  It is crucial for Heidegger that we not reinterpret this encounter as a subject’s selective cognitive and perceptual uptake of an objective world. What we encounter in art is something more deeply rooted in existence which the modern subject/object dichotomy skates right over. Our encounter with the work teaches us that that meaning does not happen solely in the art object or the viewing subject but instead takes place, we could say, between us and the work. This, again, is an ontological truth; it holds true of (human) existence in general. To be Dasein is to be “the being of the ‘between’” (HCT 251/GA20 346–7), as Heidegger first put it in 1925. This means that our encounter with Van Gogh’s painting helps us to realize and so become what we are. For, what we lucidly encounter in art is our making-sense of the place in which we find ourselves, a fundamental “world-disclosing” that is always already at work in human “existence,” our standing-out into intelligibility. For Heidegger, Van Gogh’s painting allows us to lucidly encounter what we already are, most fundamentally, but without realizing it—namely, Dasein, “being-here,” the active making intelligible of the place in which we find ourselves. Art teaches us to become what we already are by allowing us lucidly to undergo the transition from understanding and experiencing ourselves as meaning-bestowing subjects standing over against an objective world to recognizing that, at a deeper level, we are always implicitly participating in the making-intelligible of our  worlds.[77]