unique among pleasures in its integration of body and mind: it integrates perceptions, emotions, values, and
thought—it offers an individual the most intense form of experiencing his own total being, of experiencing his
deepest and most intimate sense of his self. (Such is the potential of sex, when and to the extent that the experience
is not diluted and undercut by conflict, guilt, alienation from one's partner, etc.)
In sex, one's own person becomes a direct, immediate source, vehicle, and embodiment of pleasure. And since
pleasure is experienced by man as the good (Chapter Five), sex offers him the most intense and immediate form of
experiencing himself as good, as a value. And further: sex offers man the most intense and immediate form of
experiencing life as a value.
His conviction that he is competent to live and worthy of living (his self-esteem) exists in a man's mind as an
abstraction; its meaning is that he is competent to achieve his values, and therefore to achieve happiness, and that
he is worthy of doing so. The pleasure he experiences in the act of sex is the direct, immediate, sensory
confirmation and reaffirmation of that conviction.
His conviction that life is a value, that life is worth living, exists in a man's mind as an abstraction; its meaning is
the conviction that the nature of life is such that happiness is possible; that, by the nature of existence, happiness is
within his power to achieve. The pleasure he experiences in the act of sex is the direct, immediate, sensory
confirmation and reaffirmation of that conviction.
Thus, sex is the ultimate form in which man experiences perceptually that he is good and that life is good.
In sex, more than in any other activity, man experiences the fact of being an end in himself and of feeling that the
purpose of life is happiness. (Even if the motives that lead a person to a particular sexual encounter are neurotic,
and even if, immediately afterwards, he is tortured by shame or guilt—so long as and to the extent that he is able to
enjoy the sex act, life is asserting itself within him, the principle that a human being is an end in himself is asserting
itself.) In sex, man escapes from any malevolent feeling of life's futility or drudgery, of his own senseless servitude
to incomprehensible ends, which, unfortunately, most men experience too often. Thus, sex is the highest form of
selfishness in the noblest sense of that word.