In addition to this, I need to add a bit more. I think that this view on suffering and its ubiquity can, well I know that it can be very overwhelming and depressing, it has the power to totally usurp and over-ride all other feelings and instincts and values within the mind (as Ascolo testifies to when he talks about his three stages of this thought). I have grapped with this problem lately - do I truly let the fact that all human values and happinesses (most of them, the vast vast majority) are really only functionaries and derivatives of suffering bother me, do I let it consume my values and happinesses? I have answered a decided, “No!” to this question, and not only because I am not ready yet to carry my own ashes to the mountaintop. . . . in contemplating and meditating on this thought lately I have come to a realization I wanted to share, in case anyone else other than me has been strugging this this problem: values and happiness are still values and happiness regardless of from where they are derived and from where they emerge. Humans create, that is our task and method of existence. We are creators. And we create by willing-to, by valuing and esteeming. When the will learns to value and esteem itself for its own sake then we will perhaps truly overcome this circle of suffering, but until that point we ought not to lose ourselves and throw away our values and happinesses merely because we might experience the deeper existential essence of these.
Happiness is happiness, a value is a value to someone, to he whom holds or experiences that value or happiness. This does not mitigate any potential falseness or internal oppositional contradictions that might be present in such things, but then again this falseness and contradiction itself does not, cannot truly mitigate the entirety of the experience and reality of value and happiness themselves. Ascolo tells us that man can never redeem all of his suffering, that a little must always remain? This is true; but on the other side of this, man can never truly ‘redeem’ (refute, expose, deconstruct) his values and happiness and meaning without a little bit of it remaining left over. Why do I think this? Because once value, happiness are created by man, once personal meaning is generated and experienced, it exists, it is born into the world, into this subject. He creates it himself, man, the creator gives birth to this new entity, even and especially if it only exists within his mind, his own subjective perspective. Truths can and will only be found within ourselves – any truth or reason which is shared by two or more people is of necessity a false truth or reason. This, to me, is undeniable. Of course this falseness does not mean that such truths and reasons are not useful or necessary in themselves. But they are not true creations, they are not birthings in the same manner as the subject gives birth to value and happiness and meaning within his own soul - this method of man’s existence is an individual one, despite that man learns this method from others (from society, from philosophy, from initiation)… the method, once man grows into a mature conscious being, becomes wholly individual.
Basically, while suffering is ubiquitous (near ubiquitous) and at the heart of almost every human value and experience, this fact does not mean that these values and experiences do not exist in the manner in which we experience them. It only means that there is more going on, below the surface, and that a certain degree of self-deception is necessary within man - but Nietzsche knew this, and so did Kierkegaard and Deleuze and probably others as well, that the true primary function of man’s consciousness is forgetfulness, and that this forgetting is the most positive and necessary act of the human will (that is, until man learns to will himself, to will to himself). Suffering is not something to cause us a loss of meaning or hopelessness, depression or despair, and neither is the self-deception and space of forgetfulness that sustains us in these conditions. We are human, we are alive, we live and function as humans, and we can be proud of this and affirm it even where this functioning runs counter to what we suppose to be the case within ourselves. Philosophy is, after all (or at least it ought to be), destructive and dynamic and wholly personal.
The innocence of which I spoke earlier, the moment of the birth of self-affirmation and true willing, true creative release and expression, occurs all the time incrementally, it is not only a moment of rare transdendence and overcoming but also a natural state of man. We see this state in very young children who first learn to experience the world around them, the pure spark of joy and total honesty and sincerity in their eyes. . . this spark, this glow of the eyes, is also present in those enlightened ones, those who master themselves and their human condition (their psychology/personality/animality). And this glow, this spark of pure essence also exists when we look into the eyes of our true lover, who holds for us the deepest and most trusting and sincere love imaginable. Those of us who are lucky enough to have had this experience of true human love for another, who have shared this experience in a moment, know what this is like. The innocence and purity of love is a true moment of creative expression, a birthing, a willing-to in the highest sense, even when, in the case of children or of lovers, it is accidental, unintentional, an emergence and imminence which radiates outward as a consequence of that person’s nature in that moment… the sage, the enlightened one, is the only one who truly forges himself in a conscious and willed manner into this state of being an abundant and self-propelled fountain of joy and creative expression (love). But regardless, the state is attainable, it exists, even though most all of us slowly forget and can lose this as we age and grow out of childhood.