Life and Will in Nietzsche and Bergson

Life and Will in Nietzsche and Bergson Arnaud François (bio) Translated by Roxanne Lapidus 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. * * * An essential moment in the trajectories of the two philosophers is to be found in the critique they make of darwinism. Among other things, we find the same argument in both Nietzsche and Bergson: life cannot be understood uniquely as adaptation to external circumstances; it also refers to an internal movement. "Life is not adaptation of internal conditions to external conditions, but will to power which, from within, always masters and incorporates more of 'the exterior,'" [FP XII, 7 (9)] wrote Nietzsche. We find in Bergson analagous declarations: "Science has [...] shown along the whole evolution of life, the various consequences attending upon the fact that living things must be adapted to the conditions of the environment. Yet this necessity would seem to explain the arrest of life in various definite forms, rather than the movement which carries the organization ever higher" (ME, 24). Darwinism, in the form the two philosophers encounter it in Spencer, as well as in the form Nietzsche encounters it in Haeckel, is in contradiction with the facts, Nietzsche maintains: according to such a doctrine, the most wonderful successes of evolution should be the norm, which is not the case.5 It is especially in Eimer that Bergson denounces the notion of adaptation: to adapt is always consciously to conserve what one knows is useful to oneself. The hypothesis of an adaptation that is purely mechanical is thus self-contradictory.6 In an astonishing convergence of movements, both Nietzsche and Bergson come to characterize life in terms of "will to power" for the former, and "élan" for the latter. We even find in Bergson a reference to will: it is a "pure willing" that "runs through this matter, communicating life to it" (CE, 238). It is...