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The evil demon, sometimes referred to as the evil genius, is a concept in
Cartesian philosophy. In his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy, René
Descartes hypothesized the existence of an evil demon, a personification who is
"as clever and deceitful as he is powerful, who has directed his entire effort
to misleading me." The evil demon presents a complete illusion of an external
world, including other minds, to Descartes' senses, where in fact there is no
such external world in existence. The evil genius also presents to Descartes'
senses a complete illusion of his own body, including all bodily sensations,
when in fact Descartes has no body. Most Cartesian scholars opine that the evil
demon is also omnipotent, and thus capable of altering mathematics and the
fundamentals of logic.
The evil demon has a parallel with Berkeley's concept of a consensus reality
supported by God. It is one of several methods of systematic doubt that
Descartes employs in the Meditations.
Deus deceptor
Another such method of systematic doubt is the deus deceptor (French dieu
trompeur), the "deceptive god". Cartesian scholars differ in their opinions as
to whether the deus deceptor and the evil demon are one and the same. Among the
accusations of blasphemy made against Descartes by Protestants was that he was
positing an omnipotent God of malevolent intent.
Kennington states that the evil demon is never declared by Descartes to be
omnipotent, merely to be not less powerful than he is necessarily deceitful, and
thus not explicitly an equivalent to an omnipotent God. The evil demon is
capable of simulating an external world and bodily sensations, but incapable of
rendering dubious things that are independent of trust in the senses, such as
pure mathematics, eternal truths, and the principle of contradiction.
However, this was not the view of Descartes' contemporaries. Voetius accused
Descartes of blasphemy in 1643. Jacques Triglandius and Jacobus Revius,
theologians at Leiden University, made similar accusations in 1647, accusing
Descartes of "hold[ing] God to be a deceiver", a position that they stated to be
"contrary to the glory of God". Descartes was threatened with having his views
condemned by a synod, but this was prevented by the intercession of the Prince
of Orange (at the request of the French Ambassador Servien).
The accusations referenced a passage in the First Meditation where Descartes
stated that he supposed not an optimal God but rather an evil demon "summe
potens & callidus" (translated as "most highly powerful and cunning"). The
accusers identified Descartes' concept of a deus deceptor with his concept of an
evil demon, stating that only an omnipotent God is "summe potens" and that
describing the evil demon as such thus demonstrated the identity. Descartes'
response to the accusations was that in that passage he had been expressly
distinguishing between "the supremely good God, the source of truth, on the one
hand, and the malicious demon on the other". He did not directly rebut the
charge of implying that the evil demon was omnipotent, but asserted that simply
describing something with "some attribute that in reality belongs only to God"
does not mean that that something is being held to actually be a supreme God.
That the evil demon is omnipotent, Christian doctrine notwithstanding, is seen
as a key requirement for Descartes' argument by Cartesian scholars such as
Ferdinand Alquié, Beck, Émile Bréhier, Chevalier, Frankfurt, Étienne Gilson,
Anthony Kenny, Laporte, Kemp-Smith, and Wilson. The progression through the
First Meditation, leading to the introduction of the concept of the evil genius
at the end, is to introduce various categories into the set of dubitables, such
as mathematics (i.e. Descartes' addition of 2 and 3 and counting the sides of a
square). Although the hypothetical evil genius is never stated to be one and the
same as the hypothetical "deus deceptor," (God the deceiver) the inference by
the reader that they are is a natural one, and the requirement that the deceiver
is capable of introducing deception even into mathematics is seen by
commentators as a necessary part of Descartes' argument. Kenney exemplifies
Cartesian scholarship on this point, stating that the reason that Descartes
introduces a second hypothetical, beyond the original hypothetical of the deus
deceptor, is that it is simply "less offensive. The content of the two
hypotheses is the same, namely that an omnipotent deceiver is trying to deceive."
Scholars contend that in fact Descartes was not introducing a new hypothetical,
merely couching the idea of a deceptive God in terms that would not be offensive.
Janowski points out one reason for not accepting this interpretation, the same
as given by Kennington, namely that the set of things that the evil demon is
stated as rendering dubious ("the heavens, the air, the earth, colours, figures,
sounds, and all external things") is only a subset of the things that the deus
deceptor is stated as rendering dubious (earth, heavens, extended things, figure,
magnitude, place, and mathematics). The omission of mathematics implies either
that the evil demon is not omnipotent or that Descartes retracted Universal
Doubt. Janowski notes that in The Principles of Philosophy (I, 15) Descartes
states that Universal Doubt applies even to "the demonstration of mathematics",
and so concludes that either Descartes' Meditation is flawed, lacking a reason
for doubting mathematics, or that the charges of blasphemy were well placed, and
Descartes was supposing an omnipotent evil demon.
W. Teed Rockwell, claiming to be a Deweyan pragmatist, argues that instead of
being dualists or Cartesians, "philosophers should realize that the human
conscious self is not reducible to the brain, nor to the nervous system, nor
even to the human body. The thinking, conscious self is a nexus--or a "behavioral
field"--of the brain, the nervous system, the body, and the world." Rockwell
contends that his position "can allow for solutions to certain philosophical
problems such as the 'brain in a vat,' . . . a contemporary, materialist version
of the problem introduced by Descartes's 'Evil Genius'". "Both thought
experiments are supposed to show us that human consciousness is plausible even
though there might be no world in which consciousness exists," but Rockwell
argues "that even in a vat the brain would have to be stimulated by some world,
if only a world of electronic gizmos, and that such a world would have to
produce a continuous experience. The brain, hence, would have to be embodied in
some way.