© 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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Is sex (among humans) strictly human? No. It is too closely linked with our biological being to qualify as entirely human. Is sex merely animal? No. It is too dynamic, too human. Neither term does justice to that urge inside us for a moment of madness. The Trans-Biological term for a human motivator that pulls us in many contradictory directions at once is a “Cauldron.” From the beginnings of civilization some human beings have sought to deny the incessant pull of sex. But you might as well deny the overwhelming pull of the tides. Those who seek to deny it are either denying the act (not the drive) of sex, which is the least of it, or else channeling the sex drive into areas removed from the act of physical sexual release.

The dynamics of the sexual cauldron result in human actions of every variety, from mass murder to religious ecstasy. What all the actions have in common is that they are free, even if only momentarily, of Pose/Poise. It might take all the posing skills you have to gain access to a sexual partner, but in the moment of sexual release, you are not poised. You are in no place, you have no name, you follow no agenda. That moment of total free release may only last a few seconds, but that moment has a powerful way of reminding you that you are human. You are neither kinetic nor static, but you are wonderfully human.

The human discontent with stasis, even that civilized stasis associated with what we may call positive Pose/Poise, leads humans to manifest the sex drive in numberless ways. If we were to view sex as a strictly biological act dedicated to perpetuating our species, we would probably come to the conclusion that the drive is so strong because otherwise, distracted, we may not be sufficiently motivated to perpetuate the species. If we take on these rather joyless assumptions, it's no great jump to call nearly all human sexual activity of today “unnatural.” Of course, that's ridiculous, but let's follow the line of reasoning in order to gain perspective. Homosexuality wouldn't make the cut here, nor would masturbation, as neither has a direct connection with the perpetuation of the species. But you could take it further: why all this fuss about heterosexual monogamy? Wouldn't the custom of having multiple mating partners add genetic variety and fertility to the species? And, speaking of fuss, why all this “unnatural” talk about love, intimacy, personal space and the like? Why do we persist in preferring a partner of a certain shape, height or hair color? And then there's all the fuss we make about having “things in common.” Why don't we just skip dinner and the movies and all that posturing and get down to our real agenda: procreation?

Of course there's more to it than procreation, someone might argue, but that doesn't prove sex isn't just biological. Human beings probably just take the biological process and make it more complicated. They mask or ornament their basic biological urge to reproduce in a complex series of rituals, no different from the posturing many animals go through when they prepare to mate. They are refined animals with extremely sophisticated rituals, but animals just the same. Once we boil away all these human additions, we get to the heart of the matter, that basic animal urge.

In answer to this seemingly sensible argument, I hold that you cannot boil away human additions to uncover an animal core or anything else. The human sex drive is not just different in degree from the animal sex drive; it is different in kind. It has permutations and facets that apply to humans alone and that are meaningless when applied to animals. Because stasis is powerful, pervasive, and sometimes desirable when expressed in Pose/Poise, human beings have a desperate need to escape it. Sex and certain other activities that lead to a passionate abandonment of day-to-day control fulfill that need.

But remember, the Trans-Biological Imperative within the human being is as powerful a force as the stasis-based Biological Imperative. One of these forces will always be dominant at any given time. Except for the very moment of sexual loss of control, the human being will be headed either in a static or kinetic direction. An orientation to seek sex alone is a static one, while an orientation toward seeking sex with intimacy is kinetic. The person who needs just sex will rarely be satisfied with it. The brief sexual release, even if frequent, satisfies one need—to escape the oppression of Pose/Poise—but leaves the human being in Discontent because it doesn't satisfy the need for kinesis, creativity, and progress. Sex with intimacy satisfies these needs and opens up promising vistas of human interplay on many levels.

Trees, oceans, mountains, deserts, plants and animals exist, but “nature” is an arbitrary classification given to the sum total of these things by humans. Intimacy and creative love cannot be scientifically quantified or proved and do not exist in “nature.” They exist in the realm of the human. Just as human beings use tools to build shelters for themselves instead of depending on caves, they use their kinetic creativity to expand biological reference matrices like sex and ultimately change them into something different in kind, and not just degree, from their original biological base.

Let's pick a useful analogy of how human kinesis changes things in kind, and not just degree. For its Shock value, we'll use an unrelated subject. In the year 1688, Puritans from Massachusetts founded a new settlement in what is now New Jersey. They intended it to be among the holiest places on earth, a place where they could live the kind of pure life their religion demanded. Accordingly, they named the village “New Ark,” after the Ark of the Covenant. They poured all their energy into the settlement, but as more humans came, this changed, and that changed, until their creation obscured them entirely. Three centuries later, in present-day Newark, New Jersey, the Puritans remain as not more than an item on a historical tour. The four hundred thousand inhabitants of the city have other agendas. But even the Newark of fifty years ago was a different place. Human beings change whatever they touch. Biology can't hold humanity back any more than its Puritan beginnings or its biblical name could have kept Newark from becoming a great secular city.

Biological limitations are intolerable to restless, discontented humanity. Sexual variety, for example, will always be a true part of the human condition. The human sexual need is too complicated and varied to be able to be expressed within the narrow bounds of what some humans choose to call “nature.” Human beings are, by virtue of being human beings, un-natural. There will always be humans who do not want to express their sexuality in ways relating to or leading to procreation. We tend to peg and classify them, they even tend to classify themselves, but classifications only have limited use when dealing with phenomena as explosive as the human drives for freedom from Pose/Poise and for expression of kinetic intimacy.

Exercise: Sex as the Human Part of You

Next time you have a sexual experience, thou/ght or fantasy, concentrate on the human part of your sexuality while downplaying the animal.