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Skidmore College
First-Year Experience

Klara’s Religion

July 14, 2023

From the very beginning of their life, Klara the AF engages intimately with the Sun, a mysterious force of nourishment for their body, and ultimately a source of faith, hope, doubt, inspiration, and healing. Ishiguro’s careful narration of Klara’s sensory encounters, thoughts, and ritual practice raises a powerful question for readers: can we say Klara has a “religion”? There are many possible approaches to this question, so in this brief essay I’ll give only a few from my own field of religious studies—the rigorous academic study of how religion functions and what worlds people have built with it.

Way back in the late nineteenth century, the textual scholar Friedrich Max Müller called myth “a disease of language.” By this he meant that the grammatical structures of language cause humans to attribute agency and sentience to nonsentient natural forces. We create stories of gods not through any willful childlike fantasy, but simply because our languages used nouns to describe natural phenomena, and simple nouns easily slipped into proper nouns. So the Proto-Indo-European word *ŧܲ “shining one,” from the verbal root *di- or *dei- (“to shine, be bright”) will just naturally slip into a proper noun, *ٲŧܲ, “The Shining One,” which would be passed down as words for the personified Sky God (Sanskrit Dyaus, Greek Zeus, Latin Iove). We can see this in action at the very beginning of Klara and the Sun, when Klara says “we would see the Sun on his journey…” The capitalization and the his are key here: Klara sees the Sun as a sentient being.

Müller’s approach is echoed by cognitive-scientific scholars of religion like Pascal Boyer. For Boyer, our cognitive systems were pressured by evolution to be constantly searching for agency, for camouflaged tigers in the tall grass. And so we see agency where there is none: ghosts in the shadows, gods in the sky, an intelligence lurking in the LLM chatbot.

Through much of Ishiguro’s novel, I was worried that he would settle for such uncomplicated and stale theories of religion derived from cognitive science. We are always seeing Klara and her relationships, after all, in terms of language (what words does she use?) and cognition (how does she identify shapes in her vision?). But by the end of the novel Klara surprises us. Recounting Capaldi’s theory that Josie could be perfectly copied, she says to the Manager, “…I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside her. It was inside those who loved her.”

It is love that matters. Klara reminded me here of Donovan Schaefer’s astounding 2015 book Religious Affects, which argues that our old theories of religion are anthropocentric, unduly focused on language and human cognition. Thinking about affect, and the intimate relationality of bodies and worlds, Schaefer urges us to embrace an expansive definition, one in which chimpanzees, rabbits, and AFs like Klara could be said to have “religion.” I’m grateful to Ishiguro for so sensitively sharing Klara’s religious world with us.

 

Human or AI?

Ryan Overbey
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies & Asian Studies