In chapter III of Creative Evolution Bergson develops a theory of the reciprocal genesis of the ‘understanding’ (or the ‘intellect’ as he calls it) on the one hand, and matter and space on the other. Kant had raised a serious issue for the basic empiricist model of knowledge: space is not something we have an empirical impression of. Yet, if, instead, we say that we have empirical impressions of spatial relations (things being next to other things, for example) we realize that the experience of such relations already presupposes knowledge of space. So, Kant argues, space is not one representation among others, but the a priori form of all experiences, given prior to those experiences by being the basis upon which they are constructed. Bergson agrees with the problem Kant has raised, but disagrees with his solution. If we follow Kant, Bergson argues, it becomes impossible to give an account of why we should construct experience in terms of spatial relations. That is, we cannot give an account of how we as experiencing transcendental subjects emerge.
In place of Kant’s transcendental idealist approach for accounting for our knowledge of space, and the a priori precision with which we can apply geometrical concepts to the matter we discover strewn around in it, Bergson offers an alternative. If we understand matter and space evolving alongside the faculties we have for contemplating and manipulating matter and space, then their ‘fittedness’, one to the other, would not be mysterious. In this picture, from out of an endless becoming, myriad movements in unfurling duration, organisms gradually develop the means for encoding some gerrymandered set of sub-rhythms within those movements into stable elements: certain constancies of properties of interest. This faculty, to make stable divisions among a mobile flux and think of them organized in a space that separates them, evolves and extends itself to the degree that the gerrymander it carves aids life in its exigencies. Thus, the world appears as so much matter strewn about a uniform space because we have evolved to see it that way, but we have evolved to see it that way because, for our purposes, that’s a fine enough way to see it.
But philosophy goes wrong when it mistakes this ‘fine way of seeing, for our purposes’ as a complete metaphysical picture. The understanding, or the intellect, is at home in manipulating the matter it has defined in the space it uses to organize it. It can only approach time via analogy or symbolism (where, for example, time can be arranged on a spatial line as an infinite series of points), which is to miss time, change, and duration completely. Instead, time reveals itself to us not via the intellect at all, but via our experience of action.