cannot draw “house in general”—only a house of this specific size, these specific colors, this specific set of materials, and so on.

The constitutive features of “house in general” can vary widely over a broad field [363] and across different viewpoints (size, color, materials). Moreover, each one of these multiple variations can join with another determinate variation to depict a specific house. Every intuitable depiction of the empirical concept “house” has antecedently decided on a specific set of determinate variations as regards the essential features of what is to be depicted, viz., the essence “house.”

What is to be depicted in this case is itself empirically intuitable. (I can always directly see a specific house.) Nonetheless, by its very concept it is much harder to reach through the depiction (the imaged house) than pure sensible concepts are reachable by way of sensibilization. I mean “pure sensible concepts” in the sense of geometrical concepts.

In the sensibilization of concepts, the thing to be sensibly depicted—viz., the concept—functions as a rule governing a general “antecedent sketch” [Vorzeichnung] that is not to be restricted to only what the sketch depicts, i.e., renders visible. That which is to be depicted in the sensibilization, therefore, functions as what shows up in the rule governing the sensible depiction. Or more precisely: The concept that is to be depicted sensibly is the basis governing the rule that governs the depiction. That which does the depicting [of the sensible concept]—i.e., a drawing of a specific house—does not make a copy of the essence “house” the way a photograph of this tree reproduces only this specific tree. Rather, the drawing sensibilizes the essence “house” in such a way that the essence “house” prescribes the kind of sensibilization and the kind of possible sensibilization. And this rule which governs the intuitive depiction of a concept and which is prescribed by the content of the concept itself, and which governs the procedure of the sensibilization—this is what Kant calls a schema.

Between the depiction of sensible appearances (in the sense of a pure image) and the sensibilization of an empirical concept, there is something else that is neither a depiction nor a schematizing in the Kantian sense (and I will allude to it only in passing). That is the [364] depiction of an image in a work of art. A photograph, an image of a dog in a handbook of zoology, and a painting called “The Dog”—each depicts something different, and in a different way. The deer in the forest—those, for example, that Franz Mark has painted—are not thesein this specific forest, but simply “A Deer in the Woods.”¹¹⁹ We can also call this kind of depiction in the artistic sense a “schematizing,” the

119. [Franz Mark (1880–1916), the Munich-born German Expressionist who died in World War I. See, for example, the reproduction at http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/marc/deerwood.jpg.html.]