The Vulnerability of the Sower

On Van Gogh, Kierkegaard, and the Struggle to Become Oneself

There are images we do not merely look at. They look back at us. They open a room within us where something has already been waiting to be recognized. Vincent van Gogh’s painting of the sower is such an image for me.

Vincent van Gogh, The Sower, 1888. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

A man walks alone across a field. Behind him, the sun stands low and large, almost overwhelming. The landscape is yellow, blue, golden, and restless. He carries a bag of seeds and throws them out with his hand. The movement is simple and ancient, almost primordial. A human being walks across the earth and sows.

It is not only the figure that touches me. It is also the colours. In Van Gogh, the sky is yellow, although no sky is really that yellow. The earth is blue, although earth in reality is usually brown or black. But the painting is not a naturalistic representation. It is an inner reality. It does not only show how the world looks, but how the world can feel.

For me, yellow is the colour of hope and warmth. It is the colour of meaning, the colour of understanding, the warmth that can exist both in thought and in feeling when the world suddenly comes together. Yellow is not only light. It is the experience that something opens up, that something becomes possible, that the world is not only demand, danger, and misunderstanding, but can also be presence, meaning, and understanding.

Blue is something else. Blue is the colour of vulnerability. It is beautiful, but also dangerous. Light blue requires great caution, like walking on thin ice. One must be careful with every step, because one does not know what will hold. Darker blue is like walking on thick, slippery ice. One may not fall through, but one can fall hard. Then one must have one’s spikes out. One must secure oneself. One must walk slowly, feel the surface, be prepared.

In this way, the painting becomes more than a landscape. It becomes an experience of moving between hope and danger, between warmth and vulnerability, between understanding and risk. The sower does not merely walk across a field. He walks through the colours of an existential landscape. He carries the seeds into the blue, into vulnerability, but he does so under a yellow sky. There is danger, but also meaning. There is risk, but also warmth. There is ice, but also sun.

Yet in this simple motif there is a great vulnerability. The sower does not own the future. He cannot determine the weather. He cannot protect all the seeds. Some will fall on good soil, some on stone, some among thorns, some will be eaten by birds. Still he walks on. He does not stop. He sows.

This is perhaps one of the most fundamental things in human life: having to act without guarantees. We must give something of ourselves to the world without knowing whether it will be received. We must speak without knowing whether we will be understood. We must love without knowing whether love will be returned. We must work, create, write, teach, help, build, try — without knowing how it will end.

The sower is therefore not merely a farmer. He is an image of the human being as an existential being. He is the human being standing in the openness between hope and defeat.

For me, this image has also taken on a particular meaning in relation to life on the autism spectrum. It says something about how risky it can be to step forward into the world when one does not always understand social codes in the same way as others. It says something about giving of oneself when one knows that one may be misunderstood. It says something about daring to participate when earlier experiences have taught one that much can go wrong.

To live on the spectrum is not only to have certain challenges in communication. It can mean living with a fundamental experience of uncertainty in the face of the social world. One may mean well and still come across wrongly. One may be engaged and still be perceived as intense. One may be caring and still fail to express care in the expected way. One may be honest and still seem harsh. One may try to participate, but spend so much energy understanding the situation that participation itself becomes exhausting.

Then life becomes a form of sowing.

Each time one says something, one sows a seed. Each time one tries to come closer to another person, one sows a seed. Each time one writes a text, speaks in a gathering, enters a working community, or reveals something of one’s inner life, one sows a seed. But one does not know where it will fall. Will it be understood? Will it be rejected? Will it be laughed at? Will it be misused? Will it lie there dead? Or is there a place where it can take root?

This is the vulnerability of the sower.

Vulnerability is not weakness. It is an opening toward the world. To be vulnerable means that something is at stake. A human being who cannot be wounded cannot truly be touched either. Human life is possible because we are not closed within ourselves. We depend on others. We need response, resonance, gaze, language, community, and recognition. We need someone to say, directly or indirectly: I see you. You exist. What you bring matters.

The struggle for recognition is therefore not vanity. It is not primarily about praise, attention, or social success. It is about being realized as a human being in relation to others. We become ourselves alone, but not only alone. We need a space where what we carry within us can come forward without being trampled down.

For people on the autism spectrum, this struggle can be especially demanding. Not because they lack an inner life, but because the path between the inner and the outer can be difficult. What is clear within oneself may come out unclearly. What is meant as seriousness may be perceived as distance. What is meant as precision may sound like criticism. What is meant as care may become invisible because it does not follow the usual social forms.

Then a painful distance arises between intention and effect. One wanted to sow wheat, but others thought one was throwing stones.

This experience can create caution. One learns to hold back. One becomes careful with words. One analyses situations before entering them. One can become an expert in preparation, while at the same time losing spontaneity. One may begin to hide behind roles, competence, politeness, routines, and achievements. Not because one wants to deceive anyone, but because the mask protects.

But the mask has its price. It can grant access to the community, but not always to recognition. For recognition is not only about the role being accepted. It is about the human being behind the role being allowed to exist.

Here we meet existentialism. Existentialism often begins with the unsettling insight that the human being is not something fixed and finished. We must become through choice, action, and responsibility. We are thrown into a world we did not choose, but we must nevertheless answer to it. We must live this life, not another. We must find a way to be.

For a person on the spectrum, this can mean living with a double movement. On the one hand, one must learn to know the world. One must understand codes, situations, expectations, and boundaries. On the other hand, one must not lose oneself in the attempt to fit in. One must find a form of adaptation that does not become self-erasure. One must find one’s own way of being in the world.

It is perhaps here that Søren Kierkegaard comes closer than one might first think. For Kierkegaard, the human being is not only a social being seeking recognition. The human being is the single individual. The single individual stands in relation to oneself, to others, and to God. What is decisive in life is not only to be seen by one’s age, but to become true in one’s own existence. This does not mean that recognition is unimportant. Kierkegaard himself knew the pain of misunderstanding, ridicule, and loneliness. But he also knew that a person can win the world and lose oneself.

Therefore, the sower also becomes a Kierkegaardian image. He is not only the vulnerable one seeking community. He is the single individual who must do what he is called to do, even if he does not know whether his age will understand him. He walks across the field alone. He cannot hide in the crowd. He cannot wait for complete safety. He must act in the seriousness of solitude.

Kierkegaard himself lived as a sower. He sowed his writings into an age he believed had forgotten the seriousness of Christianity. He did not primarily want to inform, explain, or teach in the ordinary sense. He wanted to awaken. He wanted to bring the reader to the point where the reader could no longer hide behind systems, opinions, habits, or what “one” says. He wanted to lead the human being back to oneself, to choice, to responsibility, to the relation to God where no one can appear on one’s behalf.

But this sowing cost him dearly. The break with Regine Olsen became a wound in his life. He renounced a possible bourgeois life, the security of marriage, and the recognition that might have followed from becoming a more acceptable man in his time. Instead, he chose authorship, solitude, indirectness, and the painful task of saying something that perhaps could not be said without wounding both himself and others. He became a stranger in his own city. He experienced the ridicule of the press. He came into conflict with the church. He was seen, but not necessarily understood.

Still he continued. He could not do otherwise. What he had been given to say had to be said.

This makes Kierkegaard more than a philosopher in this essay. He becomes an existential figure beside Van Gogh’s sower. Not because he cultivated suffering, but because he knew that truth can cost. He knew that there is a kind of life-task that cannot be carried out without risk. The one who wishes to awaken others must endure being misunderstood. The one who speaks of inwardness may be perceived as strange. The one who speaks to the single individual may be rejected by the crowd.

Kierkegaard also did not want to be understood too easily. This is why he often wrote indirectly, under pseudonyms, in voices that could not simply be turned into his own opinions. He did not sow ready-made answers. He sowed unrest. He sowed questions. He sowed spiritual trial. He sowed a movement within the reader. His authorship is therefore not merely a collection of thoughts, but a pedagogy of existential vulnerability. The reader is not only meant to learn something. The reader is meant to be placed before oneself.

Here the struggle for recognition gains a deeper tension. On the one hand, the human being needs to be seen and affirmed. Without recognition, life can become cold, shameful, and unbearable. On the other hand, the human being cannot make recognition into a god. If I only sow what others will reward me for sowing, I may lose what is actually mine. If I only say what brings applause, I may lose my own voice. If I only become what the other can tolerate, I may slowly disappear from myself.

The Kierkegaardian question is therefore not only: How do I dare to sow when so much can go wrong?

The deeper question is: How do I dare to sow the seed that is actually mine?

This is a serious question for every human being. But it has a particular resonance for those who live on the autism spectrum. Not because autism in itself makes a person Kierkegaardian, but because the experience of standing somewhat to the side can sharpen the question of who one is. When one does not simply slide into the social world, one is often confronted early with oneself. One must ask: Shall I merely adapt? Shall I hide? Shall I become the person others can more easily tolerate? Or is there a way to be true, without turning difference into rebellion and without erasing oneself?

Here vulnerability becomes double. One needs recognition in order to live. But one also needs the courage not to sell one’s truth for the sake of recognition. This is a difficult balance. For a person who has often experienced misunderstanding, the temptation can be strong to make oneself more ordinary than one is. One can learn to say the right thing, smile in the right place, soften one’s intensity, hide one’s unease, hold back one’s questions, simplify one’s seriousness. One can become more socially acceptable, but at the same time more distant from oneself.

Kierkegaard might perhaps have said that this is the quiet form of despair: not willing to be oneself, or wanting to be a self without being willing to receive oneself as one actually is. Despair is not always dramatic. It can be well dressed, well functioning, and polite. It can sit at the table and smile. It can have an academic title, a social role, and refined language. But within it there may be a human being who has learned to keep the hand closed.

Perhaps this is what Van Gogh’s sower shows me. He does not walk like everyone else. He is not safe. He is not guaranteed a harvest. He is alone in a vast landscape. Yet he is not passive. He is not merely a victim of the sun, the earth, the weather, and fate. He acts. He does what is his to do.

To sow is an existential act. It is to say: I do not know how this will end, but I will nevertheless give something to the world.

Van Gogh himself knew much of this. He wanted to give the world something, but did not receive the recognition he longed for while he was alive. He painted with an intensity that almost seems to come from a place where life itself was at stake. His images are not calm descriptions of the world. They are attempts to hold on to the world, to grasp it, to love it, to struggle with it. In the sower, we do not see only a farm worker. We see a human being casting something of his inner light into uncertain soil.

Van Gogh and Kierkegaard do not meet in art history, but they can meet in the experience of being a human being who did not easily find a place in his own time. Both carried an intensity that was difficult to make socially comfortable. Both lived with religious and existential questions that would not leave them in peace. Both gave the world something whose reception they could not fully control. Both sowed. And both experienced that what one sows is not necessarily understood while one is still alive.

It is easy to romanticize suffering when writing about artists and philosophers. One should be careful about that. Suffering is not beautiful in itself. Pain does not necessarily make a person wiser. Exclusion can destroy. Loneliness can break a person down. Lack of recognition can make a human being bitter, ashamed, or silent.

But it is also true that some people, precisely because they have experienced vulnerability so strongly, can see something others overlook. They can see how fragile participation is. They can see how much a kind gaze means. They can see how dangerous it is when people are sorted according to how easy they are to understand. They can see that a community is not only tested by how it receives the successful, but by how it receives those who come into the world differently.

This does not apply only to people with autism spectrum conditions. It applies to all who know the coldness of exclusion. People who fall out of working life. People who become ill. People who grow old. People who struggle with addiction, grief, social hardship, poverty, or shame. Everyone can experience that what they sow is not received. Everyone can experience no longer finding soil.

Therefore, the sower is also a social-philosophical image. He reminds us that the human being does not only need the freedom to sow. The human being also needs soil. A society that praises individual responsibility but does not give people soil in which to grow becomes harsh. It tells people that they must succeed, but lets them sow on stone. It demands courage, but does not give safety. It demands participation, but creates spaces where only certain forms of humanity are recognized.

The struggle for recognition is therefore not only individual. It is also social and political. It concerns which people are allowed to appear. Who is allowed to be wise? Who is allowed to be difficult? Who is allowed to be slow? Who is allowed to be different without immediately being defined as a problem? Who is allowed to sow with their own movement of the hand?

In this perspective, the autism spectrum is not only a medical or educational theme. It is also a question of how we understand the human being. What kind of society can tolerate difference? What kind of community gives room for people who do not always mirror ordinary expectations? What kind of school, working life, church, family, and public sphere can see that difference is not only a lack, but also another way of experiencing the world?

But Kierkegaard reminds us at the same time that society can never solve the whole of the human being’s existential task. Even in the best community, the single individual must become oneself. Even when one receives recognition, one must ask whether one is true. Even when one finds soil, one must dare to sow one’s own seeds and not only the seeds that most easily give a harvest. Community can give room, but it cannot live life for us. No one can choose on our behalf. No one can be the single individual for us.

This does not mean that everything difficult should be romanticized. Autism can be demanding. Misunderstandings can be painful. Overload can be real. Social exhaustion is not a poetic image, but a bodily experience. There are days when the world becomes too strong, too fast, too unclear. There are situations in which one cannot manage to sow. Then one must be allowed to rest. The earth also needs rest. The sower, too, needs to put down the bag.

But there is also another seriousness: the danger of allowing defeats to have the final word. If one has too often experienced that the seeds do not grow, one may begin to believe that one has nothing to sow. This is perhaps the deepest wound caused by lack of recognition. Not only that others do not see one, but that one eventually begins to see oneself through their absent gaze.

Then the struggle becomes existential. One must fight to preserve the belief that what one carries can have value. Not arrogantly. Not triumphantly. But quietly, persistently. One may perhaps have to say to oneself: I have seeds, even if not all soil receives them. I have something to give, even if it is not always understood. I must search for the soil where it can grow.

This has been important in my own life. I only learned late that I belonged on the autism spectrum. Before that, the difference was there, but without a name. One then learns to live with questions one cannot quite formulate. Why did this go wrong? Why did they not understand me? Why do I become so tired by what others seem to master? Why do I feel both near and distant at the same time?

When such a life receives a language, something happens. The diagnosis does not explain the whole human being. Nor should it. But it can cast light backward. It can give the experiences a context. It can make it possible to understand that much of what was experienced as personal failure also had to do with another neurological way of being in the world.

There is a form of recognition in this. Not necessarily from others first, but from reality itself. Something falls into place. One sees one’s life in a new light. Not as a defeat, but as a demanding path.

At the same time, the question remains: How shall one live on? How shall one dare to sow when one knows so much about the risk? How shall one give something of oneself when one knows how quickly it can be misunderstood?

Perhaps the answer is not to become less vulnerable. Perhaps the answer is to find a wiser vulnerability. A vulnerability that does not throw everything everywhere, but also does not close the hand completely. A vulnerability that knows not all spaces are safe, but that some spaces can become so. A vulnerability that distinguishes between defeat and identity. The fact that something fails does not mean that the human being is a failure.

This is practical philosophy in its most concrete form. It is not only about thinking correctly, but about living with wisdom. Knowing when to speak and when to remain silent. When to withdraw and when to step forward. When to protect oneself and when to dare. When to sow and when to wait for better soil.

But practical philosophy must also dare the Kierkegaardian question: What good is it to become wisely adapted if one no longer lives as oneself? Wisdom cannot only be social smoothness. It must also be fidelity to what one knows, deep down, to be true. Not as stubbornness. Not as self-assertion. Not as a right to be inconsiderate. But as a humble obligation to the life-task that one cannot hand over to others.

The sower in Van Gogh’s painting does not know all this. Or perhaps he knows it with his body. He walks. He carries. He casts. He makes his movement in the light of a sun greater than himself.

Perhaps that is why the image touches me. It does not say that everything will succeed. It does not say that the world is safe. It does not say that the sower will be understood. But it says that there is dignity in continuing. A dignity in giving something to the world, even when the world is uncertain. A dignity in being human under an open sky.

For people on the spectrum, this can be a powerful image. Not because we are all lonely geniuses or suffering artists. That would be a cliché. But because many of us know something of the risk of stepping forward. We know that social life can be a field where much is lost. We know that participation can cost. We know that the hand may remain closed.

But we also know that good soil exists. We may have found it late. Perhaps in a field of study. In a library. In a workshop. In nature. In writing. In music. In a friendship. In a marriage. In an academic environment. In silence. In a particular task where our abilities were finally allowed to come into their own.

When a human being finds such soil, something happens. What was once deviation can become strength. What was once strange can become distinctiveness. What was once loneliness can become depth. What was once vulnerability can become a source of care for other vulnerable people.

This does not mean that everything becomes easy. But it means that life receives another interpretation. One sees that it was not only about failing. It was also about searching for a place where what one carried within could grow.

The vulnerability of the sower is therefore not only the pain of possible failure. It is also the hope that something may grow. It is not sentimental optimism. It is a darker and more mature form of hope. A hope that knows the stony ground. A hope that knows the thorns. A hope that has seen the birds come. But that still does not give up on good soil.

Perhaps this is what life continually asks of us: not to secure ourselves against all risk, but to find the courage to give something of ourselves in a wise way. Not everywhere. Not to everyone. Not without boundaries. But not never.

Private Photo

To live is to sow.

Sometimes we sow with large gestures. At other times with small ones. A word. A text. A conversation. A glance. An action. An attempt to explain who we are. A piece of work done properly. A thought passed on. A hand that opens, even after many experiences of rejection.

But Kierkegaard might perhaps add: To live is not only to sow. It is to sow as the single individual. It is to dare to give the world the seed one has actually been given to carry, not only the seed that best fits the soil of others. It is to stand in one’s task without any guarantee of being understood. It is to endure that the path of truth sometimes passes through solitude, without making solitude into an ideal.

Van Gogh’s sower still walks across the field. The sun burns behind him. The earth is restless. The shadows are long. We do not know what will grow.

But the hand is open.

And perhaps dignity begins exactly there.