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LECTURE XXX, Feb. 28, 1956

We started to give an analysis of our present situation with respect to religion and culture. The reason was that art^a is excessive in its style^b for a special situation. What I wanted to communicate is the expressive power^c of the visual arts which we have seen for the understanding of our present world situation.

The first point was the question of man becoming an object. The way in which this has happened in industrial society^d was described by man becoming, by that which he makes himself, namely the tool, and in a fuller and more refined sense, the comparatively independent reality of the machine^e.

It is very frequent today, in our literature of cultural criticism, to give all guilt, all responsibility, to the machine as such, and to attack our age as ''Machine Age.'' To prevent this unambi- guous negation of the machine, I gave a kind of praise of automation, which is produced by the building of machines, namely taking away all those functions of man as man which can be mechanized. Nothing which is creative^f in man can ever be taken over by a machine, but that which can be brought into mathematical^g equations and can be brought into a mechanically calculated and managed process, can be taken over in principle by the machine. This is a point of view for our valuation of what has been called the artificial brain^h--you know these calculating machines which can do in a few seconds what hundreds of men could do in a year, if you put the right thing into them. And this of course is always the fundamental difference: man can make the artificial brain, but the artificial brain cannot make man, because in man are united all levels of reality, but they are united in a center which decides and creates. This makes all the difference! I know that many people are very much worried