«We lay the path by walking on it»: Kant, Bergson and the Power of Space

Abstract

It is usual to oppose Kant and Bergson as the cartographic reason and its other. Yet, considering the role that space plays in the philosophy of both, it is possible not only to point beyond this opposition. The mediality of space, its natural schematic property, makes it possible to identify a significant proximity between space as a pure form of sensibility and the pure perception with which Bergson opens Matter and Memory. The aim of the article is to argue in favour of this kinship by considering above all the role that space plays in the first edition of the Fourth Paralogism of Pure Reason and in the Opus postumum through the filter of the arguments used by Bergson, in the third chapter of Creative Evolution, to demonstrate the simultaneous genesis of matter and intelligence.