Clarke and Atheism
The more times I see 2001: A Space Odyssey, the
stranger the movie gets. Arthur C Clarke said a couple of things about the film
which illuminate what it is about, and a number of details in the film offer
further clues. Other work he became interested in much later, also casts light
on the real subject of the film.
Firstly, there is Clarke’s famous statement that Kubrick and
Clarke had persuaded MGM to fund an enormously expensive religious movie (he
actually meant a theological movie, but such a distinction might have
been lost on the moguls of the time). His books are in fact often peppered with
ideas which approach theological questions, yet he described himself as an
atheist many times during his life. This apparent contradiction needs to be
explored.
A good overview of the complexity of his views on both
religion and theology can be found on the Wikipedia page on Clarke’s life:
Themes of religion and spirituality appear in much of
Clarke's writing. He said: "Any path to knowledge is a path to God—or
Reality, whichever word one prefers to use."[105]
[Mintowt-Czyz, Lech (19 March 2008). "Sir
Arthur C. Clarke: The Times obituary". The Times. London.
Retrieved 6 August 2008.]
And:
He described himself as
"fascinated by the concept of God". J.
B. S. Haldane, near the end of his life, suggested in a personal letter to
Clarke that Clarke should receive a prize in theology for being one of the few
people to write anything new on the subject, and went on to say that if
Clarke's writings did not contain multiple contradictory theological views, he
might have been a menace.[106]
[Clarke, Arthur C. (1999) [1991]. "Credo". Greetings, Carbon-Based
Bipeds!. First appearing in Living Philosophies, Clifton Fadiman,
ed. (Doubleday). New York: St. Martin's Griffin. pp. 358–363. ISBN
978-0-312-26745-2. Retrieved 8
January 2010.]
I think Haldane was right about how dangerous some of his
ideas were, and that he often contradicted himself on matters of theology
outside the scope of science. The following illustrates how he occupied
different intellectual spaces from early on in his life, and right up to the
end:
When he entered the Royal Air Force, Clarke
insisted that his dog tags be marked "pantheist"
rather than the default, Church
of England,[43]
and in a 1991 essay entitled "Credo", described himself as a logical positivist from the age of ten.[106]
In 2000, Clarke told the Sri Lankan newspaper, The Island, "I
don't believe in God or an afterlife, [107]
and he identified himself as an atheist.[108]
He was honoured as a Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of
Humanism.[109]
He has also described himself as a "crypto-Buddhist", insisting that Buddhism is
not a religion.[110]
So he was characterising
himself as a pantheist at the time he joined the Royal Air Force in WW2, but in
1991 he says in ‘Credo’ that he was a ‘logical positivist’ from the age of ten.
Is this possible? It’s a contradiction, but I think it is possible that both
characterisations are true. He was a mathematician and a scientist, which
doesn’t preclude an interest in profound questions about the nature of the
universe and reality, which are less amenable to purely rational answers. We
will come back to the ‘crypto-Buddhism' later.
In saying that he was a
pantheist in his early twenties, I think he was indicating that he was already
making an equation between theology, the divine, and the nature of reality
itself. Those of a mathematical bent sometimes do, since the mathematics of the
physical world reveal something of how reality works behind the physical
representation of it. But if you are going to investigate reality itself
through mathematics, you need to stick close to the evidence. To that extent he
was a logical positivist for the whole of his life.
So Clarke was interesting in
theology and theological questions. But he clearly distinguished between those
questions, and the principal territories occupied by modern religions:
A famous quotation of Clarke's is often cited:
"One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked
by religion. [110]
He was quoted in Popular Science in 2004 as saying of religion:
"Most malevolent and persistent of all mind viruses. We should get rid of
it as quick as we can.” [Cherry,
Matt (1999). "God,
Science, and Delusion: A Chat With Arthur C. Clarke". Free Inquiry. 19 (2).
Amherst, New York: Council for Secular Humanism. ISSN
0272-0701. Archived
from the original on 3 April 2008. Retrieved 16 April2008.]
Yet Clarke was happy to engage in dialogue with those who
were not locked into a view of religion which saw faith as its core. Alan Watts
was one of those:
In a three-day "dialogue on man and his
world" with Alan Watts, Clarke stated that he was biased against
religion and said that he could not forgive religions for what he perceived as
their inability to prevent atrocities and wars over time.[112] Clarke, Arthur C.; Watts, Alan
(January 1972). "At the Interface: Technology and Mysticism". Playboy.
Vol. 19 no. 1. Chicago, Ill.: HMH Publishing. p. 94. ISSN
0032-1478. OCLC
3534353. ]
Alan Watts of course, was
heavily influenced by Buddhism, which Clarke said was not a religion.
That distinction is an important one. Buddhism is a way of approaching reality,
which assumes that everything is (in some way) related to everything else, both
in terms of representation, and In terms of causality.
Despite his atheism, themes of deism is a common
feature within Clarke's work.[[115] (20 March 2008). "For Clarke,
Issues of Faith, but Tackled Scientifically". The New York Times.
ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 21
January 2020.]
Edward Rothstein understood the
deeply rooted dichotomy in Clarke’s approach to understanding the nature of the
universe. Buddhism of course famously managed to construct a theological
understanding of reality which did not much require discussion of gods, which
is one of its most attractive features. And in case anyone was in doubt about
Clarke’s seriousness about that kind of atheism:
Clarke left written instructions for a funeral that
stated: "Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any
religious faith, should be associated with my funeral."[116]
"[Quotes
of the Day". Time. 19 March 2008. Archived
from the original on 24 March 2008. Retrieved 20 March 2008.]
Clarke spent more than half his life living in what is now
Sri Lanka (he moved there in 1956). He appreciated the good diving
opportunities available in the warm seas around the island, which represented
the nearest experience to the weightlessness of space he was likely to
experience in his lifetime. Sri Lanka was also a relatively cheap place to live.
Writers then as now found it difficult to make a decent living out of their
writing, so moving there made practical sense.
Clarke’s closest friend was a Sri Lankan, who he met while
he was studying in London in 1947.(Leslie Ekanayake).Their association lasted for the
next thirty years, until the premature death of Ekanayake. So Clarke is likely
to have had discussions about Buddhist ideas on the nature of reality long
before he made the decision to move to Sri Lanka. His understanding that
Buddhism was a way of engaging with the nature of reality which was, despite
appearances, not a religion, may have been acquired from discussion with
Ekanayake.
Clarke refer to his engagement with Buddhist thought as
crypto-Buddhism because he read the body of ideas contained in Buddhist thought
differently from others. He saw Buddhism as a way of attempting to understand
reality in philosophical terms, which also allowed the possibility of exploring
reality with mathematics and geometry.
Buddhism is a body of ideas which, like many religions in
the east, embraces paradox, and the importance of what cannot be seen. What is
on the surface, is not all that there is. Investigation of what is puzzling
about reality is required in order to gain understanding, and ultimately,
enlightenment. I was given a small statue of the Chinese goddess Mu when I was
in my twenties, made from peachwood, which represented her as holding a lotus
above her head. Mu represents the all, from which everything is made, and what
is made is what floats on top of the waters. But though the lotus emerges into
visibility, it is not itself the All. It is connected with it (the statue hold
the lotus flower by the stem), but is just a representation of what lies unseen
in the waters.
I’ve described some aspects of the Buddhist approach to what
is hidden, and the Buddhist understanding of causal processes, elsewhere (‘The
Enlightenment of David Hume’). For the early Buddhists (I’ve written about the
scholarly issues around the antiquity of Buddhism in ‘The Age of the Buddha),
the ideas that reality itself is hidden from us, and that how things are
represented to us depends on causal relationships which are not necessarily
obvious, clearly depended on a sophisticated philosophical model of the world. One
of the reasons for the importance of scholars and priests in Buddhism is that
thought and actions are required in order restore balance where balance has
been disrupted. Everything is understood to be connected to everything else,
and is understood to be a cause of something. Since we do not have direct and
unmediated access to the invisible all, careful investigation of these issues
by those who have a profound understanding of them is required.
So what were Clarke’s actual views of God and the nature of
Reality itself? Clarke kept a journal during the writing and production of
2001, which gives us some clues [Clarke included some of this journal in his
book ‘The Lost World’s of 2001’. The journal has been quoted elsewhere also].
At one point he records a discussion of Cantor’s theory of transfinite groups
with Kubrick, without going into any detail, or giving a context for such a
discussion. Transfinite groups gave Cantor a great deal of intellectual and
psychological difficulty, because of the implications (that you can have
infinities which are different sizes, but they are all infinite, for example. Which
again implies that all things are connected with each other, and each thing shares
the same identity).
It is likely that Clarke was expounding something of his mathematical view
of the nature of God and of Reality to Kubrick. This was the way he understood that
theology had to work, and both faith and belief had nothing to do with
theology.
It is clear that he understood God and Reality to have some
profound relationship to actual infinity (as opposed to an Aristotelian ‘potential’
infinity). Modern scholars (both mathematicians and theologians) ignore actual
infinity on the grounds that (they think) it is impossible to work with the
concept. This doesn’t mean it makes no sense to address the question of the
actual infinite as Cantor did. Clarke had the actual infinite in his mind,
since he referenced Cantor directly in his conversation with Kubrick, and didn’t
just confine himself to the mathematics involved in the theory of transfinite
groups. The nature of the world in which we have our existence bears some
relationship to the actual infinite, rather than the hollowed out version of
the infinite which is subject to mathematics and geometry in space and time.
The teaching machine which appears to the man-apes close to
the beginning of the film was not the first choice of object to serve that
purpose. But it is the object that Clarke and Kubrick settled on. The reasons
for this choice are interesting on account of its dimensions, which are
precisely outlined in the novel associated with the film (and elsewhere). It is
a black oblong block, whose dimensions are one, four, and nine units. That is,
one squared, two squared, and three squared. That is the beginning of an
infinite series, which, if extended, would eventually reach infinity itself.
There were discussions about what images would be displayed on the monolith to
the man-apes, but Clarke and Kubrick decided not to show any of these, or even explicitly
suggest (in the film) that the monolith was communicating with the man-apes.
However the dimensions of the monolith, embodying the beginning of an infinite
series suggest that the communication was emanating from the infinite
itself.
The Stargate sequence in the film begins after David Bowman’s
struggle with HAL (and his purely logical and algorithmic artificial
intelligence, which results in HAL’s murder of the crew who were still in hibernation), and once
they are in Jupiter space. Jupiter is of course the king of the Gods (Clarke’s book locates the Stargate near Saturn). During
that sequence David Bowman’s space pod travels over an abstracted landscape: he
is travelling somewhere, but it clearly isn’t in real space. At one point, seven double tetrahedrons appear, hanging above the landscape. Each of the
tetrahedrons is filled with geometric lines which are in motion. Each of the
tetrahedrons contains the same geometric patterns, which change in perfect
synchrony. This image is very reminiscent of Leibniz’s description of the
monads which he posited were the foundation of reality. All of the Leibnizian
monads reflect each other, in both nature and in processes. All of them are
derived from the principle monad, which is the foundation of Reality itself
[Leibniz was a student of Chinese philosophy and oriental patterns of thought,
as well as a polymath and logician].
Why are these images there in this part of the film? Douglas
Trumbull, who was responsible for many of the special effects in the film, has
said that the images in the double tetrahedra were built from reprojections of
the moving slit-screen generated landscape below the tetrahedra. Which by
itself doesn’t tell us very much, except perhaps that both the landscape and
the monads were meant to be different representations of the same thing. One
shows an abstracted representation of travel through space; the other shows
mathematical and geometrical change which might not exist in space at all. This
is likely to have emerged from suggestions from Clarke, but I am not aware that
such conversation is recorded. But it can be understood as a product of Clarke’s
self-declared Crypto-Buddhism.
These ideas may have their origin not via Leibniz, but directly
through Hindu and Buddhist texts. One of the most relevant ideas is that of
Indra’s Net.
"Indra's net" is an infinitely large net of cords
owned by the Vedicdeva
Indra, which
hangs over his palace on Mount Meru, the axis mundi
of Buddhist and Hindu cosmology. In this metaphor, Indra's net has a
multifaceted jewel at each vertex, and each jewel is reflected in all of the
other jewels.[5]
In the Huayan school of Chinese
Buddhism, which follows the Avatamsaka
Sutra, the image of "Indra's net" is used to describe the
interconnectedness of the universe.[5]
Francis H Cook describes Indra's net
thus:
Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra,
there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such
a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with
the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering
jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite
in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels,
glittering "like" stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to
behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and
look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are
reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number.
Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also
reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting
process occurring.[6]
The Buddha in the Avatamsaka
Sutra's 30th book states a similar idea:
If untold buddha-lands are reduced to atoms,
In one atom are untold lands,
And as in one,
So in each.
The atoms to which these buddha-lands are reduced in
an instant are unspeakable,
And so are the atoms of continuous reduction moment to
moment
Going on for untold eons;
These atoms contain lands unspeakably many,
And the atoms in these lands are even harder to tell
of.[7]
Book 30 of the sutra is named "The Incalculable"
because it focuses on the idea of the infinitude
of the universe and as Cleary notes, concludes that "the cosmos is
unutterably infinite, and hence so is the total scope and detail of knowledge
and activity of enlightenment."[8] In
another part of the sutra, the Buddhas' knowledge of all phenomena is referred
to by this metaphor:
They [Buddhas] know all phenomena come from
interdependent origination.
They know all world systems exhaustively. They know
all the
different phenomena in all worlds, interrelated in
Indra's net.[9]
How old are these ideas? They are a lot older than Greek
ideas about the infinite, and the idea reflected to us from the 1st
millennium BCE in Greece that Reality itself is necessarily One, which was a
question which Plato mentioned as of key significance to our understanding of
Reality.
It is worth noting that the section caption film refers to ‘Beyond the Infinite’,
rather than just 'The Infinite'. This I think would have been a formulation by
Clarke, given his understanding of Buddhist ideas. The infinite is incalculable
and ineffable. We can say it is unbounded and without limit, and so on. But
describing what it actually is, is another matter. The first translator of the
works of Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists
into English, Thomas Taylor, wrote about this question, and the Greek interest
in it, at the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though it remains
a question which is not often (if ever) discussed in classes devoted to
philosophy or classics.
It is possible to understand the film version of 2001 as a
film with a broken back. Kubrick was in charge of the script for the film, and
Clarke was writing the novelisation. They talked together and shared ideas of
course, but Kubrick had a different idea of how the film should be. I’ve quoted
evidence of Clarke’s philosophical interests. Kubrick did not share most of
these, hence the fact that, in the course of production, Clarke talked with him about Cantor’s ideas, which
he knew nothing about.
In the end, Clarke’s understanding of how the film should be
was very different from Kubrick’s, so what we have as the final product is actually
a collision between two quite different perspectives. Kubrick’s general view was
that nation states (i.e., organised societies) had always behaved like
gangsters. There was very little good to say about them. His earlier films bear
this out: ‘Paths of Glory’, ‘Spartacus’, and ‘Dr Strangelove’. None of which
paint a picture of a species which is keen to avoid war, destruction and casual
killing. He still felt that while he was making 2001, and his later films (‘Clockwork
Orange’, ‘Barry Lyndon’ ‘’Full Metal Jacket’) suggest he retained something of
that world-view for most of the rest of his life. So the beginning of 2001
features the struggle for survival of a group of man-apes, eking out a
precarious living in the dry African savannah millions of years ago, in the
vicinity of a contested water hole. They eat vegetables and are prey to
carnivores. Their prospects are not good.
Then one of the man-apes has the idea to use an animal bone
as a tool, and by extension, a weapon. Everything changes. They have access to
better nutrition, and gain hegemony over a competing group of man-apes by
beating their leader to death, and as far as Kubrick is concerned, the future
is set. The implication is that the idea was first suggested to the man-apes by
the monolith.
Cue the jump cut to orbiting space weapons. The implication is that nothing
of significance has changed over the intervening millions of years.
As if that is the human story. What does this do to the movie? It means there is no space available for anything which happened in between - culturally and intellectually. None of that is of any importance to this story. Clarke could not have included much about early human intellectual development in the west, but he could have included material from the east.
As if that is the human story. What does this do to the movie? It means there is no space available for anything which happened in between - culturally and intellectually. None of that is of any importance to this story. Clarke could not have included much about early human intellectual development in the west, but he could have included material from the east.
The consequence of inserting this jump cut is that,
though the development of the human race is perhaps to be conceived as being towards a grasp of infinite knowledge, and an
engagement with Reality itself (Clarke’s understanding), there is no space in
this film for reflection that this is an old idea, and that human beings were
aspiring to this over many thousands of years, east and west. As I’ve
indicated, there are residual clues in the film that a more sophisticated view
was discussed in the early days of the production.
Instead, Kubrick peddles the rather lame idea that human
evolution will take us to infinity, with the help of those unseen beings who
first installed the monoliths in various parts of the solar system. Despite the
fact that it seems in Kubrick’s view, the evolution of the human species just intensifies a meaningless struggle
for survival. Bigger weapons, and ever more violence.The unseen beings were the ones who encouraged the use of tools
and weapons, and now, at the end of the line, David Bowman has mysteriously reached
infinity in any case, and is reborn as a divine being.
2001 is a deeply unsatisfactory film, when it is examined in
detail. It makes it much harder to explain human cultural history, mainly because that cultural history is just swept away by Kubrick as of no importance, in one 25th of a second.
[Retitled September 21st, 2020]
