As much as they wanted to deny it, the surrealists did inherit the Dadaist's nihilism and love of violence.
They retained the antisocial character of Dada in many respects, however, they did so in the name of a new principle, that of revolution which at first, meant the liberation of the mind and spirit, but later came to include political and social revolution. Their major primary goal was to place the dream and the unconscious at the highest level of Art but like the Dadaists, they were determined to destroy traditional culture by ridicule and even by violence.The first manifesto of surrealism was published in 1924 and was fundamental for the understanding of surrealist thought, such as their desire to have a global revolt.The surrealists have been accused of being nothing more than being idealists, dreamers and anarchists. They were interested in dream and free association purely as a method of liberating man's creativity, and they claimed that poetry came from the unconscious, the irrational part of man's nature. They also believed that man has been inhibited by logic and rational thought and so saw it their task to liberate man's mind and wanted to teach him how to rediscover his own unconscious and show him how to grasp the imaginative fantasies that lay hidden.
The surrealist's used methods to explore their New World, the unconscious, the dream the fantastic or the marvellous. Those methods included automatic writing1. They had their own definition of science, which had nothing to do with logic, quite the contrary. All surrealists were trying automatic writing until eventually it became their gateway to the marvellous, the key to the liberation of man's imagination.Surrealists often published accounts of dreams along with automatic poems in La R�volution Surr�aliste2. Breton explained the revolutionary goal of surrealism as being the merging of two opposites into one continuum.
"I believe in the future resolution of these two states of dream and reality seemingly so contradictory into a kind of absolute reality, surreality" (Breton). A vital part of their philosophy was that there is no true dichotomy between dream and reality. They were very much influenced by pi�rre Janet, a French psychologist who was against Cartesian dualism and stressed the material nature of the products of mind. He believed that word and image did not exist independently, and like him, the surrealists stressed that they were not idealists and that they believed that thought is inseparable from its physical manifestation.However the surrealists were still considered to be idealists and dreamers with no practical political action for revolution.
The surrealists were also anarchists and tried not to miss a chance to cause a scandal against the bourgeois. One of their famous scandals and their first public protest was their protest against Antanole France, which was very much a national hero but to them he resembled everything they hated. The scandal was cause by an insulting pamphlet, which was written by them, called un Cadavre, on the death of France, who to them symbolised the hated literary establishment and the epitome of bourgeois pretension.Breton was behind the attack in which all the surrealists had participated.
The protest provoked a very hostile reaction from the press, which very much pleased the surrealists.The surrealists published their own periodicals, which appeared irregularly until 1929. They were essentially apolitical; however, the contents of the periodicals were showing changes in their thought. They were surprised when the letter they issued provoked a hostile reaction from the left.
In many of their articles, the surrealists demanded total liberty without any restrictions for anyone. They demanded the freedom of prisoners, freedom from all the traditional taboos of western culture, freedom from military service, freedom for mental patients and sexual freedom. They did not admire the Russian Revolution as it seemed too orderly, too directed and, as Aragon had indicated, too incomplete.La R�volution Surr�aliste often included newspaper reports of strange cases of suicide, that in their continuing fascination with the subject, they undertook to collect. Along with these were dreams, automatic texts, accounts of occult phenomena, and of all sorts of irrational behaviour.
They wanted to arrive at a new declaration of the rights of man as, Pi�rre Naville, and Benjamin P�ret, the editors of la R�volution Surr�aliste said. They were beginning to move forward some kind of action, although the word "revolution" still signified a revolution of ideas. An example of this is a leaflet signed the whole group, which included the following:
