1

One could be forgiven for thinking that Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” is mainly about a painting of a pair of shoes by Van Gogh.¹ The paragraph in which Heidegger evokes what might be disclosed to someone coming before it is perhaps now not merely famous but infamous, described recently by Stephen Mulhall as a “notorious passage of prose.”²

“The Origin” was published in 1950, an earlier version of the text having been presented in lectures in 1935–6. Eighteen years after its publication, in 1968, Meyer Schapiro published a very short but highly critical text on Heidegger’s interpretation of the Van Gogh painting, “The Still Life as a Personal Object – A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh.”³ Ten years later, in 1978, Jacques Derrida published a very long but utterly fragmented text, “Restitutions,” which laced together both Heidegger’s tracks around the painting and Schapiro’s effort to put Heidegger on trial in relation to it. Derrida left neither intact – and made quite an impression of his own in turn. In particular, he made the famous paragraph notorious, seeing it “as a moment of pathetic collapse, derisory, and symptomatic, significant.”⁴

As we get underway, it is worth recalling a little more of the remark in which Derrida delivers this critical obloquy on “the celebrated passage.” Strikingly, Derrida presents his reading as both having something like a history and as basically history-less, unchanging, “each time” seeing the same:

I won’t here write the chronicle of my previous readings … But each time I’ve seen the celebrated passage on “a famous picture by Van Gogh” as a moment of pathetic collapse, derisory, and symptomatic, significant.⁵

In this article I will forgo the easy pleasure of repeating the experience of Derrida’s eventless chronicle. Let me briefly rehearse the background to the new step I want to make here.

In what follows I explore the dramatic architecture internal to Heidegger’s text around the painting. My principal critical focus will be on an assessment of that architecture as having two basic parts pursued over two crucial paragraphs: the now notorious one and the one immediately preceding it. With an eye to a prompt from Derrida but also going beyond his own effort to follow that prompt, I will argue that we need to draw in a paragraph passed over by the two-part reading: not only the paragraph before the notorious one, but also the paragraph after it. Attending closely to that third paragraph will, I believe, reconfigure our sense of what Derrida calls Heidegger’s “pathetic collapse.” I will not deny that a collapse occurs, but I will resituate it beyond the now notorious paragraph – a paragraph that I will suggest we might learn to read again.⁶

Schapiro is perhaps the primary source of the paragraph becoming famous; Derrida is perhaps the primary source of it becoming notorious. However, if we look to “Restitutions” to identify the basic reason for supposing a collapse, it is clear that Derrida sets it out in a way that pairs him solidly with Schapiro on this matter. Reflecting on the fact that more or less any pair of shoes would have done the job that Heidegger had in view for them, even down to the “world and earth” thematic that he wanted to draw into his words around the painting by Van Gogh, Derrida suggests that “everything that comes down to the ‘peasant’ world is in this respect an accessory variable.”⁷ With respect to what I will later call the narrow context for reading the famous passage, this is right. However, with only that context in view, Derrida then takes a further step very quickly, taking Heidegger’s leap into the peasant world to show up the extent to which “what comes down to the ‘peasant’ world” can be filed “under ‘projection’” and “answers to Heidegger’s pathetic-fantasmatic-ideological-political investments.”⁸ For Derrida, then, the “accessory variable” of the peasant world is significant because it is symptomatic, and symptomatic of Heidegger’s “ideological-political investments.” That, in Derrida’s view, is the significance of the “pathetic collapse.”

But now, and despite Derrida’s often dazzling undoing of Schapiro’s efforts to trail and trap Heidegger over the question of whose step haunts the shoes, we should not forget that Derrida wants to affirm his solidarity with Schapiro concerning the collapse: Schapiro “also detects [this collapse] in his own way.”⁹ Indeed, regarding what Schapiro called “Heidegger’s fanciful description of the shoes,”¹⁰ Schapiro had been quietly damning too:

[Heidegger] has retained from his encounter with Van Gogh’s canvas a moving set of associations with peasants and the soil, which are not sustained by the picture itself. They are grounded rather in his own social outlook with its heavy pathos of the primordial and earthy.¹¹

Whatever else may keep the couple apart, both Schapiro and Derrida regard “everything that comes down to the ‘peasant’ world” in Heidegger’s text as a symptom of his “social outlook,” his proximity to National Socialist ideology, not something “sustained by the picture itself.” It is in relation to this interpretation that I want to make a new step in reading the dramatic architecture of Heidegger’s appeal to a painting of shoes by Van Gogh. As I say, in doing so I will recommend paying particular attention to the paragraph after the one Derrida calls the “incredible tirade.”¹² In that paragraph-after, Heidegger raises an objection to his own argument, asking whether what he is regarding as “sustained by the picture” is merely so sustained: “But perhaps it is only in the picture that we discern [sehen … an] all this.”¹³ Derrida had wondered whether this “perhaps” implied that the famous paragraph had, in Heidegger’s view, already made “a claim to see or read something other than or beyond the framed picture, something other than an ‘image’ and this picture.”¹⁴ As we shall see, Heidegger certainly does not simply remain “shut up” in the picture in the famous paragraph.¹⁵ However, his self-interrogation also asks a pointed question about what he claims to discern in the picture. It asks whether what is discerned belongs only to the picture, within the frame, and is not warranted by anything beyond it. Derrida does not pursue this “beyond the frame” question in “Restitutions.” He does acknowledge that Heidegger answers the objection in what he (Derrida) calls “the third paragraph of this passage around the picture,”¹⁶ but with respect to what Heidegger refers to there that lies strictly “beyond the framed picture” – Derrida says nothing. It’s as if he let go of that lace just when it needed tightening. But he should not have let it go, and in this article, I will pick it up again.

The gist of what I want to say is that what belongs to this “beyond” is both genuinely hallucinatory and deeply problematic. For here Heidegger claims to have his response to the painting attested to by an authority external to the picture, beyond the frame. And not just any authority either but by “the peasant woman” herself. As he will put it in the paragraph after the famous one: “She knows all this.”¹⁷ It is in relation to this claim that I will take a new step with Heidegger’s response to a picture by Van Gogh, and a step beyond Derrida’s eventless chronicle of seeing a political-ideological collapse in “the celebrated passage.” With respect to Heidegger’s appeal to a peasant woman’s authority in the paragraph after the famous one, I will say: that is the collapse.¹⁸

More so even than the words of the supposedly “pathetic” paragraph itself, it is the claim to find an authorizing attestation for them from a (wholly imagined) real peasant woman that makes the whole thing truly “fanciful.”¹⁹ The “third paragraph” has more to say than this. As Derrida notes, the third paragraph does not only see the peasant woman move from a position “now in the picture [in the famous paragraph], [to] now outside the picture [in the third paragraph].”²⁰ Beyond that, it is also here that Heidegger “will analyze what, in the usefulness of the product, comes from farther away than the matter-form couple.”²¹ Right. However, having dropped the thread on the first of these developments, Derrida also misses the fact that the second only deepens the suspicion that it is here we find the decisive expression of the “social outlook” in Heidegger’s (way of) seeing things that both he and Schapiro had wanted to highlight. So, the new step I am recommending, far from letting Heidegger off the hook with respect to his social outlook, will impale him on it only more thoroughly. And with that, the space will be cleared for re-reading the famous paragraph too. These then are my intentions as I step once more into the drama of Heidegger’s staging of a sequence of Acts with a picture by Van Gogh of old shoes and laces.

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In the first published essay in English engaging with Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s “The Origin” in the “Restitutions” text (a text at that time available only in French), the American philosopher Robert Denoon Cumming began by identifying “The Origin” as “one text of Heidegger’s … likely to be familiar [to any Anglo-American philosopher]” concerned with Heidegger’s “destruction” of philosophy “as a metaphysical tradition [starting] from Plato and culminating in Hegel.”²² And if likely familiar with that text, then perhaps familiar above all with “what Heidegger has to say in “The Origin” about ‘the pair of shoes’ in Van Gogh’s painting.”²³

Cumming does not comment on Derrida’s critical obloquy concerning what Heidegger is most famous for saying about Van Gogh’s painting. Quoting the first sentence of the famous paragraph, he is content to present an interpretation of his own, one that takes a different path to Derrida’s. I am going to hold off recalling what he says about that sentence until the very end of this article, when we may be better placed to read the famous paragraph itself. For now, we might simply note that Cumming does not parade the paragraph, nor does he pass judgment on it. On the other hand, what he does have to say about the philosophical work of the paragraph “as a whole,” beyond his interpretation of it via its opening sentence is, I think, less helpful. What he proposes is to read the famous paragraph as one step among others in Heidegger’s overall effort to undo the damaging “assault” (Überfall) effected by metaphysics on our pre-philosophical understanding of “things,”²⁴ damage done due to “things” being thought in metaphysics on the basis of three distinctions: the substantia and accidens distinction, the aisthēton and noēton distinction, and the forma (morphē) and materia (hylē) distinction. According to Cumming, Heidegger’s appeal to the picture is best approached in terms of its relation to the first of these three metaphysical distinctions:

The paragraph as a whole might be summarized crudely as restoring the experience of the “ground” that has been damaged by the first of the metaphysical distinctions [in the traditional philosophical treatment of “the thing” (namely, the substantia/accidens distinction) (p. 495)] in the “assault” (Überfall) [upon it].²⁵

As we shall see at the end of this article, Cumming is not wrong here. However, the summary crudeness does send us off the track of Heidegger’s steps with the shoes – a track Cumming had wanted to attend to in order to correct what Derrida had rightly “rebuked” Schapiro for doing: namely, doing damage to the “the progress [démarche]” of “The Origin” by not situating it in its context.²⁶ Schapiro had, as Cumming recalls Derrida claiming, taken a line into the essay that “cuts and brutally dislocates” its argument.²⁷ In particular, he (Schapiro) had supposed that Heidegger chose the painting by Van Gogh “to illustrate the nature of art.”²⁸ Cumming will immediately join the fray on this point, urging that the very idea of “illustration” here already belongs to another of the three metaphysical distinctions involved in the philosophical “assault” on the thing: any such appeal is “damaged by the intrusion of a [second] metaphysical distinction;” namely, “between the physical, which is available to the senses [aisthēton], and the spiritual [noēton], which is ‘beyond’.”²⁹ Cumming’s own crude summary is not so philosophically brutal. But taking the entry of the picture to belong to an effort to restore an experience of “ground” outside the metaphysical substantia and accidens distinction is really not (not even “crudely”) what launched Heidegger’s step into the familiar paragraph, at least not proximately.

To get a little closer to the proximate launching point, I want to take in what, thirty years later than Cumming (but without Cumming in view), another reader of “The Origin” essay, Stephen Mulhall, has to say about the context of Heidegger’s Van Gogh picture-reading. In his 2021 essay, “Where the World Becomes Picture …,” Mulhall is keen to keep in step with Heidegger’s progress around the picture, and particularly keen to foreground its point of departure in the paragraph before the famous one. Thus, and noting that it was “emphasized by Derrida” too, Mulhall identifies “the proximate reason” for Heidegger reaching for Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of peasant shoes not in terms of providing an “illustration of the nature of art” (Schapiro) nor as attesting to a non-damaging meditation on “the thing” (Cumming), but, as Mulhall puts it, in terms of “its apparent handiness as a prompt for a phenomenology of the equipmentality of equipment.”³⁰

Three things then: the work (of art), the thing, and the artefact. Schapiro went straight to the work; Cumming went straight to the thing; Mulhall (with Derrida) attempts to restore the order of Heidegger’s steps by appealing to us to read the paragraph that first brings the picture of the shoes on stage as representing an example artefact. This is the paragraph immediately before the supposedly “lamentable” one.

Mulhall is right to appeal to us to read this, but he is right too not to altogether forget that the background to this step is the “assault” on the “thing” that Cumming foregrounds, an assault on “the thing” by what Mulhall also recalls as the “three conceptions” of “the thinghood of things” that belongs to metaphysics.³¹ We have already seen Cumming’s drawing attention to the pertinence of two of these distinctions. However, it is the third one that Mulhall insists matters most, being “the most prevalent” of the three: “the form-matter model.”³² I think this is right, and it is certainly the distinction that matters most to Heidegger’s steps with the shoes since he does not think that the form-matter model is appropriate even to artefacts. That it is not (except in an utterly trivial sense) appropriate where it is typically supposed most innocently appropriate will, in fact, belong to Heidegger’s drama too since the traditional form-matter interpretation not only effects an “assault” on the artefact but is then extended beyond that to provide the model for both the traditional interpretation of the work (of art) and the traditional interpretation of the thing. Mulhall is thus right to say that the traditional interpretation of the artefact is the proximate reason for Heidegger’s appeal to a painting by Van Gogh. Cumming is right, however, to insist that when Heidegger introduces the idea of the metaphysical “assault” in “The Origin,” it is the traditional interpretation of the thing that comes first.

The traditional interpretation of the thing, Heidegger himself interprets as an Überfall upon the thing. This “assault” Derrida explains by paraphrasing Heidegger: “Metaphysical determinations […] have fallen upon the thing, covering it up and at the same time doing injury [Überfall] […] to what is properly thing in the thing.”³³

The translation of Überfall as “assault” is originally Albert Hofstadter’s. As Cumming’s translation recognizes, Derrida translates it in “Restitutions” as “injury.”³⁴ However, I don’t think either of these quite captures the irreducibly martial sense of Überfall. An Überfall is a raid, an unannounced attack. Überfallen means ambushed, mugged. The integrity of the thing as thing, of the artefact as artefact and of the work as work are in each case set upon by philosophy as metaphysics – primarily, Heidegger will insist, by its form-matter distinction, its hylomorphism, emphasizing “the inclination to treat the form-matter structure as the constitution of every entity” – an inclination that places the artefact, the supposedly natural home of the form-matter conception, at the very centre of the scene of metaphysical violence.³⁵ Attempting to restore the experience of the artefact that has been damaged by the third and most prevalent of the metaphysical distinctions is thus the centerpiece of Heidegger’s efforts to undo the assaults of metaphysics.

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Intriguingly, Mulhall reads a further assault in this scene – an assault on the work (of art) effected by Heidegger himself in the paragraph preceding the famous one, a paragraph where Heidegger’s use of it is “technological”: merely treating the work as a “tool” for an interpretation of tools.³⁶ Injured by that blow, the work then fights back, “displacing” the thinker and initiating in the famous paragraph a second phase of what, for the one who has regard for the picture, becomes what Mulhall calls an irreducibly “diphasic” event:³⁷

from an initial inordinate distance from the painting (situated as an observer with essentially technological designs on it from whom the world of the painting turns away) [to] placing him into inordinate proximity to it (as it speaks from his location, which is another way of saying that he speaks from its location – within or out of the world it depicts).³⁸

I too will want to draw in Heidegger’s questioning concerning technology to develop what I consider to be a satisfactory reading of Heidegger’s appeal to a painting by Van Gogh in “The Origin.” However, I do not think Heidegger’s first considerations concerning what is to be seen in the painting should be interpreted through the lens of that questioning (seeing the philosopher assaulting the work by taking the position of “an observer with essentially technological designs on it”). There certainly are two phases enacted in the two paragraphs that Mulhall considers, two Acts. But I do not think that Act One is the scene of a newly damaging philosophical assault on the work. Indeed, Heidegger insists that the description of the equipment represented in the painting in that Act, in the paragraph preceding the famous one, is “no doubt correct.”³⁹ However, and here is the crucial point to note with respect to that first phase, Heidegger accepts this correctness point only in order to hammer home that with such correctness “we can never discover […] truth.”⁴⁰ The equipmentality of the equipment is not and is never disclosed to us in a correct representation of equipment, no matter how faithful to the look of the gear that representation is. And the problem here is not the upshot of the (technological or instrumental) use to which the picture is put but that, despite sticking to what can be seen, despite doing without philosophical assumptions or metaphysical distinctions, the artefact picture cannot (it seems) do the job it was brought in to do. With respect to attaining to an understanding “the being of equipment” without appealing to “the matter-form structure,”⁴¹ the painting of a pair of shoes by Van Gogh is just no good. Unless … unless it is.

And Act Two certainly does begin there, in what is something like a tale of two truths or of two interpretations of truth. What will make the work (of art) work (instrumentally) for Heidegger (in relation to attaining clarity concerning the equipmentality of equipment) is that it will assist the demonstration that, with the work (of art) – with what Heidegger will call its “illuminating projection”⁴² – there is a completely different understanding of truth in view, beyond the correctness of a representation, a sense of truth irreducible to the correctness of the work’s faithful “depiction” of a pair of shoes. We have a two Act drama in view here, but what marks the two Acts concerns two ways of thinking about “the work and truth,”⁴³ two ways in which truth can be thought in relation to the work (of art): as representational correctness and as what Heidegger will call an event of unconcealment:

Truth happens in Van Gogh’s painting. This does not mean that something which is at hand is correctly portrayed, but rather that in the revelation of the equipmental being of the shoes, that which is as a whole – world and earth in their counterplay – attains to unconcealedness.⁴⁴

On the other hand, even this alternative “diphasic” reading of the text, as unfolding in two Acts as a tale of two truths, still misses something (more) that Heidegger would want us to read: a crucial Act Three. Among other things, this will concern the entry “beyond the framed picture” of the peasant woman herself. In what follows, and in what I hope will not be found a too circuitous route, I want to propose a new three Act reading of Heidegger’s text around the picture of shoes by Van Gogh.

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Mulhall’s recent essay on “The Origin” took a significant step away from his own earlier assessment, some thirty years earlier in fact, where the famous paragraph was more straightforwardly explored as “an example of a genuine and insightful aesthetic response to a particular work of art.”⁴⁵ Perhaps he came to think he had got mugged by Heidegger. In any case, later, after reading the assault on the famous paragraph by Derrida, he got tougher. Derrida had set the tone for a reading of it that gave no quarter to Heidegger: it was a “pathetic collapse.”⁴⁶ Cumming ignored that judgement. Mulhall accepted it. I’m not happy to do either and will approach things differently. I want, first, to step back from considerations of Heidegger’s “social outlook” and, instead, step into the shoes of someone coming before Heidegger’s famous paragraph, let’s say you, and to suggest that the distance you might feel from the words in (what some among us have, as a result, come to see as) the “pathetic paragraph” is, in our time, utterly pre-programmed – and that Heidegger is banking on that. My thought here is that internal to why it might “seem to you so ridiculous, so loaded with ‘ideological’ ‘projections’,”⁴⁷ is that this experience – this experience that you are likely to have of not finding yourself in it or not finding your feet with it – is itself the upshot of the fact that we live today in a time when “the old rootedness” that Heidegger’s words around the painting massively foreground really is “being lost in this age.”⁴⁸

Of course, the shifting context I want to bring into view here, this changeover in worlds – from the world of the peasant farmer to (what Heidegger will call) the world of “the mechanized food industry”⁴⁹ – is never mentioned anywhere in “The Origin,” neither before nor after the “incriminated paragraph.”⁵⁰ As a theme it is neither proximate nor remote in it. However, I want to see its ghost here, shadowing the text – as something that arrives with(in) us as its readers today. This difference in worlds making itself felt from an encounter with the invoked world of the peasant woman is, I believe, (unavoidably) internal to the condition of the ones who, in our time, come before Heidegger’s famous words around the picture.

I will come back to what is passed over in silence by Heidegger here (this world-change), but one should note a crucial moment in “The Origin” where it could have been opened up, even if it appears instead to be very rapidly closed down: the world-change is, I think, right there in the single reference to modern technology in “The Origin,” there where Heidegger insists that the Greek sense of technē “signifies neither craft nor art and not at all the technical in our present-day sense.”⁵¹ Not another word on that – though one might even here suspect that this “not at all” tells us a good deal about the changeover Heidegger will invite us to ponder from the world of traditional technology, which is the world of the peasant woman, to the world of modern technology, which is our present-day, and the radical contrast Heidegger will later draw between the “bringing-forth” [Her-vor-bringen] of traditional modes of revealing⁵² and the “challenging-forth” [Heraus-fordern] that belongs to technological revealing in our time,⁵³ the one not at all like the other. Like the theme of “the third paragraph” in Heidegger’s text altogether skipped by Schapiro,⁵⁴ a paragraph invisible in Mulhall’s “diphasic” melodrama, and left as a hanging thread by Derrida, we will need to bring this other theme, this theme altogether skipped by Heidegger himself, into our reading of the text and the famous paragraph on the shoes. In what follows, I will attempt this new restoration as we move towards Act Three.

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Derrida was right to “rebuke” Schapiro for not reading the paragraphs that frame the famous one, and thus for reading Heidegger in a way that “brutally cuts off and disarticulates the procedure of “The Origin.””⁵⁵ We need to read them. And having touched on its purpose, we can begin with the words that conclude the first of the three. Making what Derrida called “this ‘backward step’ on the road of thought,”⁵⁶ this first paragraph ends with two words that appear suddenly to step back from the conclusion which that very paragraph appeared to be stepping towards. The paragraph that precedes the famous one concludes with the words: “And yet [Und dennoch.].”

What is happening here? As we have seen, in the discussion running up to the famous paragraph, Heidegger had been considering whether Van Gogh’s painting might help shed light on the equipmental character of “gear” that “serves to clothe feet.”⁵⁷ His proximate concern is, that is to say, not the assault on the thing or on the work but, at this point, the assault on the artefact – with the latter being apparently innocently interpreted by metaphysics hylomorphically, as formed matter, an apparently innocent interpretation that will stepwise provide the model for the metaphysical interpretation that will have assaulted both the thing and the work. But Heidegger does not think the hylomorphic interpretation of the artefact is innocent at all. Directly, then, his concern is getting free of the metaphysical assault on the artefact, and indirectly the same for the thing and the work, the hylomorphism derived from the traditional artefact analysis serving as the model for the traditional interpretation of each of the other two, indeed, “as the constitution of every entity.”

The paragraph immediately preceding the famous one gives reasons why one might think decisively that Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes does not help make any steps beyond the assaulting metaphysical interpretation. Heidegger asks: Without filtering it all through a philosophical theory of human-made things, holding off all hylomorphic assaults – what can we say? What can this well-known equipment-picture show us? Will it do to say something to the effect that it shows us that shoes (“if they are not wooden or bast shoes”) are commonly made of leather soles and uppers joined by thread and nails so as to make “gear to clothe feet?”⁵⁸ But surely that’s not enough. Faithful as it may be to the look of the gear, Van Gogh’s picture seems not up to the job of disclosing the equipment-character of the equipment, since for that we really need to see the equipment product in use: “only [in use] are they what they are.”⁵⁹

At this point and now drawing freely on his analysis of equipment in Being and Time, Heidegger presents the equipment-character of the shoe-gear in phenomenological terms, thereby calling into question the adequacy of the “no doubt correct” simple description. The equipmentality of the equipment is simply not disclosed to a gaze that just looks at detached shoe-Things with their various properties and qualities. On the contrary, the shoe-gear will be most “primordially disclosed” as what it is only when it is (at this moment a delightfully wrong-footing word) “ready-to-hand” for its user:⁶⁰ “… [T]he less the peasant woman thinks about the shoes while she is at work, or looks at them at all, or is even aware of them” the more unveiledly will she encounter them as what they are.⁶¹

So, within Act One the point is made that looking at and faithfully describing this shoe-gear can offer nothing to our understanding of the equipmental character of equipment. Van Gogh’s accurate picture of the look of simple shoes is therefore no help at all. It is just then that Heidegger takes the backward step: “And yet.” And yet perhaps it is of use. Indeed, perhaps, “it becomes,” as Derrida puts it, “more than useful”: it becomes “useful for grasping the usefulness of the useful.”⁶²

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The backward step is the final step on the way to the famous paragraph. But the two paragraphs together, despite the tale of two truths they present, is not The End. A final Act Three remains to come. To take us to that, I want to get into view two trajectories that I think belong to the textual environment which, in certain key respects, anticipate and prepare for it.

Let’s say: there is a narrower and a wider context here. The narrower context – a context in which the specific choice of Van Gogh’s picture is not obviously motivated at all – concerns Heidegger’s attempt, already noted, to comprehend the nature of equipment and products, “gear for feet” for example, outside the traditional hylomorphic interpretation of artefacts. The wider one – which not only anticipates but almost pre-programmes the choice of specifically peasant shoes – is Heidegger’s already up and running engagement with what he knows is already, in his time, being identified as a distinctively disturbing and “incomparably different” presence in the midst of the contemporary world: modern technology.⁶³ As we shall see, the trajectory of these two contexts join together on a single path in Act Three with (among other things) the entry on stage of the real peasant woman “outside the picture.”⁶⁴

As I have indicated, the wider context introduces something not discussed in “The Origin”: the world-change brought about by modern technology, an issue that will become a major theme for Heidegger’s thinking. Central to his thinking on this theme is the claim that grasping the essence of specifically modern technology is not a matter of looking for some property common to a growing number of things in our midst today but, rather, is a matter of coming reflectively to terms with a distinctively new “midst” (world) within which things now show themselves. The essence of modern technology is, Heidegger claims, a way of revealing everything that is, a way of revealing which discloses everything, everywhere only as measurable, calculable and orderable (under orders and at our disposal) – disclosed as what he will call “standing reserve” [Bestand].⁶⁵ In “The Question,” Heidegger introduces this idea through a contrast to something he regards as essentially different: the world of the peasant farmer. It is a world that in this age is being lost:

The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set it in order still meant to take care of and maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its flourishing. But now, the cultivation of the field [die Feldbestellung] has been drawn into the undertow [in den Sog] of another kind of setting-in-order [eines andersgearteten Bestellens], which sets upon [stellt] nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it [Es stellt sie im Sinne der Herausforderung]. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry.⁶⁶

For Heidegger, when the dominant way of revealing everything that is becomes technological, then what is most distinctive, most human in the human threatens to become so deeply eclipsed that “man himself” – the one experienced in our modernity as the supposed master of the forces and energies of nature – can come to the point when he too will become disclosed as standing reserve and no more.⁶⁷

What threatens here, this “supreme danger,”⁶⁸ is not a thing in the world (a terrible machine) but belongs to what holds sway in the structure of “unconcealment itself” as it prevails in our time.⁶⁹ Nevertheless, and here is where art makes its extraordinary appearance in Heidegger’s technology essay, there is still hope: a “decisive confrontation” with modern technology is still possible because there is a “saving power” in a realm akin to it yet also fundamentally different to it, not at all like it.⁷⁰ “Such a realm,” Heidegger asserts, “is art.”⁷¹ And art is the thing here because the essence of art too is a way of revealing. In “The Question” the reference to the Greek sense of technē that was so rapidly dismissed in the “The Origin” is, for the same reason, now kept in, in fact taking centre stage: “the poiesis of the fine arts was also called technē.”⁷²

7

For Heidegger, what distinguishes the human being is not that it is the animal rationale or homo faber, but (and to stay with Heidegger here we are going to have to drop the Latin and put it poetically, as Heidegger does, citing Hölderlin) a being which is at all only insofar as it “dwells” “poetically.”⁷³ And this is so even in a time when we are increasingly “sucked up” by the challenging claim that challenges us to reveal everything that is technologically, as standing reserve:⁷⁴ this too is poetic dwelling – albeit in a mode that is not at all like the dwelling that belonged to the world of the peasant farmer with the traditional gear, equipment and tools in use there. In our time the poetic dwelling that belongs to modern man is through and through framed by something not at all like it, by modern technē.

So, Heidegger offers a completely new understanding of modern technology: the essence of modern technology is not found as a characteristic common to technological devices conceived as things of a special kind but is a distinctive way of revealing everything that is. And his understanding of art runs side-by-side with that: the essence of art too is not found as a characteristic of works (of art) conceived as things of a special kind either but, like the essence of modern technology, is a distinctive way of revealing everything that is.

According to Heidegger, what takes place when “there is” a work (of art) is, as we have seen, a happening of truth. But this is not truth as the correctness of a representation of something real but the event of unconcealing or clearing of an open realm where we dwell. Art-truth thus accomplishes the cultivation of place – the familiar locale, the clearing of a dwelling-place that the world-forming work of the work (of art) opens and sets-up, grounded on the earth that the work (of art) illuminates and sets-forth. There is here an exact parallel with Heidegger’s conception of technological revealing, and the same fundamental contrast between things in the world and the world within which things show themselves – including the work (of art) in its own thingly character as something disclosed within the very world it opens up.

Hitherto the art-being of the work will have been understood on the basis of its thingly character. However, as we have seen, that basic thingly character of the work will itself have been interpreted hylomorphically, as formed matter, and hence based on a specific interpretation of a certain kind of thing; namely, artefacts, things that are there at all only because there is a crafty and creative human hand involved in making it so. The traditional understanding of works of art – the understanding of art works that belongs to traditional aesthetics – takes the same hylomorphic model: they are “things,” of a special kind; formed matter with specifically aesthetic properties and qualities.

Now, as we have seen, it is in relation to the apparently innocent hylomorphic interpretation of human-made things or artefacts that Heidegger turns to Van Gogh’s picture of shoes. With this in view we pass back into the narrower context for Heidegger’s choice of the shoe picture: the investigation of our understanding of artefacts. As I have indicated, within the logic of that narrow trajectory, one has to say that the choice of peasant shoes is entirely unmotivated – apart perhaps from their simplicity going with the call for simple description without theory. “We choose as an example a common sort of product: a pair of peasant shoes.”⁷⁵ Indeed, this is where we began in the reading of the famous paragraph as a “collapse”: he certainly needn’t have selected shoes, let alone peasant shoes at this point, and Schapiro and Derrida think there is a collapse when he does. As Derrida notes, even if other pictures of shoes could have served him “equally” they would not have all served him “indifferently.”⁷⁶ Given what I am saying about the wider context, I will not demur from that idea at all, even if I will now no longer follow Derrida following Schapiro in supposing that the choice was simply “symptomatic” of “Heidegger’s pathetic-fantasmatic-ideological-political investments,” “symptomatic” of his National Socialist “social outlook.”⁷⁷

In the paragraph before the famous one the attempt is made to describe an artefact without getting caught up in a distorting philosophical theory. However, merely describing what can be seen in Van Gogh’s picture seems not to deliver on the hoped for result. As far as the ambition to grasp the equipmentality of equipment is concerned the picture is no use at all. And then it arrives: “And yet.” And then off we go into Act Two and the supposedly “pathetic paragraph.”

8

However, as I say, the end of Act Two is not The End. On the other side of that famous paragraph, Heidegger suddenly pauses and wonders whether his reading is merely a reading of the picture, a wordy work of words and no more. Now calling as a witness to speak against his colourful word-painting of the peasant world in the famous paragraph, he calls on the peasant woman herself. Unlike Heidegger, she does not get all wordy about her shoes and their world: “she simply wears them.”⁷⁸ Heidegger is well prepared for this objection. Indeed, his phenomenological conception of the shoe-gear’s readiness-to-hand had already recalled us to the fact that the being of the shoes is genuinely inseparable from the fundamentally “inconspicuous” character of that practical relation, the simple wearing.⁷⁹ On the other hand, Heideggerian phenomenology will have also had something else to say about this inconspicuous and unobtrusive simple wearing: it will have also rejected the idea that this kind of “simple wearing” is “simple” in the sense of “blind.”⁸⁰ As he put it in Being and Time, challenging the ancient connection of “theory” with “sight” (theorein meaning “to look at,” “to see”), Heidegger insists that “practical behaviour is not ‘atheoretical’ in the sense of sightlessness.”⁸¹ So even the simple wearing of the simple shoes is not so simple, not simply unseeing, not unknowing, not totally “blind,” and the equipmental character of the equipment, the usefulness of the useful that is disclosed so primordially when the shoe-gear is in use could indeed be said to be something with which the wearer, the real peasant woman for example, is profoundly familiar.

Fine. All good. In fact, Heidegger could have stopped there; he could have stopped with the phenomenology of simple-but-not-simply-blind wearing. But he does not stop there when he steps into Act Three. It’s not only that the peasant woman’s simple wearing does not exclude a kind of familiar “seeing” or “knowing” regarding the equipmental being of the shoe-gear. No – beyond that or along with that, Heidegger also wants to say that she knows too the familiar world he has just evoked so evocatively in the famous paragraph. There is, Heidegger thinks, no improper projection on his part in Act Two because it goes no further than to bring her own world, the world of the real peasant woman, to words:

When she takes off her shoes late in the evening, in deep but healthy fatigue, and reaches out for them again in the still dim dawn, or passes them by on the day of rest, she knows all this without noticing or reflecting.⁸²

Heidegger’s finding a reply to the objection that the famous paragraph is just an imagined projection with reference to an imagined projection of what a real peasant woman knows (the peasant woman “now outside the picture,”⁸³ as Derrida had remarked without further comment) – this, I want to say, is the real collapse. And yet …

And yet, this step too far, this ludicrous fiction of a step outside the frame, this empty appeal to what “she,” the wholly imagined real peasant woman, “knows,” was not even necessary. Not only could Heidegger have stuck with the readiness-to-hand of the shoe-gear and their simple-but-not-simply-blind wearing, but having so briefly brought in the peasant woman as a witness, he anyway drops her testimony and returns to his own “noticing and reflecting,” and to something, he says, “we” say that he wants to identify as going beyond or beneath what belongs to the usefulness of the useful:

The equipmental quality of the equipment consists indeed in its usefulness. But this usefulness itself rests in the abundance of an essential being of the equipment. We call it “reliability” [Verlässlichkeit] … [T]he reliability of the equipment first gives to the simple world its security and assures to the earth its steady thrust.⁸⁴

Overall, this new step is, in fact, another backward step in terms of priority. “Reliability” is not something super-added to usefulness. On the contrary, the latter “would be nothing without it.”⁸⁵ On the other hand, it would then be a particularly telling state of (worldly) affairs in which such reliability might be altogether passed over. What does it mean when bare usefulness is all we see? What is happening there where “reliability vanishes”?⁸⁶ Surely there and then, and only there and then, can it come to seem that “a mere fabricating that impresses form onto matter” is all that needs to be said about the “origin of equipment,” there where we don’t even need any further metaphysical distinctions to round it out.⁸⁷ For sure the material chosen for the making of shoes (if they are not wooden shoes) must be “firm yet flexible.”⁸⁸ But when that everyday and familiar fact is transformed into the metaphysical construction of hylomorphism and when, as today, “a useful artefact” is all we see,⁸⁹ we will have altogether missed the more “distant source” that the “reliability” of the useful gives us to reflect and think about concerning a human life with human-made things.⁹⁰

When Heidegger recalls a (let’s say) cultural condition where “only blank usefulness remains visible,”⁹¹ it is, I think, impossible not to see here another spectre of the concern with the way of revealing everything that is that belongs to the technological age that he skips in “The Origin” but will be preoccupied with in “The Question.” “Boringly obtrusive usefulness”⁹² is now all we have left for us in this age, there where the reliability of equipment has been compressed or diminished or pre-shrunk into the short shelf-life of the readily replaceable.

Cumming suggests that Derrida proposes translating (“associating,”⁹³ says the published translation) Verlässlichkeit as “trustworthiness” (fiabilité),⁹⁴ a choice that nicely suits the “built for life,” the “made to last” character of what one would come to know as “one’s trusty old faithful,” “old dependable,” the reliable. It certainly is this theme that matters most to Heidegger in Act Three – and it could have been introduced without appealing to the peasant woman herself and what she supposedly knows. Perhaps, then, the collapse was avoidable.

On the other hand, perhaps it was not. In fact, perhaps it is intensified at the very moment he lets her go and turns to Verlässlichkeit. Recall that when he lets her go his text turns from what “she knows” to what “we call …”⁹⁵ Reading this phrase (which in the German original is, Wir nennen …), Derrida comments that “in its very performance” this naming by Heidegger “produces” as well as “commits itself to” the very thing it names; namely, “the reliability of language and discourse.”⁹⁶ Cumming translates the words Hofstadter renders with “We call …” as “We name …” in order better to line it up with these Derridean comments on nomination.⁹⁷ But what if Heidegger is not performatively baptizing something here by way of a trusty old German word? What if he just wants to be recalling us to something already named in German by that name? Rather than (in part) performatively producing the reliability of (the German) language and (German) ways of speaking he is naming, he may simply be relying on that reliability. It is true that the German expression Wir nennen … permits a translation that supposes Heidegger to mean “I” by “we.” Derrida reads it that way, thereby committing himself to reflecting on what “he [Heidegger] will name” with the word Verlässlichkeit.⁹⁸ However, what if Heidegger is not speaking of himself in the third person plural here? Indeed, isn’t it in fact far more likely that the (specific) “we” he has in view when he is speaking about a trusty old word that (any) “we” can rely on to speak best both of and from the “distant source” – a word that names what, today, we (whoever) all reliably miss – is “we, the Germans”? “We call it …”? “We, the Germans, name it. …”

“We call it. …” Here Heidegger is addressing you (no matter who you are) and says “We.” But he does not speak this way to speak of “I” or of “You and I,” but, addressing anyone, you for example, he says what he says in order to say that “we, the Germans” have a reliable word to speak both of and from the “distant source” here named. If the peasant woman he had brought on stage had herself been German (which she is not, she can only be Dutch or French), she could be said to “know” this too, knowing the word. On the other hand, if she is not German (and she is not) then she does nevertheless still “know” what the German word names when a German says, “We call it. …” What she (silently but not blindly) “knows,” whether she is German or not, concerns what the Germans have most reliably named Verlässlichkeit, and what in English we make a stab at by way of our word “reliability,” and what in the problematic French translation is rendered by what is translated by our word “solidity,” and what, hoping to improve the French, is associated by Derrida by what is translated (by Cumming) by our word “trustworthiness.”⁹⁹ However, Heidegger’s wording, what he (performatively) does with his words, suggests: the Germans have it, the Germans have it.

The Germans, these are the people of the poets and thinkers who dwell nearest the distant source, and whose words on such dwelling in the poetry (especially) of Hölderlin “still confront Germans as a test to be stood.”¹⁰⁰ Despite the fact that “Wir nennen es die Verlässlichkeit,” the Germans today too, like the rest of us, reliably miss that more distant source which they can nevertheless name. But the Germans, thus understood, are still uniquely the ones who can rise to, for example, what is poetically projected in Hölderlin’s German words, though they have hitherto failed to do so and are still yet to do so.¹⁰¹ To rise to that would displace the Germans into a condition that is already attainable for them but is not yet attained. And what would that newly attained condition be? Having stood the test of coming to terms with what speaks in Hölderlin’s words, they would form a nation in a condition from which they could then take up the task that had always marked what had been for Heidegger the “inner truth and greatness of the [National Socialist] movement” in Germany; namely, “the encounter between global technology and modern humanity.”¹⁰² The Germans have it, the Germans have it.

But hang on, step right back and consider this instead: Those (whoever) who are most attuned to the Verlässlichkeit, the fiabilité, the reliability, that gives to the peasant woman’s world “its security and assures to the earth the freedom of its steady thrust,”¹⁰³ they are the ones who can come to see that that world just is the world that is being lost in our age, the world of our time increasingly becoming one where equipment in use, the usefulness of the useful, no longer “vibrates” in the reliability of the reliable,¹⁰⁴ they are the ones who can come to see that our world has become one in which the lifetime of the reliability of old-faithful has shrunk to the boringness of the disposable and the rapidly replaceable. I will happily stick with that version. In this relating of a possible Act Three, one might hope, along the byways of our language(s) and discourse(s), to recall all of us, any of us, to something that is being lost in this age. But, unfortunately, Act Three in “The Origin” is not just that, it is also the scene of Heidegger’s calling on a hallucinated real peasant woman to attest to his words around a painting by Van Gogh and the scene too of an encrypted appeal to a German national “social outlook” that he wants above all to affirm, calling on the Germans to rise to the challenge of what he thinks of as their historical destiny. At the very moment that he works-up “a great discourse on place and on truth,”¹⁰⁵ something utterly un-great is worked-in too: a pathetic Völkisch fantasy and a derisory conviction of a uniquely German mission for modern humanity.

9

Relocating the collapse to the paragraph after the famous one is a refinement that I am urging on the to-the-jugular dismissal of its words, a dismissal that has been encouraged by both Schapiro and (especially) Derrida. By way of concluding, I would urge in closing a further odd pair of points about the famous paragraph and its “subject,” two odd points that might serve to orient its reading from now on.

The first point takes off from something noted by Derrida. Concerning the painting by Van Gogh of a pair of shoes that will step-wise launch Heidegger’s famous paragraph, Derrida will make it clear that, whatever else might be seen in that picture we are certainly not seeing peasant women’s shoes in type. Indeed, none of the peasant women painted or drawn by Van Gogh can be seen wearing shoes of that type. The famous picture is not a picture of “a pair of peasant shoes” as Heidegger had insisted they are,¹⁰⁶ and that is because they are not peasant shoes at all. Derrida, stepping back from Heidegger’s judgement that they are, has seen it: “The peasant women in Van Gogh’s paintings and drawings wear clogs.”¹⁰⁷ Indeed, with this in view, it is hard not to see the sentence in the paragraph before the famous one in which Heidegger excludes “wooden or bast shoes” from his simple shoe description as very odd indeed. Heidegger states there: “Everyone knows what shoes consist of. If they are not wooden or bast shoes, there will be leather soles and uppers, joined together by thread and nails.”¹⁰⁸ The problem is that by far the most common shoe types worn by European peasants from the tenth to the end of the nineteenth century (and this is right across Europe, not just in the Netherlands or France) were wooden (clogs or sabots) and (woven) bast shoes. There’s almost nothing else to be seen when it comes to peasant shoes. So, even as he says he is choosing “as example … a pair of peasant shoes” depicted pictorially in “a painting by Van Gogh,” his confident reply to the question “What is there to see”¹⁰⁹ about “gear for feet” here? literally begins by him saying “As long as they are not peasant shoes, there will be …”

The second point takes off from something noted by Cumming. Concerning the famous paragraph by Heidegger regarding Van Gogh’s picture of a pair of shoes, Cumming will make it clear that, whatever else it might be, it is anyway not ekphrastic or descriptive in type. Indeed, the only descriptive moment in the paragraph comes in its very first words, where it begins with a reference to “the dark opening of […] the shoes.”¹¹⁰ Insofar as it describes anything about the shoes in the picture, the famous paragraph thus describes an aspect of their pictured “presence” concerning which there is basically nothing to be seen at all. The famous paragraph is thus not “Heidegger’s fanciful description of the shoes,” as Schapiro states.¹¹¹ Derrida will have been alive to this point too, commenting on Schapiro’s sense of the famous paragraph as “fanciful” that “one can agree with him. But one can also see in this confirmation of the fact that Heidegger was not trying to describe a picture.”¹¹² Derrida goes no further on this – apart from calling the paragraph an ideological-political collapse. But Cumming, stepping back from Derrida’s judgement on the thing, has seen it: “The paragraph … begins … with an apocalypse … As a whole [it is a] revelation.”¹¹³ In the famous paragraph, Heidegger is not describing “what is there to see” in a painting of a pair of shoes by Van Gogh. But he does not simply collapse into a derisory “social outlook” either. In that paragraph he writes as a seer of worlds and their groundedness on the earth, not a see-er of shoes and their firm yet flexible construction. And tempting though it is to make an example of the famous paragraph as a culminating collapse, “The End” is really not there – but it is nigh: “Even if, like Schapiro, one brutally cuts off and disarticulates the procedure of “The Origin,” one will still understand a little better … by reading one paragraph more.”¹¹⁴