In his classic essay on art, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Martin Heidegger analyses a pair of shoes as depicted in a painting of Vincent van Gogh. We see in the painting nothing else than a mundane pair of shoes of a peasant woman. However, the painting is not just a copy of some footwear. The peasant woman’s world seems to surround it. We can glimpse her labour, her hardship, the cycle of seasons, the harvest, the joy and the sadness.
Heidegger uses another philosophical concept to explain the nature of our experience of the painting: the earth. He thinks the painting reveals not only the world of the peasant woman, but also the earth. The peasant’s work, life and experiences constitute her world; the earth is the ground from which this meaning-making structure springs. The world is what the peasant makes of the brute earth. The world is a human interpretation of the earth, a humanised earth. As we gaze at van Gogh’s painting, we witness this interplay of the world and the earth through a worn pair of shoes.
Heidegger suggests a painting is not a mere representation of an object but a work of art in which truth happens. We get to know what shoes really are by apprehending the world as sprouting from and resting in the earth. The shoes as footgear used by a human signify the world whereas shoes as bare matter, devoid of this purposiveness, indicate the earth. We are unaware or only subliminally aware of this as we use shoes in daily life—the shoes hide themselves in their usefulness, as Heidegger puts it. The painting discloses their true nature, which is not their fixed identity as footwear but a movement between their being shoes within a human world and their being natural material. So, experiencing the painting is not just perceiving the accuracy of the look and feel of shoes, but encountering their uncovered nature and, thereby, our world and earth.
To my mind, Heidegger’s view implies that our world is one interpretation or construction of the earth. It is not the ultimate one; it is possible to carve out other interpretations. Our present world may be an inadequate realisation of the potential of the earth, but it helps us access it; it enables us to imagine an alternative interpretation. A quiet spectator of van Gogh’s painting of stock-still shoes, thus, becomes a stirred, restless explorer. She grows into a site where the struggle between the world and the earth takes place.
When a layperson, a common citizen of a country, hurls her sandal at a political leader, the act and the object acquire grave significance. Needless to say, the act is unlawful, involves some form of violence, and should not be encouraged. There are other lawful, peaceful and constructive forms of protest. Yet it is worth asking: why does the citizen pick her footwear as a symbol of protest?
There is a conventional angle here. We tend to think of the human body in a hierarchical manner: the head is the top and the most important part whereas the feet are lowly. We bow our head at the feet of someone to express our utter respect for them. We apologise to someone and enact an abbreviated gesture of namaskar when our feet inadvertently touch their body. As the feet are always in the vicinity of dust, dirt and grime, the footwear embodies the unpleasant, ignorable, viscous side of existence. So, within such a scheme of meanings, it is considered extremely insulting to intentionally throw footwear at a political leader.
There is a popular Marathi saying: “Payichi vahan payi bari.” It roughly means it is best to keep footwear on the foot. It hints at the folly to place footwear on one’s head and worship it. Maybe the sandal-hurling citizen’s act is an admission of the truth of such sayings. The polis should not worship political leaders; political leaders should serve the polis. The sandal-hurler, as a voice of the polis, accentuates the leader’s station and its duties. Does the layperson think only along these conventional lines when she decides to hurl her footwear? Or does she draw on something deeper?
Seen in the light of Heidegger’s reading of van Gogh’s painting, this act of hurling and the hurled footwear begin to seem artistic. The layperson who selects her footwear as a means of publicly registering her protest endows that footwear with the halo of her disappointing world and darkened earth. The hurled sandal is no longer a friendly footgear. The sandal and its wearer have been robbed of their world and earth. The world no longer makes sense and the earth is inaccessible. The sandal shoots from that void.
There is a difference between the shoes in van Gogh’s painting and the hurled sandal. Though worn and weary-looking, the objects in the painting are intact in being a pair of shoes in use. The hurled object is a lone, forlorn thing, riskily shooting away from its user-trustee. The thrown sandal is its user’s lament about the loss of her world. It is an orphan as it goes up in the sky and lands on the political leader. Unlike the shoes in the van Gogh painting that serenely disclose the ultimate aspects of human living, the hurled sandal is a silent cry. The shoes in the painting disclose the world-earth strife; the hurled sandal tells of its closure.
Nonetheless, there is a radically optimistic streak here. In Heidegger’s view, it is the world that makes the earth available for us; the world provides patterns to humanise it. On the other hand, the sandal-hurling citizen announces the rejection of the torn, closed, hijacked world. The citizen wants to interpret the earth anew, as a barefoot, worldless soul.
Prashant Bagad
Associate Professor of philosophy at IIT Kanpur
(Views are personal)
