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Dr. Grotjahn addresses himself to an immense subject: man's effort to control his environment, both human and nonhuman. He tackles it with imagination, learning, and a humanistic commitment to individualism. Because of the vast scope of the subject and the brevity of the paper, inevitably the presentation is somewhat impressionistic.
I shall confine my comments to one aspect of the essay—the man-machine relationship. In some ways, man's relationship to the machine parallels man's relationship to man. In the past, man dominated his fellow man by enslaving him: the historical precursor of the machine is the slave. Now, man dominates his nonhuman slave: the machine is a mechanical “slave” (the robot).
How does the slave threaten the freeman, or the machine, man? The slave threatens his master in two basic ways: first, by revolt and direct aggression; second, by offering himself as a human object, rather than subject. I am not certain which of these threats was the greater in the past history of mankind; it might well have been the latter, as only now we begin to realize.
The machine threatens man in somewhat different ways: first, by providing the means whereby man can injure and destroy his fellow man with unparalleled ease and effectiveness; second, by rendering much human labor socially unnecessary and hence existentially meaningless, thus liquidating many persons' reason for being. Here also the latter may be the greater threat.
It is easier to state these problems than to solve them. This is especially so because just as man is indispensable to his fellow man, so the machine is indispensable to man. Though human aggression threatens mankind, it is only through human cooperation that culture—and hence the flowering of the individual in society—is possible. Similarly, though the machine may dehumanize and destroy man, it is only through the use of tools—that is, of machines—that man rises above the level of the animal. In the final analysis, the problem of man's relatio