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The immediate purpose of the malicious demon, then, is to replace the deceiving
God as a supremely deceptive being in his argument, but one which is consistent
with his assumption that such a being must be imperfect or corrupt in some way.
To establish the wider purpose of this deceiver, the structure and purpose of the
First Meditation must be examined as a whole.
This leads him to invoke the idea of a deceiver. The only way one could doubt
those aspects of reality which so consistently seem to be true, namely the ideas
we have about mathematics and other basic concepts, is if our whole experience
of reality was designed to mislead us. Hence, an intelligent being is needed to fill
the role of designer in this philosophical conjecture: first, God is used, and then
dismissed because this would contradict God’s purportedly flawless nature;
finally, the malicious demon is conjured up, and the meditator is thus compelled
to withhold assent from even the most basic assumptions that they used to hold.
This concludes the First Meditation, as the undermining of the foundations of the
meditator’s previous assumptions is now complete.
1René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections
and Replies, 1996 Revised Ed. By John Cottingham – p9, ‘Synopsis of the following six
Meditations’. NB: page numbers are those of the 1996 revised edition, not those of the
original text.
2René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections
and Replies, 1996 Revised Ed. By John Cottingham – p12, p13, p14, ‘First Meditation’
conclusion in the Second Meditation that his thinking is enough to prove his
existence:
“The demon is a heuristic device. One of its uses is to strip away the
presumption that one’s existence is purely bodily or dependent upon the existence
of bodies. By clearing away those preanalytic prejudices, the demon hypothesis
paves the way for Descartes’ recognition that thinking is a sufficient condition for
knowing his own existence, a condition that is immune from the doubts raised by the
possibility of an evil deceiver.”3
In summary, the question of the role of the malicious demon in Descartes’ First
Meditation can be answered in at least two ways. Firstly, the demon is a
philosophical device which brings Descartes’ method of doubt to its logical
extreme, where all of the meditator’s previous assumptions can apparently be
doubted. Secondly, the malicious demon hypothesis is heuristic, preparing the
reader for the more significant conclusions reached in the Second Meditation,
specifically the contention that if the meditator thinks then the meditator must
exist. Since cogito ergo sum is one of the integral indubitable assumptions on
which the meditator can base further assumptions as they continue the
meditation, the role of the malicious demon is important in the overall narrative
of the Meditations, although its role is merely that of a support structure for
more central arguments.
3 Bonnen etal., Descartes and Method: A Search for a Method in Meditations, 1999 –
p124, ‘The malicious demon’
Bibliography:
Bonnen, C. A., & Flage, D. E. (1999). Descartes and Method: A Search for a
Method in Meditations. London, New York: Routledge.