Descartes’ Evil Demon
Early modern philosopher Descartes, disbelieving all material reality, concocted a thought experiment to support his radical doubt: an evil demon of “utmost cunning and power” has constructed the world of extension with the express intent to deceive him. Descartes attempts to sidestep this illusory reality by retreating to the non-material consciousness of his innermost self: his ability to think rationally at all. The entire world may be composed of demonic automata but at least he knows who is doing the thinking around here. His proposal is that god-imbued cognition in the castle redoubt of the indisputable I is what separates man from the mechanical body and dead nature. In a related experiment, in order to prove that nature was indeed soulless and mechanical, Descartes killed a cat by throwing it from a high window (the evil demon is the cat). The rationality and transparency of (human) self-consciousness becomes the fundamental datum against which all of mechanical nature is measured: hence his majesty the ego as we know it today, lord of the collapsing biosphere. “Normally, there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, of our own ego,” Freud says. “The ego appears to us as something autonomous and unitary.” Appears is the operative word here. For is not this autonomy and unity the real illusion? Descartes no doubt retreated to such unitary certitude in order to justify his cruelty to animals.
