  In the end, then, Schapiro’s objection that the shoes belonged not to a farmer but to Van Gogh himself does indeed miss Heidegger’s philosophical point. Once we understand the actual sequence of steps in Heidegger’s phenomenological argument, we can see that Schapiro’s criticism really only temporarily complicates the inference from step 3 to step 4 (that is, the move from encountering the conflict between earth and world to understanding what it is like to walk in a farmer’s shoes).  This is an inference, however, that Heidegger could have reached just as easily by discussing the world of Van Gogh himself (whom Schapiro takes to be rightful owner of the shoes in the painting). In Heidegger’s view of him, Van Gogh clearly understood the earth/world struggle at least as lucidly as the farmers he painted (so Heidegger could just as easily have moved from encountering the earth/world struggle to understanding what it is like to walk in the shoes of a painter like Van Gogh). Indeed, Heidegger’s final point (the point conveyed by his references to “you” and “you yourself”) is that Van Gogh and these farmers lived the same struggle in different ways, and so do all of us meaning farmers, that is, all of us who genuinely create by discerning inchoate contours and struggling to give shape to something that previously was only partly glimpsed at best and so remained hidden in darkness.  Art thus teaches us not to try to banish the darkness that surrounds the light of intelligibility, but to learn to see into that ubiquitous “noth-ing” so as to discern therein the enigmatic “earth” which nurtures all the genuine meanings that have yet to see the light of day. Insofar as we can learn from Van Gogh (or other similarly great artists) to see in this poetic way ourselves, Heidegger suggests, we will find ourselves dwelling in a postmodern world permeated by genuinely meaningful possibilities.