Suffering as resistance against subliminal enhancement

‘Suffering’ designates an original, subliminal self-experience of the soul which may surface in limit experiences of conscious awareness. Consciously suffering pain, loss or loneliness actualises primordial suffering which confronts the soul with an original void ‘with which’ it as it were skirmishes (as though this void were an object – which it is not). This primordial suffering aggravates ‘superficial’ sorrow (sit venia verbo) by doubling it with radical despair.

Clearly, this insight is not new; it has been indirectly brought to light by psychoanalysis and existentialist philosophy. My claim, however, partly goes beyond psychoanalytical or existentialist concerns. 

Suffering, I argue, testifies to unconscious resistance against subliminal enhancement (which is my definition of 'death'). I agree with Freud, Sartre or Heidegger when they highlight the despair which exacerbates suffering. But at least Freud and Heidegger cannot do justice to suffering as inverted ecstasy. This entails that they remain blind to human resistance against subliminal enhancement. 

Sartre, in his Cahiers pour une morale, argues for a moral ‘conversion’ which transforms anxiety into a ‘free choice’ made à cœur joie (in full enjoyment).[1] I find this emphasis on joy remarkable and noteworthy. Yet, Sartre rejects the existence of an unconscious altogether – which makes subliminal enhancement impossible. 

Heidegger, on the other hand, while phenomenologising the unconscious (that is, by reducing it to pre-intentional mindsets or Existenziale), de-personalises it, so that the implication is similar to Sartre’s philosophy’s (a dissipation of subliminal enhancement).

Freud, who acknowledges the unconscious and even subliminal enhancement (albeit only during lifetime), believes that the latter is inexorably limited by (what he terms) the ‘reality principle’; this entails that, in his view, subliminal enhancement will always be finite and restricted to the boundaries of conscious social life.

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[1] On human authenticity, Sartre writes, “Ainsi retrouvons-nous mais dans l’humilité de la finitude, l’extase de la Création divine.” J.-P. Sartre (1983). Cahiers pour une morale. Paris: Gallimard, p. 513. And “le monde qui m’apparaît est source de joie en ce que je me découvre comme absolu en le découvrant comme absolu”, ib., p. 512 ; or “La perception est surgissement de l’Etre, explosion fixe et vertigineuse de l’Etre dans le "il ya", est c’est là originellement pour le Pour-soi la jouissance.” Ib., p. 510.