© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete text of Human Action, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's philosophy of human achievement.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Human Action Table of Contents
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Schopenhauer was a great iconoclast, always at odds with a society he believed did not understand him (it didn't), and so he formulated an extremely useful guide to the process of truth acceptance and innovation. First, he wrote, truth is ridiculed, then it is violently opposed, and finally it is accepted as self-evident. After all that struggle, the new truth becomes the old truth and someone else has to innovate again.

The Human Kinetic Core expresses itself through the Trans-Biological Imperative, fights to establish itself against static opposition, then inevitably wins. The problem is, human beings also have strong limiting biological imperatives. Once Trans-Biological Kinesis succeeds in creating innovation, all too often and all too soon new walls begin to rise. The innovation becomes the norm and remains so until someone comes along with a new sledge hammer.

Successful people learn to recognize both the biological and trans-biological forces within themselves and keep them in balance. The biological imperative is not intrinsically bad. It only becomes bad when it steps out of its boundaries into the realm of the human non-animal. We all have valid animal and mechanical needs, with strong requirements to classify, categorize, sort and limit things in order to implement our innovations. We do need to create norms and cultures, not to avoid our animal natures, but to avoid the excesses of our human natures. Too much human passion without any structure leads to chaos.