  When Heidegger discusses Van Gogh’s painting of “A Pair of Shoes,” we have seen, his analysis takes us from: (1) experiencing Van Gogh’s painting as an aesthetic object (a painting of a pair of shoes apparently on hand for our viewing); to (2) attending to the nothing (that is, the way the painting’s background continues to suggest other possibilities which nevertheless resist being fully gestalted and so brought into the foreground); to thereby (3) encountering the essential tension between earth and world (the inconspicuous struggle between revealing and concealing implicit in “what is there”), and so finally (4) coming to see for oneself what it is like to walk in a farmer’s shoes (by encountering for oneself, in the artwork, the struggle to bring the bounty of the earth forth into the light of the world). We can see this quite clearly by looking at one of the crucial passages again, this time with the four steps in Heidegger’s phenomenological transition explicitly labeled: