Lecture: Commiting to self-love
KIRK: I have to take him back inside myself. I can’t survive without him. I don’t want him back. He’s like an animal, a thoughtless, brutal animal, and yet it’s me. Me.
MCCOY: Jim, you’re no different than anyone else. We all have our darker side. We need it! It’s half of what we are. It’s not really ugly, it’s human.
KIRK: Human.
MCCOY: Yes, human. A lot of what he is makes you the man you are. God forbid I should have to agree with Spock, but he was right. Without the negative side, you wouldn’t be the Captain. You couldn’t be, and you know it. Your strength of command lies mostly in him.
KIRK: What do I have?
MCCOY: You have the goodness.
KIRK: Not enough. I have a ship to command.
MCCOY: The intelligence, the logic. It appears your half has most of that, and perhaps that’s where man’s essential courage comes from. For you see, he was afraid and you weren’t.
SPOCK [OC]: Captain Kirk.
KIRK: Kirk here.
SPOCK [OC]: Spock here. Would you come to the transporter room. We think we may have found an answer.
KIRK: Coming.
- One side produces goodness, intelligence, and logic. This self transcends space and time and body looks for long-term and universal goods. And it sees the good of the selfish gene as inferior.
- The other side produces an animal—thoughtless, brutal, and dark. This self sees the world from biologic. This is the worldview of protoplasm and the delicate, desperate churnings inside the struggling, vulnerable cell.
The animal part you hate. It arises as urge with all its near necessity. It arises as automatic self-action—compulsion to which you are helpless witness but not consenting agent.
Antagonism cannot be the solution. The thoughtful soul must domesticate and even please the scared, impulsive amoeba. And the point of Bones’ lecture and Kirk’s realization is that the soul actually needs the animal. The animal is the fire that moves through the equations.