the dilemma of the deceitful god or the evil genius in descartes

The evil genius is presented as the great obstacle with which the first meditation closes. In this grandiloquent gesture, the echo of a hostility towards what the figure of the genius embodies, the understanding of the same Genius (as a representative figure of the indomitability of the spirit) as the Evil One from whom the calculating conscience must be protected, resounds. so as not to see his triumphal march disturbed. However, the evil genius actually acts as a mask that distracts us from the true indomitability of the spirit that had made an appearance with the deceitful God.

Doubt would seem to reach a point of no return by introducing the possibility, derived from the omnipotence of the Creator, that God is a deceiver. If the experimental sciences had seen the reference of his discourse broken with the argument of the indiscernibility between sleep and wakefulness, the deceitful God extends the doubt to the point of cracking the formal coherence of the mathematical discourse both in terms of its demonstrative evidence and to the intuitive ones (we come to doubt, as we will be told in the Principles, “also of those principles that until now we considered evident”). The process of doubt would take a qualitative leap here, since it would be the same pretensions of self-foundation of reason that would be prosecuted and it would be the court of reason itself that would sit on the bench of the accused. It would seem that the doubt has gone out of Descartes's hands, as if the judge's chair had become empty.

At this point, Descartes had only two options left: give up his pretensions to self-justification of the discourse of reason, or initiate discounts. The first reduction is an allusion whose true import will become visible in the two following meditations and which highlights the circumstance that the goodness that corresponds to the true God seems incompatible with deception although, on the other hand, it would also seem contrary to his goodness. . . the fact that sometimes we are wrong. It is then pointed out that those who deny the existence of an omnipotent God, far from avoiding the problem of error, strengthen it, since "the less powerful the author to whom they attribute my origin, the more likely it is that I am so imperfect that I always deceive myself.

Furtively, with a subliminal ability, Descartes places a marked card on the table. The deceiver god had positioned himself as the omnipotent god, and in fact it was his omnipotence that gave him the power to deceive permanently, now, however, it is suggested to us that deception is more likely to arise from impotence than lack. of power. omnipotence, since the less powerful God is, the more easily I will be a victim of deception; Which is as much as saying that the more power God has, the less likely I am to be deceived, so that what previously seemed threatening, an omnipotent God, now appears reassuring. It is the moment in which the Evil Genius enters the scene, "not a true God -who is the supreme source of truth-, but a certain evil genius, no less cunning and deceitful than powerful, who has used all his industry to deceive I will think that the sky, the air, the earth, the colors, the figures, the sounds and the other external things, are nothing more than illusions and daydreams, which he uses to trap my credulity. without hands, without eyes, without flesh, without blood, without any sense, and falsely believing that I have all that.

If we look beyond the drama with which the figure of the evil genius is exhibited, in what it expressly manifests, we see the following: it does not express any doubt about the intra-mental world but rather limits itself, in any case, to rooting the doubt about the extra-mental world in a metaphysical-demonic realm. Far from being, therefore, the figure of the evil genius, the peak of doubt is already a decline with respect to what was suggested when the figure of the deceitful God made presence. The evil genius forces us to suspend our judgment on the material-extramental (be it other bodies or my own), but leaves the eidetic-mental realm intact. What we are now fighting against is no longer against that God whose volitional omnipotence acts as a background opaque to reason, but against a kind of lesser god, against a powerless god whose power affects the reference of our empirical discourse, but no longer to the nucleus of intuitive certainties on which its coherence is based. The fact that Descartes from now on intertwines the figures of the evil genius and the deceitful God forms part of the sleight of hand, since, precisely to stage an appearance of radical doubt, the evil genius will sometimes be spoken of as if he were the deceiver God. and others of the deceitful God as if he were the genius of evil, thus inducing a feeling of synonymy where there is a polysemy.