I can think of nothing that would more quickly facilitate a grasp of the thinking of Immanuel Kant than an understanding of what he means with his "anschauung". The anschauung (or envisagement, as I usually render this term in English) may have been given its most simple and yet dramatic expression by David Hume in his Enquiry into Human Understanding (Section 118 [use back button to return here]) when he distinguished his subjectively seated, retinal image of his table from the table itself. That this is an anschauung/envisagement becomes clear when we realize that we are not compelled to make that distinction and could just as easily (and perhaps even more easily) take the image of the table for the table itself.* Such a conception would certainly constitute a different envisagement or anschauung of the world. And it is immediately apparent that the envisagement is entirely within us and not something which is given to us from elsewhere; it is not in the thing, but rather in how we think of and consider the thing.

[* It is helpful in this regard to keep in mind that when we see a face in a cloud we could easily consider the face to be in the cloud in the same way and sense that we think the human face is actually on the front of the human head, i.e., the face, and not just the cloud, could be looked at and viewed from different perspectives. In this sense then a face is actually detached from the head and therefore can appear here and there, in clouds, shrubbery and even in the folds of cloth.]

While the anschauungs are countless, there are two fundamental, human anschauungs which underlie all human perception and which provide a certain form to perception and even make perception possible in the first place. These two anschauungs may be called the Hookian, and the Humean.*

[* Named, respectively, in honor of the famous Captain James Hook, nemesis of the storybook hero, Peter Pan; and of David Hume, arch-skeptic of the first half of the 18th century Scotland and the one responsible for awakening Kant from his "dogmatic slumber".]

The Hookian assertion (which is simply understood and not usually openly expressed) is two-fold, namely: 1. space and time are quite apparent and clearly encompass all things before our eyes as we peruse the scenes and sights of this world; and 2. it is equally apparent that things are exactly as they appear to us, e.g., things getting physically smaller in size the more removed they are from us, and faces occasionally and actually and physically appearing as such in clouds. This anschauung (as every human anschauung) would be driven by a controlled talk as young Hook was beginning to catch on to things (and to talk) as a child.* People would have said to Hook when leaving him, or when he were leaving their presence, "O Jimmy, look how small we are getting."**

[* There is an interesting case in Germany of a foundling by the name of Kasper Hauser who was apparently raised under highly controlled conditions and then left standing one morning at the age of about 15 in a village square. His keeper had evidently never allowed Kasper to actually see another human being. As Kasper developed an ability to communicate, he once denied the possibility that he had been raised in such a tower as was pointed out to him in the distance because, as he said, the tower in which he was raised was so large that it would encompass all the universe.--Evidently, as he was removed from the tower by his keeper to be left in the village, he was not allowed to turn around to see how small the tower was becoming as the distance from it increased.***]

[** To continue this envisagement/anschauung we would have to say that things approach us as we approach them. Any one who can walk along and look closely at the ground as heshe does so will come to see the ground moving under our feet, much as though one were on a treadmill.]

[*** A like case according to myth and perhaps not so extreme is the world (the enclosed and expansive palace grounds) in which Gautama, the Buddha, grew up, for he was denied all access to the world beyond his surrounding walls until finally his charioteer agreed to take him.]

The Humean envisagement agrees with the first assertion of the Hookian that time and space are quite apparent and encompass all things about us, but then parts company with Hook entirely and introduces the remarkably novel assertion that things do not get smaller the more remote they are, but merely seem to, for what we see (according to this anschauung) are not things per se, but rather merely images or perceptions of things; and furthermore that faces are not in clouds, but merely that a cloud, from a particular perspective, takes on the looks of a face.* This might also be called the common-sense anschauung or point-of-view envisagement and the one which is common to all humans unless, like Captain Hook or Kasper Hauser, they were raised by a talk which were directed to a specialized anschauung/envisagement.

[* It was then, based on this understanding, that Hume was forced by his own honesty and consistency to doubt any possibility of certitude with regard to any knowledge of these external things, and so essentially descended into empirical idealism and its concomitant skepticism. But this topic is reserved for subsequent investigation.]

Now we said that the Hookian and the Humean envisagements were the two fundamental human anschauungs. It will be helpful to note that the common element of both of these, namely that space and time encompass all things, is itself an even more fundamental anschauung which might be called the human anschauung, and which can be contrasted with what we might then accordingly call the animal anschauung or the "talk-less" envisagement, namely where space and time are not apparent at all and do not enter into the mental and behavior equation. In the animal anschauung things get bigger and smaller on their own, just like in the Hookian anschauung, but in this envisagement no notice is taken of the spatial and temporal aspects of this change, and so while the animals get used to the regular change in size due to distance, e.g., a bird approaching a limb, it is like the visions on a television screen, namely: through the development of unconscious expectations the animals negotiate this arena very well, but still never come to realize the orderly change in size and that the size is related to distance.

The human anschauung, things in time and space, is such that we are able to distinguish: now from then, and up from down, left from right, back from front, here from there, etc. and are further able to calibrate our now and then and the up and down, etc., with those of another person who is in sight. The animal, in contrast, is able to orient itself directly to some object of interest, e.g., visually follow some path to get to that object, and where everything looked at is always straight ahead and directly in front of the animal's eyes.*

[* I am not sure if the animal is able to gaze on a scene and to notice that something is to the right of the visual field, for example. My guess is that if anything is of interest to that animal the eyes of the animal are turned to gaze directly on that thing and in which case the thing is in the center of vision. But I am not sure about this.]

In his monumental Critique of Pure Reason, Kant sets out to bridge both of these gaps, namely first of all from the animal to the human, and then from the immediately apparent and intuitive Hookian anschauung to that more complex envisagement of Hume. The importance of this has not yet been indicated. Since we are dealing with an anschauung or envisagement, this means that this is a way of looking at things and so which resides in the looker and not in the object looked at. Consequently and of course, since then we ourselves, as the looker, are providing these views of things, the question must arise: by what authority may we presume to think that the way we have of considering things which are independent of us is valid and binding on the objects we are considering. For it is surely clear to even the superficial thinker that we could dream up a host of things, e.g., gods and demons, but that we are not thereby authorized to consider them as actually existing. It is one thing to conjure up something via a productive imagination, and something else again to recognize that something. It is to this task that Kant calls upon us, as fellow thinkers, to prepare ourselves and to join in the solution to this problem.

Therefore our task will be two fold in this initial stage, namely first of all to justify the acquisition of time and space as the forms of human perception, and then, subsequently, to justify the Humean anschauung of uniformly and independently existing objects. When that has been accomplished, we will then be ready to explore the problems that arise in philosophy as a result of this Humean anschauung and how it is that Kant will solve them. In particular this will enable us to examine the classic conflict between the necessitation of nature and the freedom of will which is so important to religious thinking. All this remains here a project.

A further consideration of time and space as ways of human looking can be found here.

See also the text of the entire Aesthetic from the Critique of Pure Reason.