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34 pages 1 hour read

Karel Čapek

R.U.R.

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1920

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Background

Literary Context: Influence on Science Fiction

Čapek’s R.U.R. is credited with inventing the word “robot.” In Ivan Klima’s introduction to R.U.R., he notes that the play is based on a short story cowritten by Karel Čapek and his brother, Josef, “The System.” It was Josef who invented the word robot, Klima argues.

Karel Čapek was influenced by writers such as Leo Tolstoy, and he was skeptical of the sciences replacing religion. Klima’s introduction also includes a quote from The Saturday Review of July 23, 1923: Čapek dubs Alquist “the Tolstoian architect” who believes “technical developments demoralize man” (xiv). Other scholars trace Čapek’s ideas about robots back to E. T. A. Hoffman’s 1817 short story “The Sandman,” which includes a human falling in love with a beautiful female automaton, similar to Robot Helena.

Several science fiction tropes, or staples of the genre, come from R.U.R. The act of mistaking humans for robots, and vice versa, appears again in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was adapted into the film Blade Runner.

Čapek’s narrative, where robots kill all of humanity and take over the earth, is seen in one of the most famous pieces of popular science fiction, The Matrix. Before that blockbuster film, the threat of robots killing humans was taken up by science fiction author Issac Asimov in his “Three Laws of Robots.” These prohibited robots from harming humans, and were included in his short story collection titled I, Robot, also adapted into a film. Works of contemporary philosophy still reckon with the ideas proposed by Čapek. Donna Haraway’s philosophical piece Cyborg Manifesto takes a deeper look into the hybridity of humans and machines, speaking to the ending of R.U.R. where Robot Helena gains the ability to organically procreate. 

Philosophical Context: Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic

The play uses Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic. Hegel is today considered primarily a philosopher, but during his time he engaged mostly in anthropology. Dialectics are combinations of two ideas or phenomena that contradict each other—thesis and antithesis—but combine into a greater definition or concept: Synthesis. Within the parable of the Master-Slave dialectic, Hegel proposes that consciousness is self-justifying and exists to itself without external verification, and that two conscious beings meeting will struggle to find out who is superior. The dominant being becomes the master, while the weaker becomes the slave.

However, the slave is able to recognize their consciousness through productive work, while the master is only able to exhibit their consciousness through the recognition of the slave by giving them orders. In this manner, Hegel proposes that the master, though dominant, becomes terrified of the slave’s ability to exist without recognition. In R.U.R., the story starts with the humans as clear master, treating the robots as slaves. Despite this, Helena later confesses to hate and fear the robots, the way that Hegel theorized the master fears the slave.

Later in the play, Radius the robot confesses to wanting to be master over man, and to be free from work. Radius self-recognizes, fulfilling the master-slave dialectic as a slave.

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By Karel Čapek