"Whereas for Kant time is one of the categories of the human mind that structure our experience, for Bergson, the duration of time is an absolute reality, and, as a first step, we can know, in our immediate consciousness, the duration of our inner life directly. From that basis, through his four major works, he opens a new path to intuition which he deepens and expands as his philosophy progresses, beyond our own lives to life in general and to the vital principle of all things."
"In it, he develops his notion of "duration": that lived, experienced time is the reality, and that there would be no succession without the past being preserved in consciousness. Clock time, or the time of physics, is derived from this more fundamental time, and though valid and useful for daily life, common sense, and scientific knowledge, it is ultimately relative to practical purposes, not absolutely real."
Kant conceived reality in itself as chaotic beyond the order and sense imposed by the mind, so knowledge and experience operate only within a mind-structured domain. Bergson restores the possibility of direct intuition into reality and revives metaphysics by making duration an absolute reality rather than a mere mental category. Immediate consciousness can know the duration of inner life directly. Bergson locates clock time as a spatialized derivative of lived duration and explains that measuring time abstracts its essential flow by separating continuous moments into discrete, countable instants.
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