It’s good to hear from you, too, when it is like this. And yes, these things are really interesting to me right now. The Jungian functions, not so much—sorry, Phone! Actually, I’m not sorry, because I don’t believe in—free—will, and therefore believe no one and nothing is to blame or to praise for anything. In other words, I don’t believe in power(s)!
If struggle is only a feeling, it’s only a seeming struggle. The feeling is real, but what it feels like is only apparent. For example:
“[L]ike a sick man who, feeling one of his limbs uncommonly heavy, comes to the conclusion that another man is lying on top of him, the naive homo religiosus divides himself into several persons.” (WP 135.)
“[M]an has not dared to credit himself with his strong and surprising impulses—he has conceived them as ‘passive,’ as ‘suffered,’ as things imposed upon him” (WP 136).
Now Nietzsche is usually understood as teaching that man is himself the cause of these feelings (and perhaps he does teach this—exoterically, for the “noble”!). However, all he really teaches is that “they come without being willed, consequently we are not their author: the will that is not free (i.e., the consciousness that we have been changed without having willed it) needs an external will.” (ibid.)
There is no such external will, but there’s no internal will, either! “What alone can be our teaching? That no one gives man his qualities—neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself” (TI “Errors” 8)…
I think the word “will” is meaningless if it doesn’t mean free will. I’m saying there is no freedom or agency whatsoever! There’s only self-lightening—which, when it lightens itself on (an)other self-lightening(s) which lighten(s) itself on it, is self-valuing.
Without the notion of praiseworthiness, there can be no pride; and without pride, can there be joy? “[W]henever man rejoices,” Nietzsche writes, “he is always the same in his rejoicing: he rejoices as an artist, he enjoys himself as power, he enjoys the lie as his form of power.” But the fundamental delusion is precisely that “he dupe[s] himself” (WP 853, emphasis mine)… If joy/pleasure (Lust) is the feeling of power, and if the feeling of power is the feeling of freedom, and if the feeling of freedom is the feeling of free will or agency, then it is groundless. To see this groundlessness is the deepest abyss. I envision the rest of my sane life as a war waged on my feeling of free will by my disbelief in free will.