The Elusive Human

Raphaelesque Head Exploding (1951) by Salvador Dali

Once it was said that a human is a speaking animal.
And elsewhere, that a human is a religious being.
Two phrases, like mirrors facing each other, reflecting endlessly what it means to be what we already are — and yet, hardly understand.
For centuries, humanity has tried to define itself through contrasts: the animal and the divine, the rational and the instinctual, the mortal and the eternal. We draw lines between ourselves and other creatures, between ourselves and gods, hoping the contours will give us certainty. But the more we try to define “the human,” the more it slips away — like trying to draw the horizon with a fingertip.
Perhaps this difficulty is not a failure of thought but the very essence of being human: to exist as a question rather than an answer.
 
The Speaking Animal
To say that humans are “speaking animals” is to recognize that we are not merely flesh that moves, eats, and reproduces. We are flesh that says.
Through language, the world becomes doubled: there is the world as it is, and the world as we tell it. A stone is no longer just a stone; it becomes symbol, metaphor, memory. Through speech, the animal begins to dream.
Language is not just communication. It is creation. The first myth, the first poem, the first cry of love or fear — all of them shape the invisible architecture of human existence. The universe we inhabit is not only made of matter but of words.
And yet, in speaking, we are also separated from the immediacy of life. The animal acts; the human narrates. We live always at a small distance from what we are doing, as if watching ourselves from the outside. That distance gives birth to consciousness, to self-awareness — and also to doubt.
Every sentence contains a wound: a fracture between what is and what could be. We speak because something is missing. We invent language to bridge the gap between our solitude and the world. But that very bridge reminds us of the separation.
The “speaking animal” is therefore a creature condemned to mediation — never fully at one with the world, yet never fully apart from it.

The Religious Being
If the first definition roots us in logos — reason, language, reflection — the second, calling us “a religious being,” roots us in longing.
Religion, before temples and dogmas, is the trembling awareness that there is something beyond the visible — a sense of mystery that neither logic nor language can exhaust. It is the ache of the finite reaching for the infinite.
To be “religious,” in this sense, does not necessarily mean to believe in a god, but to feel that life itself surpasses understanding, that there is a sacred dimension woven into the ordinary. Even the atheist who feels awe before a mountain, or silence before a dying friend, shares in that same human gesture: the bow of wonder.
We are religious beings because we cannot bear the flatness of existence. We seek meaning, even when the universe offers none. We invent gods, stories, symbols, not only to explain the world but to make it lovable.
Where the animal accepts the world as it is, the human asks why.
And from that question, civilization is born.
 
Between Beast and Angel
Both definitions — the speaking animal and the religious being — reveal that we are creatures in-between.
We are animals, yes, made of hunger, instinct, and death. But we are also something more: a consciousness that looks at its own mortality and asks what it means.
Every human life unfolds between two silences: the one before birth and the one after death. Speech fills the gap between them. Religion — or the search for meaning — is our way of making peace with those silences.
In that sense, our greatness and our tragedy are the same. The dog sleeps peacefully under the stars, unaware of eternity. We, meanwhile, gaze at the same stars and feel both wonder and terror. We invent names for the constellations, stories for the gods who dwell among them, but beneath the stories lingers a quiet despair — the knowledge that we are mortal storytellers.
The human, then, is not the animal who speaks or the animal who prays.
The human is the being who speaks because he prays, and prays because he speaks.
We speak to fill the void; we pray to give it meaning.

The Difficulty of Definition
Why, then, is it so hard to define what is human?
Because to define is to draw a limit — and humans are precisely those creatures who cannot stay within limits. We invent tools that extend our hands, machines that replace our labor, technologies that rewrite our bodies. We write poetry to transcend time, and religions to transcend death.
Every definition we make becomes a wall we are destined to climb.
To call us rational is to ignore our passions; to call us religious is to ignore our doubts. To call us animals is to forget the vastness of our imagination; to call us divine is to forget our bones.
The human essence is perhaps the refusal to have one essence. We are unfinished, open-ended, perpetually becoming.
When the first human carved a shape into stone, when the first voice rose in song, something extraordinary happened: the animal began to echo itself across time. The present ceased to be only the present; memory and imagination were born. We became temporal beings, haunted by the past and longing for the future.
That, too, is what makes definition impossible: we exist in time, and time itself is movement, change, decay. To define a moving river is to misunderstand it.
 
The Mirror and the Abyss
Perhaps the truest way to define the human is not by what we are, but by what we seek.
We are the being who looks into the mirror and sees not only a face, but a question.
We are the being who builds meaning upon a void, who sings into the abyss and listens for an echo.
When we call ourselves “speaking animals,” we are acknowledging our ability to turn existence into story. When we call ourselves “religious beings,” we are confessing our inability to live without mystery. Both are true, both incomplete.
What we really are might lie in the space between those truths — in the silence between words, in the doubt between beliefs, in the heartbeat that keeps asking who am I even when no answer comes.
 
A Human Among Humans
Maybe to be human is not something one is, but something one does.
We become human each time we speak honestly, each time we create beauty, each time we reach out to another being and say, “I see you.”
The animal eats to survive; the human shares a meal and calls it communion.
The animal mates; the human loves and writes poetry about it.
The animal dies; the human buries the dead, builds a monument, whispers a prayer.
It is in these gestures — small, fragile, infinitely repeated — that humanity reveals itself.
We are not gods, not pure spirit, not detached reason. We are dust that dreams.
And it is precisely this mixture — this contradiction — that makes us wondrous.
 
In the End
To say “a human is a speaking animal” and “a human is a religious being” is not to choose between two definitions, but to recognize two movements of the same soul: the need to express and the need to transcend.
Speech without transcendence becomes chatter; transcendence without speech becomes silence.
Together, they make the melody of our existence — words rising toward meaning, meaning dissolving into words.
Perhaps that is all we can say with honesty:
the human is the being who cannot stop asking what the human is.
And in that endless question, we find our dignity.