Life and Will in Nietzsche and Bergson

The bringing together of Nietzsche and Bergson, which may appear strange, seems justified by the fact that the two philosophers were the 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 the only thing that can explain life’s tendency to self-perpetuation. However, when Schopenhauer describes the struggle between forces—or rather, between ideas—and the ensuing victory of a superior idea, this victory that lets him explain the deployment of life in the heart of phenomena is always expressed in terms of objectification (Objektivation).1 Both Nietzsche and Bergson, in their own ways, refuse the distinction between phenomena and the thing-in-itself. Of course Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy reprises Schopenhauer’s terminology of the 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 the will to power.3 But this distinction is properly nietzschean, and presupposes the prior challenging of the distinction between phenomena and the thing-in-itself.4 As for Bergson, it is following Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (TFW, 1889) that he suggests that we can have access to the intimate stuff of things—this being the flow of time. Admittedly, Matter and Memory (1896) will rediscover kantian vocabulary and will indeed distinguish between the “thing,” which is matter as undivided continuity, and the “phenomenon” that we perceive. But, Bergson clarifies, “the relation between the ‘phenomenon’ and the ‘thing’ is not that of appearance to reality, but merely that of the part to the 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 the objectification of will; rather, it is will itself. In what follows, I would like to explore the reasons [End Page 100] for this identification (is it in fact an identification?) along with its consequences and difficulties.