Recently, on Facebook, I saw a friend of mine objecting to a line from one of my all-time favorite movies, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. (Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen it.) The line is near the end and happens to be one I absolutely love — in a moment of great sorrow, James T. Kirk says, referring to Spock, “Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most… human.”

My friend objected because she pointed out that Spock never wanted to be human, valued his Vulcan heritage immensely, and that to call his soul “human” cheapens his journey. That Spock himself would not have wanted to be called “human.”

I see where she’s coming from. But I disagree. And I found I had so many thoughts on the topic I couldn’t possibly fit them into a Facebook comment, and I was much too tired to type them all on a phone keyboard, anyway. So I thought I might as well share them here, in case anyone was interested.

It’s very true that Spock never wanted to be human, certainly not in the sense that Data or the EMH later strove to be. He often wrestled intensely against his human side, but I wouldn’t say that because of that he was opposed to humanity. What he hated about his human side was emotion, the way it made it harder to adhere to the logic his Vulcan side valued so dearly. But humanity is much more than emotion, and that is exactly what I think Spock came to learn throughout the years.

The trouble with a line like Kirk’s, perhaps, is that it tries to encompass a very in-depth and non-straightforward journey into a single sentence. But that doesn’t make it incorrect. Spock certainly often despised his human side, but he came, by the end, to embrace it. To see it as a strength, not a weakness. Because as the years passed, as he struggled to reconcile the two sides of himself, he found that it was not as black and white as human versus Vulcan, emotion versus logic. Vulcans, after all, are naturally deeply emotional people. Humans are capable of logic. In their souls, they are essentially the same — but with different essential values.

Those values are what made Spock unique. Being two-natured gave him not only immense struggle, but also an ability to see multiple perspectives. In the three seasons of the show we saw hints of it, but in the movies we really get to see this journey come to fruition. We see Spock at peace with who he is. No longer fighting his humanity. Embracing the empathy and compassion that keep him as an outsider among other Vulcans.

Spock’s soul, ultimately, strikes Kirk as “the most human,” because unlike humans, he chose his humanity. He could have continued to fight it, to push it aside and squash it permanently under cold, solid logic. But he didn’t. He chose humanity, the best of humanity, a humanity tempered by the calm, understanding perspective of a Vulcan.

He is the most human precisely because he is outside the rest of humanity. He is the most human because he, more than any of us, has the tools to choose only the highest parts of what we are.

It is precisely in being the least of us, that he was able to become the most of us.

The most human of us all.