'I'm not interested in religion.'
These are some random thoughts that I decided to jolt down after viewing Pi for the tenth time.
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When Lenny Myers first introduces himself to Max Cohen, he comments on the fact that they are both Jewish and then asks Cohen if he is a practicing Jew. Cohen retorts that he is “not interested in religion”. We the audience are supposed to believe that Cohen is your stereotypical secular rationalist who exalts scientific rigour and discursive thinking over intuition and sensibility. This is the biggest lie in the entire movie.
I believe that, on the contrary, there is absolutely no difference between Cohen and the faithfully religious, in the sense that neither he nor they ever yield in their belief in God and both of them devote their entire life to Him. They do differ, however, on what they call their belief in God: the religious call it faith; Cohen calls it an assumption. Yet essentially the religious’ “faith” and Cohen’s “assumption” are the same act.
Now in order to allow myself to continue, I have to explain what I mean by God and remove some preconceived notions. Most people reading this probably associate the term God with the common (mis-)conception of the Christian Father, namely, an old, bearded guy in robes. In contrast, when I use the word, I equate it with Logos, that is to say, the idea of a rational force that permeates and orders everything. Man is said to partake of this force through his reason, which has a structure identical to the structure of the force; indeed, the force is reason itself.
Logos as a vision of God is an idea that was popular with both Ancient Greeks (Heraclitus, for example) and Jews (for instance, the Hellenistic philosopher Philo Judaeus). It seems more than fitting, then, for a movie that ties together Ancient Greek philosophy and Judaism; especially if you consider the fact that Cohen believes in a single mathematical pattern that orders everything.
Yet this belief isn’t enough for Cohen and herein lays a great difference between him and the religious; for while the latter are satisfied with simply knowing that God exists, Cohen needs to know Him as well. In this sense, Cohen is parallel to Socrates. The commonality of Ancient Greece was comfortable simply knowing that there is such a thing as the good, but Socrates wanted to know the definition of the good, that is to say, its essence. He would roam the streets of Athens, asking stranger after stranger, but no one could tell him what the good was, although they were all assured that the good does indeed exist. And so Socrates was in a continual state of disappointment, longing to fill empty words.
It is precisely that that differentiates Cohen from the religious: he is not a philosopher because he questions the existence of God -- indeed, he never questions or doubts it -- but because he is not satisfied with simply knowing He is there, because he has to know Him. Thus if he follows in the footsteps of Socrates, then his need has set him up for disappointment and tragedy. And indeed, this has already happened before the events in the film, and in recalling this, Cohen predicts his future.
The event -- or prediction -- was that when he was young, Cohen’s mother told him to never stare into the sun, so one day he did and he blinded himself (this story alludes to Plato’s allegory of the sun as the supreme good, which Christians would later identify as God). Cohen muses that when he was finally able to see again, something had changed inside him. Yet this isn’t strictly true, for the change had already taken place before he turned blind; indeed, the change caused his blindness. Seeing the sun and then being away from its presence for so long only enraged his change, i.e., his need to know God.
Cohen seems to be angry at God, almost as much as he desires to know him, precisely because of this desire. Generally, the scene where he finds a brain crawling with ants in his sink and then proceeds to squish it with an electric drill is seen as representing his anger at the position his intellect has gotten him into, the ants representing the Jews and business corporations hammering him for answers. That is one way to interpret the scene, one that I am inclined to believe is correct. But I believe that you can also see the brain as representing God: a brain, a rational order that is everything and the ants living on it.
For me, perceiving the movie in this manner leads one to the conclusion that Cohen is the embodiment of the history of Ancient Greek philosophy, a search for God that ends in resignation. First there was faith, then there were the pre-Socratics, who asked “what is it?”, then came a great flurry of work with Plato and Aristotle (the discovery of the 216 digit number for Cohen) before the disenfranchised Hellenistic philosophers, finding themselves with less than they had started out with, searched for a way to escape suffering, and they found it in abstinence and agnosticism.
One thinks of Kierkegaard’s discussion of the proverb “a person needs only a little in order to live and needs that little only a little while” in “Four Upbuilding Discourses”. In his typically ironic fashion, Kierkegaard praises the proverb in order to highlight its deficiencies. It is true that man needs only a little to live, but only on condition that he is apathetic and mindless. Man in his highest form, in his perfection, needs God. In Pi, we witness Cohen’s fall from grace.
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On a final note, I want to say something about the complaints that for a movie about maths there isn't enough mathematics. For me, the movie isn't about mathematics at all. A mathematician was simply a good vessel for representing the core of the movie. A biologist, philosopher or priest wouldn't have worked so well.