[lit-ideas] Descartes's Demon and Geary's Demon
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 19:11:18 -0400 (EDT)
In a message dated 4/18/2014 2:42:30 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx writes:
you should keep in mind that this is a philosophy and literature
discussion group and who amongst us dast define either literature or
philosophy?
Surely no one would be so fool-hardy. I know from mine own private
philosophizing that most people are as stupid as I am and so.... I haven't
yet
finished that thought, maybe you can help me here. There's a fella called J.
L. Speranza what writes long writs on this discussion board. You may know
him. Some call him J., some call him L. Some even call him JL while some
others don't call him at all. He gets drunk on Grice on ice, methinks.
Me? I used to get drunk on everything, but time has turned me out.
-----
The origin of the daemon hypothesis in Descartes can be traced back to
Greek authors.
It possibly does involve, as Geary notes, the definition of literature
_and_ philosophy.
Kennington, for example, 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, Wilson, and J. M. Geary.
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.
Geary and Janowski point 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.
Geary and Janowski note 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, taking a different side from Geary's, and 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.
And so on.
Cheers,
Speranza
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