In contrast, as our intellect is finite, our decisions and choices are affected due to not being able to clearly and distinctly understand things, resulting in choices that can be deemed as “Bad”. Concluding that God is not as fault for our defects as we are not clearly and distinctly perceiving things, Descartes illustrates how he can avoid error by suspending judgements when uncertain, or only passing judgment when certain of clear and distinct
“Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once” (Descartes). By this, he means that our perceptions are deceptions created by our senses to trick us into believing that we are awake and going about our day when in actuality, we are dreaming and the world around us is an illusion. Hence, we shouldn’t trust our senses to give us any true knowledge of the world because it may always be deceiving us. It is true that senses can deceive, however, for us to know that our senses are deceiving us, we must differentiate between reality and what is deception.
He argues that "[He] now seems to be able to lay it down as a general rule that whatever [he] perceives very clearly and distinctly is true" (Descartes 35). The reason, he explains, that his clear and distinct perceptions are so reliable is because of God’s existence; particularly, because of God’s existence as a beneficent God. According to Descartes, God simply cannot be a deceiver; God is perfect. Perfection can only include positive traits such as beneficence, unconditional love, justice, and wisdom. Therefore, God cannot, and would never deceive us.
Deception is defined as a scheme to get what one needs in a dishonest way. The act of deception is one of the themes of the novel, The Maltese Falcon. It starts from Miss Brigid telling Mr. Spade that her sister had run off with a man called Thursby to San Francisco. This act is seen as a deception because she was not telling the truth. Miss Brigid was being deceptive because she wanted Spade and Miles to think that Thursby is a dangerous man and in the process, when she kills Miles, she will be able to frame Thursby easily.
Moving onwards to stage two, where Descartes now questions the aspect of dreaming. For the duration of this argument Descartes faces extreme philosophical scepticism, as he is in use of the skeptical voice, where he now doubts whether he is awake or is being deceived and is yet asleep in a dream. Over the course of stage three, Descartes' skeptical voice progresses, and in the third stage he begins to suspect that there is now an ‘evil demon’. This evil demon is now determined to trick Descartes and mess with his powers of
If demons exist, so must God. Descartes believed God will not allow any evil demons to deceive anybody. We can not be for certain if God had a reason to teach humanity a lesson or allow an evil demon to do that
In talking to the Fool, Descartes must account for the Fool’s insistence that an infinitely perfect being is incomprehensible. Descartes characterizes everyone as having concepts of “perfections” (infinite quantities of goodness, knowledge, self-existence) all of which God must possess (Descartes 59). To use this premise, Descartes needs the Fool to admit that his mind contains the idea of infinity which is needed to understand perfection. However, the Fool should not have to admit to understanding the infinite and even if he did, there is no way to assure that the concept of the infinite is truly
However since we already have an idea of God as this perfect and infinite being, he must exist. Furthermore, since the natural light clears deception as an imperfection as well as not existing, God is a non-deceiver, he exist and is perfect. After the cogito argument and natural light examination of the deceptive God, Descartes discards the hypothesis that God is a deceiver. Since God is all-good, he would not deceive us. For that reason, Descartes introduces the evil demon/genius instead.
While Descartes is clearly considering even the most remote possibilities in his method of doubt, all he offers is the claim that such a being could exist. However, this is not seen as a solid basis upon which absolute doubt, required by Descartes, can be built. Ironically, his skepticism offers such that I am in a state of doubt, I will also have doubt about the possibility that there could even be a deceiving being. As such, my doubt about the possibility of such a being serves to undermine the greater doubt that is supposed to be generated by this being. In order for the evil demon to generate such a degree of doubt it must be possible for it to exist.
For how he can be certain that 2+2= 4 and not 5, how can he know for sure that he is not being deceived into believing the answer to be 5 due to a demon. But even if an evil demon did indeed exist, in order to be misled, Descartes himself must exist. As there must be an “I”, that can be deceived. Conclusively, upon Descartes’ interpretations we can come to decipher that in order for someone to exist they must indeed be able to think, to exist as a thinking thing.
Descartes makes the Evil Demon argument to neither prove the existence of such a demon or construct a better understanding of this source of deceit. But rather to destroy the foundations in which he has built all his bias on and rebuild his knowledge from scratch. It works to make us speculate everything while doubting the beliefs and senses we hold so true. This never-ending doubt gives rise to a new question, how do I know that
However Descartes believed that if Evil Genius existed, that we would have definitely have to exist for it to fool us. And if we are doubting our own existence, we must exist in order to doubt it! “Cogito Ergo
In order to be right about claiming that the senses do deceive, a person should have recognized that an error has actually occurred. So the person distinguished between being mistaken and being correct. (For example knowing that heat mirages on the roads are deceptions, one has successfully classed them as optical illusion). Thus one is able to see through the deception and thus avoid being deceived. Oddly, it must be concluded that in presenting examples of how the senses deceive, one is also presenting examples of how we are able to see through deceptions.
5. Why can’t an evil deceiver deceive Descartes about his belief that he thinks? He sees that he can be certain that he exists and that he thinks because even if an evil genius is doing everything possible to deceive Descartes, it can 't deceive him into believing he doesn 't exist. In order for something to be deceived, it must at least exist. Then, Descartes comes up with a rule which allows him 6.
Siegfried Kracauer, like Andre Bazin, was interested in viewing cinema from a realist perspective. When talking about their ideas, Bazin was more focused on capturing reality that already exists, whereas, Kracauer focused his attention on cinemas ability to redeem reality. To explain this would be to say, where the viewer is able to tap into the unconscious world of modernity but comes back to reality by the camera's gaze in the world of cinema. All in all, Kracauer was a German film theorist and believed that film should show the reality of the world. Kracauer believed that the Lumiere Brothers had demonstrated “the true domain of the cinema in the right manner”.
