Gary,

I’ve been going through your June 12 entry and I have these comments:

1. The French existentialists advocate an inner withdrawal into a private meaningfulness from a nihilistic world. This presupposes that being is the subject, the individual who does the withdrawing.
2. You suggest that for Heidegger being is the community – at least, that is what I take you to be saying, although I suspect that I detect an ambiguity here. We’re born into an historical situation in which we are constrained, which conditions our engagement and the way we conceptualise. To live authentically means to break with these constraints. So far we’re still in step with the French existentialists.
3. Here’s the first difference: authenticity is a way of interrogating our historical existence, rather than just being a way of coping – as, essentially, it is for the French.
4. In order to be able to carry out this interrogation, we need self-understanding, which comes not from negative dialectics but from care and concern within a world of potentialities. Freedom is acting to realise these potentialities. Authentic existence is resolute commitment to this pursuit.
5. Awareness of, and preparedness for, death allows us to choose between contending potentialities.

The first thing I’d say is that both versions of existentialism are subjectivist and they both recognise a collective, albeit in one case a nihilistic aggregation and in the other a community. The dispute between the versions is over how to establish meaning and to live freely. In the French view, meaning is established by breaking inwardly from the collective, and freedom comes from establishing this meaning. In the German view, meaning comes from the great universal of death in its interrogation of the collective, and freedom from the pursuit of some consequent collective potential.

Bataille compares existentialism with surrealism:

‘The profound difference between surrealism and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre hangs on the character of the existence of liberty. If I do not seek to dominate it, liberty will exist: it is poetry; words, no longer striving to serve some useful purpose, set themselves free and so unleash the image of free existence, which is never bestowed except in the instant. This seizure of the instant – in which the will is relinquished at the same time – certainly has a decisive value. It is true that the operation is not without difficulties, which surrealism has revealed but not resolved. The possibilities brought into play go further than they seem. If we were genuinely to break the servitude by which the existence of the instant is submitted to useful activity, the essence would suddenly be revealed in us with an unbearable clarity. At least, everything leads one to believe so. The seizure of the instant cannot differ from ecstasy (reciprocally one must define ecstasy as the seizure of the instant – nothing else – operating despite the concerns of the mystics).’

This contrasts with the kind of meaning the two existentialist groups pursue in the above account, where rising above or breaking with the collective in some way is the key to meaning and freedom. It is essentially the same idea that is found in German idealism but it is achieved in a different way. The existentialists don’t subscribe to the idealist thesis of the universality of reason. Nonetheless, both existentialist versions are about the mastery of the will, whereas for surrealism freedom lies in the relinquishment of the will.

On the other hand, the surrealist position is very close to that of Adorno and Benjamin. So, once again, I would emphasize the differences between the Heidegger-type approach and the Adorno-type approach. The negative approach demands that we are critical of any universal we might erect to justify our own existence as authentic, and it requires that we look for the reification just where we feel most certain and comfortable in our certainty. There is no abstract certainty in death – there is only death and dying today, and our memories of certain events. As Proust says, a memory of a certain form is always regret for a certain event. Regret isn’t a universal but it tends to function like one. It helps to focus the light of redemption.