Primitive Thinking Is Art Thinking

The thesis holds an assertion that primitive thinking is neither obscure nor unintelligible but the thinking by which the artist to make their works today, namely, art thinking or aesthetic thinking. In other words, art is immemorial rather something emerged on the later stage of civilization development. Primitive thinking is no more than art thinking while art thinking is only a new name for it after the emergence and dominant of abstract thinking over figurative thinking. This article believes that primitive thinking is a kind of thinking that has never changed since time immemorial and maintained complete in art thinking as we understand what it is today.Based on rich accumulation of anthropological research, the article aims to demonstrate the connections between primitive thinking and art thinking. In the Introduction, we will explain why some researchers mistake art thinking as an advanced form and repetition of primitive thinking on a higher stage and refuse regards them as identical. What we concludes is that primitive thinking or art thinking has never changed since its emergence and what has really changed is the fact that the system by which humankind understand the world has shifted from poetic to rational.Chapter One start from the elucidation of Poetic Wisdom in Scienza Nuova by Giambattista Vico, the Italian scholar who firstly paid attention to primitive thinking. His seminal idea of Poetic Wisdom offered a logical reunion of primitive thinking and art thinking which had been separated by the development of rational thinking. And then we adopt some of ideas of the anthropologists in the nineteenth century as evidences to prove primitive thinking is not alien to us.Based on the understanding of the study by the anthropologists in the nineteenth century, we compare the features of primitive thinking, such as Animism, Mutual Infiltration, and primitive people’s ideas of dreams and hallucinations, with art thinking, and reveal that primitive thinking and art thinking are identical on every aspect; therefore we have the conclusion that they are the same with different names. The purpose of our endeavor to prove primitive thinking and art thinking are identical to establish the idea that art thinking is immemorial and permanent, which should be helpful to understand the question ’what is art?’; therefore, Chapter Three will be a necessary part in which two ways of defining art will be discussed, and we have found that the difficulties the scholars experienced while they attempted to answer the question’what is art?’ attribute to their muddling the two ways.