In ‘From Chaos to Wholeness’ Arnheim responds to the chaotic forces of nature questioning the clarity of things belonging ‘apart or together, or when they interfere with one another’ as requiring a sense of ‘equilibrium’, to prevent the fragmentary from dismantling into chaos. He defines the term ‘reductionism’ as a generative desire, where we form a sense of wholeness and grasp a sense of a centre when witnessing ‘imperfect functioning’ within collectively assembled elements, to build a mental image of completeness within incomplete forms.
Distinguishing the ‘nature of creativity’ as the intent of creating ‘problems…moments of contradiction, discontinuity, and opposition’ that may never be solved and through ideals that may never be met, Arnheim elucidates how, through the use of ‘abstraction’, the artist can develop thought and behavioural patterns to expose the viewer to their ‘…mind’s own range of experiences, knowledge, and attitudes’, where they can ‘…remain continually open to flux and flow of their environment’ and form their own sense of order within disorder’. Characterizing chaos as an ‘unstructured…shapelessness’ of ‘incompatible forces’ bound up in a ‘spiralling vortice’ that encumbers a ‘magnetic appeal’, Arnheim delineates the movement of this collective relationship as ‘turbulent’, where uncoordinated ‘components of a system…act upon one another’, while ‘operating in different directions’, which ‘fight one another’ and develop ‘more than one centre’ [1].
[1] Rudolph Arnheim. ‘The Split and the Structure’. University of Californa Press 1996. p156-162