It is only great pain–that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood–that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us ‘better’–but I know that it makes us deeper.
