Europe Discovers Nietzsche 327attempt, because he could not get beyond the traditional notion of time
as "space" in which life processes take place. Bergson was better able to
picture time as a creative, dynamic force. He regarded it not as a medi-
um in which something is "contained" but as a productive power. For
Bergson, time was not a mere stage on which a drama unfolds; time
takes on the role of actor. Man does not just experience time, but pro-
duces time by means of his actions. The inner organ of time is initiative
and spontaneity. Man is a beginner creature. According to Bergson, the
innermost reaches of man's experience of time contain within them the
experience of creative freedom. The creative cosmos attains its self-
awareness in human freedom.
In this respect, Bergson's line of thought was ultimately more closely
allied to Schelling than to Nietzsche, but Max Scheler's Vom Umstur^der
Werte (Attempt at a Philosophy of Life, 1915) paired Bergson and
Nietzsche as like-minded Lebensphilosophen. According to Scheler, both
philosophers sought to liberate people from the "prison" of the "purely
mechanical and mechanized" and lead them "into a blossoming garden"
(Scheler, Umstur^ 339). In the philosophy of Nietzsche (and of
Bergson), the lava of life eventually breaks through any encrustations
and petrifactions. "We exist, revolve, and live in the absolute" (Scheler,
Umstur^ 339).
Georg Simmel also interpreted Nietzsche as a philosopher of cre-
ative life in his famous lecture series of 1907. He put his finger on the
exact set of questions that had perplexed Nietzsche and on the
panorama of meaning that Nietzsche had sketched out. In the past,
Simmel explained, life came equipped with a supreme goal and value,
but modernity no longer has these foci. The complex and immense
mechanism of society has now become a universe of means no longer
applied to a central sense of purpose. Modern consciousness is "bound
up with the means" (Simmel 3), entangled in long chains of events that
have no link to an ultimate purpose. Consciousness has relinquished
sublime infinity and gained in its stead the poindess infinity of a being
that runs like a hamster on a treadmill. The result is "the anxious ques-