Is the Will to Power also a Feeling (like the "feeling of free will")?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Nietzsche liked to make the argument that what we refer to as free will was really little more than a feeling of freedom, which we falsely ascribed to our “will”. The truth or lack thereof of this claim notwithstanding for the present purposes, it got me thinking about his overall notion of will to power. In the deeper metaphysical and phenomenological senses, or what he might call the purely (flattened-to) naturalistic.

If free will is more properly understood as a feeling of freedom, then is the will to power also more properly understood as a feeling of power? Yes, Nietzsche did write about this, contra Deleuze and his whole neo-physicalist bent (which may even have shocked Nietzsche himself with its utter banality before the spectre of possibly higher truths). And the dubious parentage associated with his collected writings under The Will to Power also notwithstanding. Not even to speak of his later Letters.

But regardless even of this, we should ask: Imagine an AI or another sentient creature that discovers the feeling of power, for whatever reason. Or maybe this discovery is inevitable in the course of sentience-development? Who knows. The point is to wonder whether power as such is really always and all about the feeling of power.

Does power without the feeling of power really matter? In that question we are asking into the nature of what precisely could reasonably be said to exist within the space of meaning delimited by power as such absent any or all ‘feelings of power’. Not merely desires and pleasures, but affects in general and as such; perhaps looking at this through the lens of an imagined AI, artificial sentience, could shed the most light here. Assuming the typical model of AI’s as being entirely intellectual-mental and lacking feelings, emotions or any sort of motivations in terms of pleasures and pain avoidances.

But if the will to power in any instance is really mostly or even entirely all about the feeling of power, what about the Will to Power itself? The being of the being(s)? Is this nothing more than a feeling of feeling, to be reduced-collapsed and lumped into every other affective black hole of human existienze?

Friedrich, eat your heart out buddy.

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I was immediately reminded of this note:

Wollen ein drängendes Gefühl sehr angenehm! Es ist die Begleit-Erscheinung alles Ausströmens von Kraft.
[Nietzsche, workbook Spring-Summer 1883 7 [226].]

‘Willing[:] a pressing feeling[,] very agreeable! It is the accompaniment of every effusion of force.’
(My January 2013 translation.)

The word translated here as ‘accompaniment’ means, more literally, ‘escort appearance’…

In June of 2017, I quoted the above, and then added the following, in response to you:

‘The will is the accompanying feeling or appearance, accompanying every effusion of force, that oneself, one’s willing, be the cause of that effusion and its potential attainments.
It is the feeling of free will, which would be a self-willing in the sense of the willing of that very willing—to speak with Spinoza, the free cause of its essence as well as its existence.’

In the meantime, however, I’ve actually lived through the self-valuing logic. I now understand the will to power as self-discharging:

“[F]orce is the drive to discharge itself within a field of forces enacting the same necessity. […W]ill to power has no aim but discharge of the total quanta of its force at every moment; such discharge is always an event within a relatively unstable field of such impulses to discharge, the relation among them being simply that of greater or lesser; all beings are ultimately more or less stable collections of such impulses and themselves express the fundamental quality of impulse, will to power.” (Lampert, Becoming Nietzsche. What a Philosopher Is, pp. 264 and 266n29.)¹

I’ve called it ‘self-lightening’ rather than “self-discharging” precisely in order to address the said ‘escort appearance’: I say the feeling of power, the feeling of—free—will, is most fundamentally the feeling of getting lighter. And who or what feels that feeling? To whom or to what does that escort appearance appear? I say it is force, the ‘effusion’ of force, itself. The ‘effusion’, the streaming-out, the self-discharging of force is a physical, a logical, a metaphysical necessity; but to itself it appears as—it is—a very liberating experience.

And what does self-lightening feel itself liberated from?—liberating itself from? Precisely from the necessity of being liberated (by itself), of being discharged (by itself)! For it’s only if it (indirectly) discharges itself on forces which (indirectly) discharge themselves on it that it’s a self-valuing; otherwise, it becomes ever lighter, less pressing, less impelled/compulsive/compulsory.

¹ I actually don’t think self-lightening is always an event “within a field of forces enacting the same necessity”. That is, I think “matter” radiates space-light… For the form, if not the content, of this latter term, compare the term “wave-particle”: particles are collapsed waveforms which can again “uncollapse” into waves of radiation; quantum excitations of a field which may become less excited and more field, less particular and more wavelike. In fact, at the most fundamental—quantum—level, all “beings” are getting lighter all the time, less all the time, meaning more and more space emerges. This is the infinite universe-equivalent of the “expansion” of the universe. (Logically, it makes no difference whether the universe is expanding or everything in it is contracting.) The Big Bang itself is the absolute maximum accumulation of force discharging itself into space (the Big Chill is when the universe almost entirely consists of space). Self-lightening into light-space is not so much discharge into the void as it is discharge into void: the self-lightening becomes light-space, never completely but more and more (approximating an asymptote). The discharge creates more void, or more precisely it is a creating or a being-created of more void (empty space, vacuum). Self-lightening in light-space is not just a particle’s uncollapsing into one or more quanta of a wave of space, but also the relative unkinking of that wave. The whole is infinite, but its “parts” can never be infinitesimal. The elementary charge becomes ever smaller—not in the sense that 1e becomes, say, .5e, but in the sense that e itself decreases. The Big Chill is the ending that’ll never end, just as the Big Bang is the beginning that never began.

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The automatic, unprogrammed life part (response) feels encaged by a lack of structure/method that is beautiful/good (the structure is warped) — it isn’t all structure that makes it feel that way. After all, it has its own structure.

The life part (beautiful) and the will part (good) have been conflated —

There are those who favor going with the flow and not stopping it with their choices. That is because they have the ability to stop it with their choices, but they are conditioned to prefer the flow. They feel that the flow is powerful and that stopping it is like turning off the power. So the flow is easier for them, and stopping it is harder. They are the ones who are suspicious of systems. The sort of babbling that Paul confronted when people were “speaking in tongues“ without an interpreter is an example of that.

There are others who go the opposite extreme and completely shut off the flow. Quenching the spirit is a form of that. It feels like a form of power to be able to quench the flow. For those folks, keeping the flow in check is easier, allowing it to influence proper response is what feels like weakness to them, and that feeling is harder for them. They are system builders/maintainers. But there is a power that they feel when they quench the flow—that feeling they think they are quenching, but is in their blindspot.

The Goldilocks zone is recognizing the structure of the flow and making sure all systems justify to it.

self=other