Life and Will in Nietzsche and Bergson

Abstract

The bringing together of Nietzsche and Bergson, which may appear strange, seems justified by fact that two philosophers were first to understand life in terms of will. Admittedly, we find a similar doctrine already in Schopenhauer. But when Schopenhauer speaks of will-to-life, he considers will as a thing in itself, and life as a phenomenon. It is true that will, inasmuch as it is unceasing thirst, is only thing that can explain life's tendency to self-perpetuation. However, when Schopenhauer describes struggle between forces—or rather, between ideas—and ensuing victory of a superior idea, this victory that lets him explain deployment of life in heart of phenomena is always expressed in terms of objectification (Objektivation). 1 Both Nietzsche and Bergson, in their own ways, refuse distinction between phenomena and thing-in-itself. Of course Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy reprises Schopenhauer's terminology of principal of individualization, but transforms its meaning. Beginning with Human, All Too Human, however, we find a strong critique of Kant's and Schopenhauer's distinction. 2 Later, however, Nietzsche would perceive a radical distinction between becoming and its essence, which is will to power. 3 But this distinction is properly nietzschean, and presupposes prior challenging of distinction between phenomena and thing-in-itself. 4 As for Bergson, it is following Time and Free Will: An Essay on Immediate Data of Consciousness (TFW, 1889) that he suggests that we can have access to intimate stuff of things— this being flow of time. Admittedly, Matter and Memory (1896) will rediscover kantian vocabulary and will indeed distinguish between thing, which is matter as undivided continuity, and phenomenon that we perceive. But, Bergson clarifies, the relation between 'phenomenon' and 'thing' is not that of appearance to reality, but merely that of part to whole (MM, 306). Perception gives us access to matter itself, in its reality, but we only consciously perceive those parts of it that have bearing on our actions. Thus for Nietzsche and Bergson, life is not objectification of will; rather, it is will itself. In what follows, I would like to explore reasons