  The suggestively ambiguous phrase, “nothing out of the ordinary,” might make a good title for Heidegger’s attempt to show how the mysterious “nothing” emerges from Van Gogh’s painting of a seemingly ordinary pair of shoes. For Heidegger, it is not that the person who broke in these empty shoes, although absent from the painting, nevertheless remains present there in his or her very absence. It is true, as Edwards (2004, p. 54) suggests, that the palpable presence of the missing person whose feet shaped the shoes that Van Gogh painted quite naturally leads those who study the painting carefully to wonder, Whose shoes were these originally? And that question, in turn, helps fuel the controversy that still surrounds Heidegger’s interpretation of the painting (see section 4). For Heidegger, however, the “nothing” that is visible in Van Gogh’s painting is not the haunting presence of these shoes’ absent owner but, instead, the equally paradoxical (and no less phenomenologically discernible) appearance of that which is neither an entity nor merely nothing at all and yet conditions our experience of all entities.  We can encounter this active nothing phenomenologically as we learn to be receptive to the textural hints of that which is not yet a thing and yet offers itself, in the suggestive hints of a “outline” or “rift-structure”, beckoning to be gestated and so brought into being by our disclosive capacities.