Help with Existentialism and Postmodernism

[Mcadge]

Hi all,
This is not much of a discussion but I am in need of some much needed help:
I have chosen an essay that requires me to identify three main differences
between Existentialism and Postmodernism but I am really struggling! I have
read up on both, and on Sartre, Heidegger and Derrida, but am finding it
very difficult to find three main differences. I have loads of notes but
can seem to make much fit together! Someone please help! Also, please reply
in layman's terms as I'm just a first year undergrad in Theology and
Philosophy is module I often find hard (am still enjoying it though. Also I
posted this question on a Theology group on fb and the responses I got
simply didn't make much sense to me, so simple language appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Mike

[Hereandnow]

Hmmmmm Sartre is a Cartesian, which means for him, philosophy, ontology and phenomenology, start with the egoic center. But sartre did not hold that this ego was in any way substantive or structuring; he argued with Husserl over the transcendence of the ego. The latter was a Kantian, of sorts? Kant held that our judgment and experience was bound together by set synthesizing faculties issuing from the unseen cogito) while Sartre held the true center was a nothingness. This nothingness is very enigmatic for theory). Sartre also defended a concept of bad faith which was, basically, the attempt of the nothingness (pour soi, in itself) to identify with things en soi, (in itself)/ When nothingness grabs on to things with fixed at set natures, like being a doctor or a dentist, it is attempting to become a narrative, I am a doctor, I live at so and so, I have a husband and I like golf, etc.

Now Heidegger had this concept of das man, the "they" of the expression "they say that..." This is what comes out of the quotidian affairs of a commonly lived life, unexamined and yielding to the currents of culture and standards of acceptability. Das man people are like Sartre's bad faith: They hide, unable or unwilling to look honestly at the world. With sartre the principle concept is freedom and responsibility, keeping in mind that he did have an agenda which was to hold those accountable who behaved badly during the war. For Heidegger, as i recall, it was more a matter of living a life that was well made. There is Nietzsche behind this as he was adamant in his anti-rationalism and his insistence that reason belonged to the arts than anything else. Living is a kind of artistic creation and one should live a life that can be admired, celebrated, like Odysseus. One must, strive for authenticity by allowing the unsettling voice of philosophical inquiry to have it s say.

Derrida? He was a language philosopher. Where Heidegger put hermenuetics forward, rejecting some sort of fixed Real world that is beyond this one and favoring an interpretative relativity (wording here?), Derrida looked at langauge. In short, deconstructive thinking finds in language a system that is infinitely self referential or deferring endlessly to more language. Any given meaning of a term is always already deferred, and any attempt to connect with an actual object independent of language fails. The post modern idea that things have no centerd at all, just endless referencing of language. And we are in the middle. No self, no center of cognition, can be ushered in by language, and since meaningful ideas are embedded in language's ability to make propositions, and there are no propositions "out there" we can never touch this "out there". Trapped in language! Like Heidegger's hermenuetics

[Mcadge]

Thanks a lot for your reply. It's slowly making sense to me!
Mike