Anschauung

Anschauung is a German philosophical term that generally translates as “intuition,” “perception,” or “direct presentation.” Its etymology combines the prefix an‑ (“on, at”) with the verb schauen (“to look”), suggesting a mode of seeing that is immediate rather than mediated by concepts. In the history of German philosophy, the concept acquired technical meanings in the works of Immanuel Kant and later phenomenologists.

Kant distinguishes Anschauung from concept (Begriff) in his Critique of Pure Reason. For him, Anschauung denotes the raw, sensuous data of experience that are given in space and time; it is the necessary form of immediate representation that can then be organized by the categories of the understanding. Kant further links Anschauung to the faculty of sensibility, asserting that knowledge arises only when sensibility’s raw input is synthesized by the understanding’s concepts.

In phenomenology, Edmund Husserl reinterprets Anschauung as a step toward a direct, pre‑theoretical grasp of phenomena. He emphasizes that phenomenological reduction seeks to suspend judgment and attend to how objects are given in intuition, thereby revealing their essential structures. Martin Heidegger and later existential philosophers also employ the term, often stressing the situated, embodied character of perception.

Outside philosophy, Anschauung appears in art theory and pedagogy to denote the role of immediate visual or sensory experience in shaping understanding. The term remains a focal point in debates about the relationship between perception, cognition, and meaning in both classical and contemporary epistemology.