Antun Kapor’s paintings and drawings depict men, women and children as if they were only robots or automatons, built out of tubes, lines and shapes like those of plans for machines. Kapor’s drawing seems to imitate that of engineers or scientists, constructing semi-humans or semi-robots, and here we are faced with the question: are human beings really only machines ? Our bodies, our brains, our hearts, are they nothing but components activated by mechanical or cybemetic forces?

Equating humans with machines is nothing new, and dates back at least to the first automatons of the 17th century. It was certainly Descartes who was one of the first philosophers to talk about the mechanical man. For him, the bodies of humans, animals and plants can indeed be compared to machines; to quote: «I know no difference between the machines made by craftsmen and the varìous bodies constructed by nature alone» (1649) This analogy opened up possibilites for modern medicine and biology for which the heart is a pump and arterieslike pipes which can be replaced if necessary.

But if Descartes does state that the body of a man is a machine, for him the same is not true of the soul, which remains an immaterial, spiritual substance, free and of divine origin. So Descartes does not attempt to explain consciousness by the laws of physics, but by daring the analogy between the living body and the machine, he paved the way for strict materialism: one century later the philosopher La Mettrie wrote «The Machine Man» (1744) in which this time man as a whole, body and soul, is a mere machine.

Two centuries later, what Kapor painted in the sixties seems to be happening ali around us today, thanks to modem technology. We already have more or less sophisticated humanoid robots imitating human behaviour and faculties. We can also observe with a mixture of admiration and terror the plan to transform the human body and brain using mechanical and electronic implants (transhumanist movement). The brain itself today appears to be comparable to a Computer, since thought is sometimes no more than calculation, so wonderfully performed by our data processing machines. Silicium artificial intelligence capable of improving and criticizing itself will perhaps overtake human thought in ali fields someday, just as it already has in games of chess and go. The improved human and the humanized robot will perhaps one day form a new sort of post-humanity resembling Kapor’s pictures.

For me, I see Kapor’s work as an invitation to seek in myself that which operates mechanically — to pinpoint in my behaviour anything mechanical. I understand these paintings as appealing to that which in us is neither mechanical nor automatic. Doubtless, Kapor was not intending to denounce the deviations of modem techno-materialism, which indeed sees us as living like machines, as other artists have done : he really does think man is a machine.

And it is true that most of the time we live in a repetitive way like robots. Our unoriginal thoughts seem to stem from a programme which we did not design; our emotions are often mere automatic and biological reactions; our actions reproduce those which the social machine expects of us.... If we humans see ourselves as machines, it will not be diffícult for machines to copy us.

But: is not the creative urge which inspired Kapor to do these paintings and drawings - for several years in his youth - a proof in itself that everything in man is not mechanical?

Does not the artistic freedom and power of these works bear witness to a source other than mechanical ?

I believe that an original work of art emerges without design; it escapes any determinism, or any mechanical result. It lets freeedom spring forth in the world, as Bergson somewhere said. And here, the work of art points towards that which, in us, transcends the machine.

If we know how to contact in ourselves the same living creative source, may we not thereby escape the usual mechanism of our repetitive behaviour ?

Any everyday action could itself become a work of art, pure spontaneity, a pure surge of awareness and creation. We simply have to disconnect ourselves every instant from ali the mechanical forces which emprison us, to come back to the living, the free and the new, and somehow let it take shape in the world.

Kapor’s art unveils a truth for us: that man lives like a machine; and it could also give us hope: by recognizing this fact we can find a way back to freedom.

José Le Roy

Professor of philosophie, Paris