(or: the depiction) and that which is depicted in it. That which does the depicting is this picture here, painted with oils on canvas. But we can also turn this painting [370] into an object of discussion and study it in its own right, say, in terms of its degree of preservation. Is it well preserved or not? Has it been damaged? Was it subsequently restored? When I consider the painting in this fashion, I am looking at it primarily as a “painted thing” (that happens to depict something). I treat it as an image-thing while prescinding from whatever is depicted in it.

However, what is depicted in the painting—say, the sunflowers Van Gogh painted—does not get damaged if the picture should happen to suffer damage. Consider the case of an artist who sets out to depict sunflowers that are wilted and spoiled.¹²⁴ He will succeed at the task not by producing a spoiled picture but by producing a picture so perfectly unspoiled that it depicts what it is meant to: the wilted flowers. And it is what is depicted that we see if we approach and understand the picture naturally. That is what we see first of all: the thing depicted. It shows up directly—whereas it takes a mental somersault to understand the picture as a “painted thing.”

The Abgebildete—the thing insofar as it has been copied and depicted in an image—is what we can simply intuit [in the painting]. It is what simply shows up and can been seen: the Bild or image. It has the same meaning here as when we speak of a Bild or image of a landscape. Here a Bild no longer means [as in the case of a death-mask] some image that, as a copy of something, refers us to that something. Here, rather, a Bild or image is that which, qua depiction, shows itself. It is what is intuitively visible in and through the depiction. More precisely, “image” means the “looks,” the “visible aspect” the thing offers of itself. It is the species, what is seeable and seen, what is given to an act of intuiting. We refer, for example, to the “image” that someone can give of himself, as in the phrase, “He presented a remarkable image of himself in that situation.” In this case “image” simply means what is visible in itself.

This is the sense of the word “image” that Kant uses in his exposition of the schematism. Concepts cannot be copied in an image [abgebildet] but they must be furnished with an image [Bild]. That is, they must somehow be able to offer a visible aspect of themselves in something intuitable, something which can be depicted in a procedure whose rules are dictated by the very concept that is to be depicted. [371] Therefore, visible aspects of concepts must, in principle, be able to be produced. These images—or quite simply, visible, intuitable aspects—that arise from a depiction regulated by the concepts themselves indicate the schema, i.e., they indicate the rule governing their own depictability; and by way of this rule they indicate what dictates

124. [See, for example, van Gogh’s Two Cut Sunflowers and Four Cut Sunflowers.]