  The most important point to grasp here, then, is that Heidegger does not maintain (as it is easy but nonetheless a mistake to assume) that Van Gogh’s painting allows us somehow first to directly intuit the world of a farmer as she might experience it so that, by getting in touch with her farming world, we can thereby come to experience the “essential tension” between earth and world with which a farmer is intimately familiar. That cannot be right because it begs the question, assuming the aporetic step that Heidegger realizes needs to be explained (as we saw in 3.3), namely, how can we move from an aesthetic experience of a painting on hand like an object to an encounter with the “equipmentality” of equipment? It is crucial to see that Heidegger does not first assume that the shoes in the painting belong to a farmer, and then, by alluding to the farmer’s world, introduce the essential struggle between earth and world as the truth of the painting. If that were the sequence of steps in Heidegger’s argument, then not only would he be knowingly begging his own question but, worse, Schapiro’s telling criticism that the shoes in Van Gogh’s painting could not in fact have been used by a farmer would constitute a completely devastating objection to Heidegger’s interpretation. For, Schapiro is certainly right that the shoes in the painting could not have been used by a woman while farming, for the simple reason that the Dutch farmers Van Gogh painted wore wooden clogs in the damp potato fields, not leather shoes like those worn by farmers in Southern Germany, which would have quickly rotted from the damp soil in the  Netherlands.[100] Thus, if Heidegger had sought simply to move from what he assumed were a pair of farmer’s shoes to an intimation of the earth/world struggle familiar to farmers, and then from there to the essence of art, Schapiro’s objection would destroy the bridge Heidegger was seeking to build from an ontic work of art to the ontological truth of art in general.