Martinez Dettinger: Sartre and Heidegger and the role of Primal Art in the beginning of Consciousness

 In What is Writing? Sartre states "For the poet, language is a structure of the external world. The speaker is in a situation in language; he is invested with words." (pg 13). His view on the role of language with being is similar to that of Heidegger as expressed through his comment in his Letter on Humanism, "Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of being insofar as they bring this manifestation to language and preserve it in language through their saying." These two standpoints on the human interaction with language are complimentary. Sartre places language as external to the human poet, while Heidegger places the human within language, and with that grants language an ontological purpose. I tend to agree more with Heidegger's take which is that our conceptualization of the world around us is fully formed through our ability to express it in words. It is like trying to understand a difficult math problem, and learning it better by teaching someone else the steps. However, I also consider Sartre's pruposeful exclusion of language in fundamental ontology to be more generous toward humanity in that it does not require language to be considered human. I think of Chauvet Cave, the site of some of the oldest cave paintings known to us. It is unknown whether or not these people, early humans, had language or the extent of their language, but they did have art. Here, I think Heidegger might place too much importance on Language. He does also argue that the essence of art is being and truth, but would Heidegger have hierarchy in place between Language and art? Early Sartre, on the other hand, might value art above language in its greater ability to communicate, as we saw in Nausea. Would later Sartre with his political leanings and distinctions between good and bad art see value in the paintings of Chauvet cave in relation to its proposed meaning as signifying the beginning of human consciousness as we know it today? Furthermore, how closely does art relate to religion in the case of Chauvet cave? Is the presence of the mystical-feeling artwork dancing on the cave walls speak inherently to the presence of a belief or faith in something greater, or does it simply fulfill the need to be memorialized on something permanent that every human seems to have? I wonder if the basis of oral traditions is something beyond language as opposed to Ong and Abram's assertions that oral and language-based communication is foundational in human communal structures. 

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