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.