Encountering Finitude: On the Hermeneutic Radicalization of Experience 1

“However paradoxical it may seem,” Hans-Georg Gadamer writes in Truth and Method, “the concept of experience [Erfahrung] seems to me one of the most unelucidated [unaufgeklärtesten] concepts we have.”2 Indeed, the claim is striking. After all, few terms have been more central to the Western epistemological tradition, which, ever since Aristotle, has conceived of experience as an indispensable stage in the ascent to comprehensive knowledge and understanding. With the increasing doubts that late medieval and early modern philosophy cast upon the capacity of discursive reason to penetrate the innermost essence of nature on its own strength, experience emerged as the watchword with which modern science distinguished itself from the Aristotelian model of epistēmē, which is focused on intuitive insight and deductive reasoning. In his manifesto for an experimental scientific method, Novum Organum (1620), Sir Francis Bacon describes the incipient modern age as an age of experience (experientia), one in which “the store of experiences has grown immeasurably” in comparison to antiquity, with its greatly expanded perspective on history, unforeseen technical innovations, and the discovery of the New World and its peoples.3 Since Bacon and the British Empiricists, the emphasis

things, we become prepared for what may come, that is, when the accumulation of experiences prevents further encounters from taking us by surprise.Learning can only be achieved by systematizing and synthesizing the historical multiplicity of shifting experiences into increasingly constant unities.In this sense, "by its very essence, experience merges [aufhebt] its history into itself and thus obliterates it." 9However, it is precisely the historical multiplicity, singularity, and unpredictability of experience, which is seen as a weakness from the point of view of scientific method, that Gadamerian hermeneutics seeks to explore and elucidate.Taking our cue from several seminal texts highlighted by Gadamer himself, first and foremost, Aristotle's Metaphysics and Posterior Analytics, Bacon's Novum Organum, and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, we will sketch an outline of certain key stages in the conceptual history of experience in the epistemological tradition in the coming sections. 10This will enable us to place the Heideggerian and Gadamerian hermeneutic radicalization of the concept of experience into a historical context as an attempt to overcome the limitations of the methodical approach to experience and to grasp experience anew as the finite human being's finite-that is, inherently singular and transformative, and, in that sense, risky and perilous-encounter with reality.

Aristotle: experience between the particular and the universal
The Presocratics Parmenides and Heraclitus generally depreciate experience.For them, philosophical thinking constitutes a radical break with the multiplicity of situated, particular perspectives or "acceptances" (doxai) of ordinary "mortal" experience and entails an insight into the fundamental unity of all beings in the mode of intuitive beholding (noos) or discursive articulation (logos). 11rmenides' goddess exhorts the thinker not to let "custom [ethos] force you upon the way of much experience [polypeiron hodon], / heeding the unregardful eye and the roaring hearing / and the tongue; rather, discern through discursive articulation [krinai . . .logō]." 12 Plato, too, mainly views empeiria in a derogatory manner, as a mere business or occupation (epitēdeusis, tribē), such as rhetoric, that does not constitute an art (technē) based on rational insight but rather requires proficiency acquired through mere habituation. 13istotle, however, takes a different approach.For him, there is a relationship of continuity between experience and rational insight.In his genealogy of human knowledge and understanding in the first book of the Metaphysics and in the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle describes empeiria as the point of divergence between the cognitive capacities of the human being and those of nonhuman animals.
Animals are distinguished from plants by sense perception (aisthēsis), the innate capacity for apprehending their environment through the senses; some animals further possess memory (mnēmē), that is, the ability to retain sensations beyond the immediate act of perceiving them. 14Of the animals that remember, some (first and foremost, humans) are further capable of discursively articulating their sensations with the help of a conceptual determination (logos), which then allows them to identify certain perceptions as sharing one and the same object with previous perceptions retained in memory. 15It is this latter perception of identity, the attainment of a "universal [katholou] that has come to rest in its entirety in the soul, a unity that is apart from the many [retained sensations] and is present in all of them as one and the same," that grounds experience (empeiria). 16perience is, for Aristotle, an essentially discursive capacity for accumulating propositions (hypolēpseis) regarding particular cases (kath' hekaston) with some degree of identity.Experience tells us, for example, that patient A with a certain kind of ailment benefited from a certain treatment and that this was also the case for patients B and C with similar ailments, which then encourages us to apply the same treatment in the similar case of patient D. 17 The sufficient accretion of such individual experiences finally allows us to move to a new level of abstraction, formulating a general rule-for example, that treatments of a certain type will benefit a certain type of patients with certain symptoms.This step from habitual familiarity to the possession of a universal principle is the step from experience to technē, technical expertise or "art." 18What distinguishes the expert or master craftsperson (architektōn) possessing technē from the experienced worker (cheirotechnēs), whose hability is an incommunicable "manual" routine (ethos) acquired by doing, is the former's insight into formal principles and her ability to teach her expertise (verbally and discursively) to others. 19perience is thus the necessary preliminary to the more comprehensive, discursive, and systematic forms of knowledge constituted through the human soul's natural capacity to discursively synthesize and articulate sensations and to abstract from them more and more comprehensive conceptual unities.Aristotle is no empiricist in the modern sense: even though sense perception and the accumulation of experience necessarily precede in time the higher, more abstract levels of knowledge concerning the ideal structures of reality, such knowledge is not reducible to individual perceptions.For the Aristotelian tradition, "induction," epagōgē, does not mean simply the logical derivation of the universal from particular cases, but more generally the literal "guidance," the agōgē or ductio, provided by experience of particulars toward an intuitive grasp of the universal. 20 thus find in the Aristotelian account a teleological and methodological instrumentalization of experience as a pathway to a level of certainty and necessity that is itself, in some sense, beyond experience.For Aristotle, the important epistemological limitation of experience in the ordinary sense is its contingency, its dependence on random individual encounters with particular phenomena.
Experience is exclusively awareness of facts, of the bare contingent "that" (to hoti), without their underlying principles or grounds, the "because" (dioti). 21Knowledge, however, cannot be satisfied with the contingent.Philosophy as a theoretical project starts from wonder (thaumazein), inspired by things that happen to be at hand (ta procheira), but ultimately seeks the grounds of everything that there is. 22The path of knowledge must thus lead from sensible particulars, "better known and more evident to us" in the genealogical and developmental order, to the most universal determinations, 18 Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.1.981a1-12. 19Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.1.981a12-b10. 20Aristotle, Topics, in Topica et Sophistici elenchi, ed.Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.1.981a24-30. 22Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.2.982b11-28.
"better known and more evident in the order of nature."In Kantian terms, this refers to that which is known after the fact, a posteriori, to that which is known before all facts, a priori, and is necessarily true regardless of the situation. 23

Bacon: From experience to experiment
The Aristotelian understanding of experience held sway throughout the Aristotelian tradition up to Thomas Aquinas. 24It is not until early modernity that an upheaval in the status of experience takes place.The important philosophical difference between the Aristotelian and the early modern thinkers was that the latter had largely, if often implicitly, accepted the consequences of the theological voluntarism of the late medieval via moderna, represented in various forms by scholastics such as John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Gabriel Biel.Voluntarists saw the rational, moral, and physical order of created nature, to which God's "ordained power" (potentia ordinata) has normally been committed since creation, as ultimately contingent and constantly capable of being overridden by God's exercise of the primordial absolute freedom of his will, his absolute power (potentia absoluta). 2523 Aristotle, Physics 1.1.184a16-21;Posterior Analytics 1.2.71b29-72a5.Note, however, that while according to the Posterior Analytics, what is closest to us are sensible particulars, from which we proceed toward universals, in the Physics (1.1.184a21-b14),Aristotle states that what we actually initially encounter in sense perception is a confused and indeterminate general notion (e.g., "animal") which is then defined and analyzed into more specific kinds (horses, cows etc.).The latter description fits Aristotle's historical account of the development of philosophy in the first book of Physics as the emergence of increasingly sophisticated conceptual distinctions.Both accounts stress that knowledge essentially strives for a grasp of the causes (aitia) and principles (archai) of things, which are universals in the true sense of the word.Bacon (Novum Organum 1.19, 1.104) criticizes the Aristotelian method precisely for leaping too quickly over the passage from particulars to universals, which for him is the only true path of science.
24 Thomas Aquinas, for example, simply reiterates Aristotle's definition of experience (experientia) as a synthesis of many remembrances; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Pars Prima, Quaestiones L-CXIX, Sancti Thomae Aquinatis opera omnia, vol. 5 (Rome: Polyglotta, 1889), 1.58.3.This approach was closely linked to the nominalist ascription of a purely intramental existence to the forms and structures of human understanding, which have gradually become "ideas" in the modern sense. 26th these theological and metaphysical views operating in their background, the early moderns were beset by a new skepticism: they could no longer simply regard natural philosophy as a straightforward matter of discovering, by means of reason alone, immediately accessible rational principles inherent in nature itself.For Descartes, who considers even mathematical truths to be contingent upon the divine will, there is a plausible danger that the workings of our created reason are inherently distorted. 27In order to avert this risk, our reason has to be provided with a guarantee: indubitable proof of the existence of God as a perfect being who would not will to deceive our reason as long as it operates with the simple, clear, and distinct ideas placed in it by its creator. 28The British empiricists will, of course, accept the same general predicament of reason-that it is not in a position to claim direct access to the "mind of God" and the intelligible foundations of his creation-but go on to reject the Cartesian way out, denying the existence of pregiven necessary ideas in the human mind, famously viewed by Locke in its initial state as "white paper, void of all characters."According to Locke, whatever ideas arise in the mind are to be regarded as the result of experience, which he understands in a general and vague sense comprising the mind's individual sensory encounters with reality, its reflective encounters with itself, as well as the imprints and lasting syntheses produced in the mind by these encounters. 29e first outline of what developed into the modern scientific method was famously drawn by Sir Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum (1620)-a work purporting to present a "new organon," a new "instrument" or methodology of science to replace the "old organon" of Aristotle's logic and forming part of Bacon's unfinished overarching project Instauratio Magna, the "great renewal" of science.The aim of his new logic of scientific inquiry, Bacon declares in his dedicatory letter to King James I, is to ensure that "after so many ages of the world" without adequate progress, science and philosophy will no longer "float in the air, but rest upon the solid foundations of every kind of experience [experientiae] properly considered." 30In their modern rebirth (regeneratio) envisioned by Bacon, the sciences will be "raised up in a sure order from experience and founded anew, which no one . . .would affirm has yet been done or contemplated." 31ke his younger contemporary Descartes, Bacon emphasizes the distance between human notions and the ideas of the divine mind according to which the true essences or forms of things are created. 32Only God has immediate access to these forms; we finite beings must discover them gradually and incompletely through the study of nature. 33Such a study should not attempt to simply leap from the particulars of experience to intuitive and abstract axioms of reason, as Bacon accuses traditional (Aristotelian) induction of doing.The Aristotelian method has resulted in a natural philosophy that is basically a mere self-reflection of the human mind on its own vague and deficient concepts and, for the most part, simply "voices dialectical terms." 34Its basic fault is to regard the constitution of knowledge as a natural process to which the human mind is inherently suited.Rather, Bacon maintains, certain innate tendencies and inclinations of the human mind hamper and distort its access to nature.These are the four famous "idols" or "illusions" (idola) of our reason, which are related to the inherent limitations of the human sensory and cognitive capacities, the specific situatedness of the individual human being, the limits imposed by the shared language and discourse of human communities, and misleading intellectual doctrines and traditions. 35The different prejudices arising from these tendencies must be acknowledged and obliterated in order to gain access to the hidden truths of creation.Thus, experience in itself does not guide us toward higher forms of knowing, but must first be subjected to a systematic and methodical procedure.Our ordinary mode of experiencing, Bacon argues, is "blind and stupid," errant and wandering in that it takes its lead from mere random encounters with things (ex occursu rerum): the objects of further investigation are simply come across (inveniunt) in a casual manner. 36This leaves knowledge to the "waves and winding of chance [casus]   and casual, unregulated experience [experientiae vagae et inconditae]."Dependence on experiences that merely occur by chance is like groping around in the dark in hopes of stumbling upon the right path.
Experience must be undiluted by human idols, but not passive; in addition to actively purging our own understanding of hindrances, we must also take an active stance towards nature.The student of nature must interrogate nature, pose questions to it.Only experience that is actively sought after, "requested" (quaesita), deserves the name of "experiment" (experimentum). 37Bacon likens such active, productive experiencing to the divine act of creation: just as God created light before any determinate thing, scientific inquiry must be illuminated by the light of the proper "experimental" method that eliminates randomness and contingency before embarking on particular experiments. 38thodical experimenting allows us to overcome the great inherent weakness of experience: the uncertainty and fallibility due to the constant possibility of a negative experience.Bacon is fully aware of this negative dimension of experience and its importance with regard to the inherent bias of the mind in favor of positive instances that confirm prejudices and superstitions. 39However, in order to extract positive results from experience, this negativity must be appropriately managed.The manifest problem with inductive reasoning from experience, in the traditional sense of simply enumerating instances that support a given generalization, is that it is constantly "exposed to the danger [periculo] of the contrary instance." 40In the method elaborated by Bacon in the second book of the Novum Organum, termed "written" or "literate" experience (experientia literata), this risk is controlled by a systematic separation of positive and negative instances. 41For any natural phenomenon whose nature we wish to understand (in Bacon's example, heat), we carefully draw a table of instances in which the phenomenon in question is present and another table of relevant negative cases, in which it is absent.By comparing these lists, it is ultimately possible to come up with a conjecture concerning the fundamental nature, form, or source of the phenomenon for which there is no contradictory instance. 42In this way, negative experience is systematically charted and subordinated to the attainment of positive knowledge concerning the causal laws of phenomena, which Bacon understands in terms of Aristotelian "formal causes" or essences. 43

Hegel: The negativity of experience
Humean skeptical empiricism, of course, takes the danger or peril of the negative instance even more seriously than Bacon.While the latter thinks that the danger can ultimately be overcome through methodical experiencing that will allow us to map the necessary causal grounds of phenomena, Hume calls into doubt whether any observed causal regularity, no matter how strongly corroborated, can rationally entitle us to exclude the constant possibility of a contrary instance.But let us focus for a moment on the danger as such.Claude Romano draws our attention to the fact that experience (experientia) and peril (periculum) are cognates-together with a host of related words, such as the English "fear," the German Erfahrung and Gefahr "danger," and the Greek empeiria and peira "trial, attempt," they allegedly go back to the Proto-Indo-European root *per-"to try, to risk." 44Experience, experientia, empeiria is thus literally knowledge that has undergone a peira, a risky trial or test-it is tested knowledge, "imperiled" knowledge.But what does this putting-to-the-test, this trial, consist of precisely?
In experience, it is clearly we ourselves-our knowledge and know-how, our capacity for coping with the things that face us-who are put to test.As Romano puts it, the "danger" of experience is "such that I put myself at risk in it in the first person, . . . in what constitutes me 41 Bacon, Novum Organum 1.101, 1.103, 1.110. 42Bacon, Novum Organum 1.105, 2.1, 2.11-20. 43Bacon, Novum Organum 2.1-2.essentially as such: in my selfhood." 45What tests and tries us in experience are precisely the singular and contingent situations in the context of which we encounter reality and are compelled to cope with it.The risk or "peril" involved in such situations is precisely the risk of failure-the risk of a negative instance in which our knowledge does not pass the test of the encounter but rather fails to cope adequately and is consequently compelled to transform and modify itself.This structure of experience through trial and error is presupposed by Aristotle as well as Bacon; and yet, as Gadamer emphasizes, the teleology inherent in their respective scientific ideals focuses not on the negativity of the test, risk, or peril as such, but rather on the positivity of its outcome, on the knowledge that, by virtue of its superior universality, ultimately survives the of experiencing and is thus alleged to be increasingly immune to further experience, to the peril of future contingent encounters. 46For axiomatic-deductive as well as experimental-inductive science (even though the latter is, in principle, committed to empirical fallibilism, to an ultimate falsifiability of all assumptions by experience), the basic function of experience is to increasingly immunize knowledge against further experience.This is so, Gadamer adds, even for the last great architect of a purely speculative system of science-Hegel, who lays perhaps more weight on the inherent negativity of experience than any other thinker of the tradition.The "science of the experience of consciousness" charted in The Phenomenology of Spirit is the study of the development and unfolding of the spirit (Geist) to itself as spirit, that is, as absolute subjectivity, as the fundamental self-conscious "substance" of reality.In its different developmental stages, the spirit's consciousness contains two fundamental moments: that of knowledge (Wissen) and that of the object (Gegenstand) known.The latter is "negative" with regard to knowledge in the sense that it is never completely immanent to knowledge.The experience of consciousness is, in each instance, its awareness of this disparity or opposition between its current state of knowledge and the object of this knowledge, between knowledge and truth, between the "for us" and the "in itself." 47In other words, experience is fundamentally a negative experience of the current finitude of our knowledge.
However, against Kant's critical philosophy, Hegel presupposes that this disparity and finitude is a position in which knowledge, in its inherent will towards the absolute and the infinite, cannot and will not remain.Experience consists of testing (Prüfung) our knowledge with regard to the object; the discovery that there is more to the object than our current, inadequate cognitive grasp of it can access necessitates a dialectical movement towards a new perspective, a passage to a new stage of 45 Romano, L'événement et le monde, 196; Event and World, 145. 46Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 355-359; Truth and Method, 344-348. 47Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 29-30, 58-62; Phenomenology of Mind, 20-21, 50-53.
consciousness in which the current disparity is resolved in an enlarged, synthetic grasp of the object that includes the prior negativity within itself.With this movement, not only knowledge but also its object and the very criterion of knowledge are transformed. 48Thus, for example, in the first dialectical step of the Phenomenology, the most elementary form of consciousness-the immediate sensory awareness of the here-and-now-is dialectically transformed into an articulate perception of a determinate object that retains its identity throughout a temporal and spatial manifold of sensations.
Experience is, for Hegel, the "dialectic process which consciousness executes on itself-on its knowledge as well as its object-in the sense that out of it the new and true object arises." 49While the inherent negativity of experience, the disparity between the conscious ego and the object of consciousness, can be regarded "as the defect [Mangel] of both opposites," it is nonetheless "their very soul, that which animates them [das Bewegende]." 50perience is thus, for Hegel, more than knowledge encountering reality, more than simply testing knowledge with regard to something fundamentally external to it.Rather, experience is the process through which the spirit, absolute subjectivity, gradually encounters itself as spirit and tests itself.Through experience, the spirit's internal contradictions and disparities are gradually resolved as it gains a more and more comprehensive and mediated grasp of itself as the fundamental rational, discursive, conceptual, and ideal structure of reality.At the end of this process stands the spirit's complete reconciliation with itself: absolute knowledge, a purely positive perspective of the spirit upon itself that leaves no residual disparity or negativity, and consequently, no room for further experience.The experience of consciousness culminates in the impossibility of further experience in the strict sense.On this absolute level of knowledge, the remaining task in the system of absolute science is the elaboration of the conceptual architecture of the discursive contents of knowledge, a task that is performed by the purely speculative science of logic. 51
its negativity, that is, its potential for undermining and transforming all pre-established judgments and cognitive frameworks.As we have seen, the Aristotelian, Baconian, and Hegelian notions of experience as a method, as a pathway to science, all sought to immunize scientific knowledge against these aspects of experience by envisioning a transition from experience to the most universal and fundamental intuitive principles or axioms of intelligibility, to the discovery of the hidden truths or essences of nature through the systematic experimental management of empirical data, or to the absolute self-consciousness in which there is no longer any disparity between knowledge and its object.In other words, all three thinkers of the tradition ultimately seek to attain, through experience, a kind of knowledge that is no longer susceptible to experience.
Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics, by contrast, discovers the true hermeneutic fruitfulness of experience in precisely these aspects.Hermeneutic experience is historical experience enacted in singular historical situations of meaningfulness.Such situations are, as articulated in Truth and Method, always entered in terms of our individual prejudices, of a pre-existing cultural understanding, of discourses and conceptual and linguistic frameworks inherited from our tradition. 57en making sense of any meaningful phenomenon encountered in the situation, we primarily interpret it in terms of our preunderstanding, applying the discourses and concepts that we already possess.However, according to the Heideggerian and Gadamerian model of the hermeneutic circle, if approached in a proper manner-in the form of a genuine question that acknowledges the finitude of our knowledge-these phenomena can, in turn, work retroactively on our preunderstanding and disclose its insufficiency, its inability to make sense of certain aspects of what is read, heard, or encountered. 58This discovery of insufficiency then encourages us to reconsider and revise our prejudices, our existing conceptual framework-and it is precisely this feature that makes this discovery an "experience."In the context of the hermeneutic circle, the capacity for experience is precisely the capacity for being tested and "imperiled" by situations of interpretation in unpredictable ways, for encountering the irreducible negative otherness in phenomena that our current preunderstanding and our current conceptual framework are in some respect inadequate for making sense of.Thus, openness to hermeneutic experience means accepting, ever anew, the necessity of 57  undergoing a transformation, of reconsidering and revising our current mode and our current discursive tools for understanding, interpreting, and making sense.
In this sense, as Gadamer points out, a truly meaningful-that is, transformative-experience is analogous to an encounter with another person in the second person singular, as a "thou" (Du) with whom we are engaged in a genuine conversation.A "thou" always carries a foreign element irreducible to the "I" and therefore can never, in an encounter that takes place within the ethical dimension, be a simple object.Interpreting a text, a discourse belonging to a textual tradition, cannot be carried out in the role of an impassive and neutral observer-it always compels the interpreter to engage, from out of her specific historical and discursive position, with another "speaker," another historical and discursive position which, if genuinely questioned and properly "listened" to, cannot avoid affecting the questioner herself.This is the Gadamerian model of "historically effected consciousness" (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein), a consciousness of history not as a mere object of study but as the living network of a tradition within which we ourselves are caught and involved. 59rough a transformative discursive exchange with the "thou," we can ultimately become incorporated into a new "we," an entirely new shared perspective on the world.In such a hermeneutic "fusion of horizons" (Horizontverschmelzung), which is something entirely novel with regard to the horizons fused in it, our self is irreparably transformed. 60But only a finite self can encounter another as a genuine "thou"; only a finite self is susceptible to contingent, singular, and transformative encounters with that which comes from beyond its proper realm, in other words, to experiences."Hermeneutic consciousness culminates not in methodological sureness of itself, but in the same readiness for experience that distinguishes the experienced person from the one captivated by dogma." 61Among more recent contributions to the theory of hermeneutic experience, the subtle account articulated in Claude Romano's Event and World (1998) approaches experience as exposure to events, to the singular takings-place of meaningfulness that have no substantial and repeatable identity.These events are precisely moments of transformation and rupture with previous identities after which nothing has exactly the same meaning as it did before. 62This singularity and unrepeatability of the events of experience is the fundamental reason, that experience, unlike technical expertise, cannot be taught to others, as Aristotle emphasized: experience only truly addresses us in the singular. 59Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 363-368; Truth and Method, 352-355. 60Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 311-312, 380, 383, 392; Truth and Method, 305-306, 367, 370, 390. 61Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 367-368; Truth and Method, 355. 62Romano, L'événement et le monde, 193-255; Event and World, 143-189.

25
See William J. Courtenay, "Potentia absoluta/ordinata," in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 7, ed.Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Basel: Schwabe, 1989), 1157-1162.For this thesis concerning the influence of the Christian doctrine of creation and its radicalization in late medieval philosophy on the foundations of modern empirical science, see, e.g., Michael B. Foster, "The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science," Mind 43 (1934): 446-468; Francis Oakley, "Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: The Rise of the Concept of Laws of Nature," Church History 30 (1961): 433-457.For a critical modification of this view, emphasizing that not only early modern empiricism but equally the rationalism of Descartes was based on the voluntarist understanding of the primacy of the divine will, see Peter Harrison, "Voluntarism and Early Modern Science," History of Science 40 (2002): 63-89.Cf.John Henry, "Voluntarist Theology at the Origins of Modern Science: A Response to Peter Harrison," History of Science 47 (2009): 79-113. 26On the emergence of the modern concept of "idea," first and foremost introduced by Descartes, see Wilhelm Halbfass, "Idee III," in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol.4, 102-113. 27In his letter of April 15, 1630 to Marin Mersenne, Descartes defends the view that even "eternal" truths, such as those of mathematics, were created by God because he willed thus; René Descartes, Correspondance avril 1622 -février 1638, ed.Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, OEuvres, vol. 1 (Paris: Vrin, 1897), 145-146; The Correspondence, trans.John Cottingham et al., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23.The famous hypothetical "evil demon" argument regarding the possibility of complete deception is presented in Descartes's First Meditation; Meditationes de prima philosophia [1641], ed.Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, OEuvres, vol.7 (Paris: Vrin, 1904), 20-23; Meditations on First Philosophy, trans.John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 14-15.