woman, how could they have evoked a sense of the wintry field and the “surrounding menace of death”? Must the world of the peasant woman that is created by the interaction between viewer and artwork be rejected as a mere hallucination?

In a way, these concerns point to one of the central difficulties of the Heideggerian philosophy—that is, the “Unverborgenheit” that comes about through a work of art might mean an uncovering (as in the case of Heidegger’s conjuring of the peasant woman’s world), but what is revealed in this uncovering is not necessarily true. That is, the uncovering act could reveal things incorrectly, just as easily as it can reveal things as they “really are.” This difficulty is just what Heidegger runs into in this essay—while his conclusions about the shoes are seductive and internally consistent, they seem to stem from a world that logically does not exist.

The crux of the issue, then, seems to lie in the question of whether the phrase ”things at they truly are” has any real sort of normative value. Despite the fact that “truth” seems to command immediate attention as a philosophically positive claim, it seems difficult to argue that one person’s view of the “truth” is more correct than another’s. In the case of Van Gogh’s painting, we come upon just such a difficulty. Does it really matter what function the shoes actually serve? Could they not very well have belonged to a peasant woman who trudged through the fields on her way home from a hard day’s work? And in fact, contrary to Shapiro, what if the true nature of the shoes had never been known? Would such a revelation have caused Heidegger’s comprehension of their “equipmentality” (and by extension, the workliness of the work) to be any less valid?

Heidegger himself seems to address this concern very directly in his discussion of C.F. Meyer’s poem, “Roman Fountain.” He implies that the “truth” revealed by the work of art does not necessarily have to correspond to some notion of truth in the real world—“this is neither a poetic painting of a fountain actually present nor a reproduction of the general essence of a Roman fountain” (667). Rather, the work of art is unique in that it creates its own separate world. By implication, then, it does not really matter that the shoes Heidegger takes such pains to elucidate do not belong to a peasant woman at all. Instead, the importance of the art lies in its ability to transport the viewer elsewhere—to create an entire world surrounding the work’s subject that is both removed and also perfectly self-contained. Heidegger praises the Greek temple, for instance, by saying that by “standing there, [it] opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back again on earth, which itself only thus emerges as native ground” (671). For Heidegger, Van Gogh’s shoes have this world-establishing quality because they necessarily imply a separate context that is also familiar to the viewer and reestablishes the work of art in the world.

While this line of reasoning seems to save Heidegger’s essay from Shapiro’s accusations of factual misinterpretation, it also raises deeper questions about Heidegger’s fundamental philosophy of art, for a theory that allows every interpretation of a work to be equally valid does not in the end lay claim to any real notion of truth as it exists separate from the realm of experience. If, for example, another critic had been inspired by Van Gogh’s painting to describe the world of the painter himself—his heavy trudge across the carpet to the easel, the silent call of the palette, its quiet gift of swirling colors and inspiration—Heidegger’s theory would not be able to suggest that this alternate world which is created, despite its technically greater accuracy, is any more valid than the description of the peasant woman seen in the essay. To put it more generally, if “art is truth setting itself to work” (668), how are we to distinguish between the various interpretations of a particular artwork and find the one that is “true”?

Here we cannot turn to Heidegger’s assertion that “the work lets earth be an earth,” where “earth, self-dependent, is effortless and untiring” (674), since multiple interpretations of a work could ostensibly let “earth be an earth”—there seems to be something universally familiar about understanding the equipmentality of a pair of shoes, whether they are described in the context of the wheat fields or the garret. The very resistance to cooptation that characterizes the earth as an embracing context prevents it from also being used as a normalizing feature. It appears, then, that the difficulty with Heidegger’s theory is that as the product of an understanding of “truth” as an uncovering allows for the creation of worlds which, while beautiful and self-contained, are also totally discrete and commensurable. That is, the beauty of Meyer’s perfectly contained fountain is purchased at the price of reality—the fountain itself as described in the poem does not exist anywhere “in truth.”

Heidegger himself is fully prepared to admit this, as evidenced by his rejection of the “view that art is an imitation and depiction of reality” as “fortunately obsolete.” Instead of being “the reproduction of some particular entity that happens to be present at any given time,” he argues, the work is “the reproduction of the thing’s general essence” (666). Thus, Meyer’s “Roman Fountain” can properly be termed a work of art even though it does not correspond to reality, so long as it manages to convey the essence of a fountain. We must then also accept that Heidegger’s seemingly faulty interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting is nevertheless valid, simply because it is inspired by the essential nature of shoes even though it does not correspond in any practical way with reality.

The problem with all this is that Heidegger’s philosophy leaves no room for the regulative component of truth that would seek to unify the various worlds that are set up by the interaction between viewer and art. The potential for multiple self-contained and independent interpretations of a work of art, as outlined above, necessarily leads to the possibility of a totalitarian art theory in which the whole precedes and dictates the relations of the parts. The imagined world of the peasant woman, in its perfectly insular non-existence, is seen as evidence for the painting’s status as an artwork (even though it has no bearing on reality), and this establishment then gives life and affirmation to the painting’s other components. Thus, Heidegger’s philosophy raises the grim specter of ideology, of squeezing things into a form and imagining that there is no need to provide any sort of justification for that form. Without the intervention of an absolute feature, such as truth (which Heidegger rejects as obsolete), there is no way to escape these totalizing views, which automatically suggest the dangers of Nazi art and theoretical arrogance.

Shapiro’s criticism, then, does not present any fundamental challenges to the structural integrity of Heidegger’s artistic philosophy, since Heidegger himself admits that correspondence to the “real world” is not a necessary consideration. Rather, he argues, the most important characteristic of the work of art is its ability to create an independent world separate from and yet somehow grounded by the reality of the earth. Yet Shapiro’s observation about Van Gogh’s painting does invite deeper reflection about the overall value of a philosophy that lacks any regulatory feature for uniting or in some way equating the multitude of worlds that could potentially be created by a single work of art. We have looked at two interpretations of Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes, one of which is based on reality and one of which is not. Unfortunately, Heidegger’s philosophy provides very little in the way of deciding between the alternative possibilities. It is clear that if modern art is to avoid the totalizing ideologies that have caused critics such as Robert Jan van Pelt to declare a loss of trust in the world and the triumph of nihilism, it must resist this Heideggerian tendency toward isolation and ideology.

Word Count: 2,224.

1) Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Philosophies of Art & Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 1964.