  The fact that Heidegger’s first mention of Van Gogh is framed by these two ways of undermining our usual sense of the obviousness of things should lead us to suspect that he is introducing an ordinary idea that he will subsequently use phenomenology to try to excavate beneath and so go beyond. Once we recognize the context, it is not difficult to detect the irony in Heidegger’s initial suggestion that “artworks are familiar to everyone” already since they populate our world just like all the other objects “on hand”: