Suffering As A Completion

Georg Simmel, The View of Life (Lebensanschauung): Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms, tr. A. Y. Andrews (University of Chicago Press, 2010), ch. 2, p. 32:

. . . Whereas pain is adapted to life, the streams of life congeal into suffering just as into happiness; the soul can find in suffering as in happiness (though with the sign reversed), a consummation, a completion of life, even a redemption from it, a redemption that is the opposite of the role of pain. The fact that we can spiritually feel sorrows that have in principle no teleological significance—this seems to me to be a quite decisive hallmark of the human essence.