The Complexities of Contemplation

Darren Aronofsky’s Pi thrusts you into the dark and fixated mind of Max Cohen. Max’s world (portrayed by Aronofsky in solely black and white) is consumed by obsessive thoughts of numbers and patterns. More precisely, Max believes that through the rigorous analysis of Pi and the Golden Ratio, patterns can be found in nature which will ultimately allow mankind to decode and predict the natural world. Almost every second of Max’s days are spent hysterically typing lines of code into his homemade supercomputer in hopes of discovering the numerical. According to Max:

      1. Mathematics is the language of nature.

      2. Everything around can be represented and understood by numbers.

      3. If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge.

            4.Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature.

There is never a calm moment in Max’s world, and we feel this crippling anxiety throughout the entirety of the movie. The neurotic need to decode the world is literally eroding Max’s (and the viewer’s) sanity. As every second passes, it seems as if Max is spiraling further and further away from reality. The stress of living a life consumed by racing thoughts and numbers constantly triggers severe panic attacks which Max must helplessly and painfully endure. The tragic irony of Max’s desire to comprehend the natural world paired with his imminent mental collapse signifies a philosophical conundrum: is man capable of fully understanding the world in which we live in? And, if that is even possible, is man capable of living with the breadth and weight of that knowledge? 

It’s easy to see some of Rene Descartes’ qualities in Max Cohen. Descartes, like Max, felt an immense desire to comprehend the natural world through his own understanding. Descartes begins his Second Meditation by admitting that, “the Meditation of yesterday has filled [his] mind with so many doubts, that it is no longer in [his] power to forget them.” Like Max, it appears that Descartes’ furious contemplation and questioning has developed into an insatiable desire for understanding. Both men see it fit to discard all that is generally taken to be irrefutably true and start from the bottom up. Descartes abandons the comforting belief that all that we are surrounded by is true and real, and asserts that “body, figure, extension, motion, and place are merely fictions of [his] mind.” Now, nothing exists but the mind and its ability to think. Therefore, we can deduce mankind into “thinking things.” However, being thinking things begs an extension of that definition. Thinking things are capable of doubting, understanding, affirming, denying, willing, refusing, imagining, and perceiving—the capacities of the mind are seemingly endless, yet also prone to error. 

When an individual is presented with a physical stimulus, he or she comes to understand it in two ways. The first is through sensual perception—touch, smell, sound, etc. But this yields an inevitable understanding through contemplation. Both means have the potential to be correct and incorrect, depending on the scenario, yet it is apparent that the mind will ultimately allow us to fully understand more than our senses will. This is so because, according to Descartes, the authenticity of the physical world is still not sure while we can be sure that we are cognitive and contemplative beings—while we cannot always be sure of the contents of our minds, we can be sure that we are capable, at least, of thinking.

This is where I find Max’s story to be so terribly tragic. His neurotic need to understand this physical world ultimately destroyed his mind. The final scenes of the movie show Max discovering what could potentially be the magic number sequence. Seconds after, Max suddenly appears in what can be construed in an alternate reality—a reality devoid of the stress and mania that had plagued every second of Max’s life. Is this wholesome understanding? Is this life, in its purest and realest form?

He and the viewer are finally at peace, albeit for only a few short seconds. Max is thrust back into his tiny apartment, and makes his way into the bathroom. He produces a drill, which Max turns on and slowly moves towards the part of his skull which is represented in phrenology as the mathematical portion of his brain. He slowly drills into brain and the scene ends. 

Moments later, we see Max in a park sitting peacefully in a bench. This is not the anxious Max we had been forced to watch throughout the movie. A little girl who was well acquainted with Max’s genius asks him a difficult math problem. Max smiles and replies that he does not know. It seems that he has rid himself of his genius and is pleasantly ignorant to the intricacies which had made him a prisoner to his own mind.

Are we better off ignorant? Are the complexities of life too convoluted for human understanding? Regardless, it seems to be a human characteristic to question the world around us in order to give both life and ourselves meaning.