  If Heidegger was literally describing the figure he saw emerging from “[o]ut of the dark opening of the well-worn insides of shoes” (PLT 33/GA5 19) in Van Gogh’s painting of “A Pair of Shoes” (1886), however, then what Heidegger offers us is not merely the projection of his own subjective associations onto a blank canvas but, instead, a meaningful gestalting of something from what is really there, something we too can phenomenologically confirm for ourselves. (It may help to examine this detail from the shoe on the right-hand side of Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Shoes” (1886); here the figure of the farming woman that, I argue, Heidegger creatively disclosed “[s]taring forth from out of the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes” (PLT 33/GA5 19) has been outlined by Mark Wrathall in order to make it easier for others to see.)