Divine deception and skepticism

Abstract

After presenting the widely divergent interpretations of H. Gouhier and M. Gueroult on the status and role of the deceiving God and the evil genius in Descartes, we will attempt to show that divine deception is linked to the doctrine of the creation of eternal truths by an all-powerful God and to the ontology of the incomprehensible that underlies it, and that the skepticism inspired by the deceiving God is linked to this concern about the origin of our being. It will then become apparent that, far from being rhetorical, the fiction of the deceitful God is grounded in reason, and that it is from the necessity of this fiction that the subject will be able to emerge as the locus of criticism of the rationality of his reason and the rationality of the world.